Mike Labine is now in training to become farm manager at Vermont Shepherd Cheese in Westminster West. He was born in 1992 in a very different world: Darien, Connecticut, one of the goldcoast suburbs in ready reach of NYC. But what captured his imagination and heart as a young boy was a 100-acre parkland near his home. He roamed and played in that parkland as a boy and remembers seeing a dinosaur. It was a place that fired his imagination.
He attended the King School in nearby Stamford, CT and then went to the University of Washington to study and row. When you meet him, you find yourself in the presence of a young man 6’7” tall, broadly built and just the right physique for rowing 8-oared shells you saw in the University Of Washington’s crew in the recent film Boys in The Boat. After college, he returned to the Connecticut coast where he worked for the Norwalk River Rowing Club as a coach and boatman.
During that time, he took a summer camping trip to Vermont where his memories of that 100 acre park in Darien was fired. He saw life in Vermont and said to himself, “This is what I want.” He got a job working at Walker Farm in the vegetable fields and as Christmastime approached, Jack and Karen Manix, who had just bought Elysian Hills farm and Christmas tree farm, asked Mike to help with the trees. As it happened David Major and his wife Yesenia, owners of Vermont Shepherd Cheese in Westminster West, drove up to get a Christmas tree. Yesenia saw Mike with his impressive physique and said, “We need him on the farm.”
During the winter, Mike agreed to an interview to see if he was interested in working at Vermont Shepherd since Walker Farm was only part-time. Mike knew nothing about sheep or farming other than it was a way of life that drew him. But he knew plenty about hard work. He accepted the job. He started full-time in lambing season 2015 and has been there these nine years. He is now in training to become the farm manager with 8-10 employees.
David Major grew up in Westminster West. His brother Stephen is a large-animal veterinarian in the area and has been for decades. His mother was a teacher in the local schools (whose brother Paul Bruhn ran The Vermont Preservation Trust for years). His father was a realtor and from a long-standing family in Westminster West. David graduated from Harvard in 1983 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He started milking sheep in 1988. The operation was centered in the barns at his parents’ farm off Barnes Road in Westminster West. By 1995 he bought what was the late Dan and Deb Bump’s 350 acre farm with 200 acres of open grazing land. He initially started raising sheep for meat and wool but in 1992 turned to milking sheep and making cheese from it following a training in the Pyrenees Mountains in France. In 2017 he expanded further by leasing the Ranney Farm from the now owner Peter Shumlin along with land adjacent to his owned by the Haas family. All together, in 2024, they now farm 350 acres of farmland, most owned by David and Yesinia and his father Randy.
It has been so successful he now has cheese distributors arrive at Vermont Shepherd every Friday. His cheeses are shipped to local shops across New England, to a New Jersey/NY distributor. Another ships to Chicago and another to California. Through the international firm Sky Chef, Emirates Airlines, for example, offers its passengers Vermont Shepherd cheeses as part of their snacks and meals on their flights.
When Mike Labine accepted a job with Vermont Shepherd ten years ago, he was joining a group of eight or ten other young people who were helping Vermont Shepherd thrive. Lindsey from West Townshend is the office manager. Nita from Putney and Dimitri from Dummerston are shepherds, Austin from Westminster West and Guelo, originally from NYC, is head cheesemaker. Mike lives in a house across the driveway from David and Yesinia and in sight of the barn where the flock lives in the winter.
They milk around 200 sheep in that barn in groups of 16 twice a day from after lambing is over in mid-April until around mid-November 15. Mike is taking over more and more of the management of the lambing, the milking, as well as haying 200 acres of hayfields surrounding the milking barn set aside for milking sheep. He and his fellow workers see to moving all the milking sheep to small fenced areas twice a day to fresh grazing. The quality of the cheese relies on this intense grazing.
“As Farm Manager in Training, I organize the day’s work. It’s all about teamwork from 5:30 AM on… We tend 300 or so sheep on the farm that were bred to produce milk - a cross of Dorset, Tunis and Friesian sheep, but the flock has crossbred over the years and are indistinguishable now.”
Three border collies – herding dogs - live with and work the sheep with the team. The mother collie is named “Cookie”; her two offsping are named “Cheat” and “Roxy”. David trains them to know signals such as taking the herd clockwise - “Comeby!” - or counterclockwise - “Away!”
There are also six guard dogs, each of which is assigned to a specific group of sheep in separate fields. They are big, white-furred Pyrenese/Akbash. (“Peep” and “Gerda” are 10 years of age; “Ghost” is 6; “Perla” is 5; “Ozzy” and “Guy” are 1. Gerda – like the other guard dogs - stays with groups of sheep staying out all night every night the sheep are bedded down in the fields. David said coyotes have not been a problem in these remote fields at night. “Coyotes get skittish in a fenced area, not to mention a tangle with a big white dog on a moonlit night.”
The entire flock is pretty much in the barn during the winter and are let out when weather allows for a few hours. Lambing starts in early March and results in 300 lambs from around 140 pregnant ewes. Each mother and her lambs have their own 4’x5’ pens to assure bonding in which they are fed hay, grain and water. Lambs are weaned 3-4 weeks after birth. You can only imagine the sounds in the barn at birthing time.
Mike showed me the milking parlor in the barn. “We milk twice a day, the first milking at 5:30AM, the second around 3:30 that afternoon. It’s late in the season so right now we’re down to around 162 milking ewes. They come to the barn of their own accord, divide themselves into the same groups of 16 every day for the milking parlor and pretty much end up in the same milking-stanchion each day, all except “Jumper” who always wants to be first. There’s a big spread of personalities in the herd. We milk from mid-April when the sheep are still suckling the lambs until mid-November when they go dry. The milk goes into old-fashioned milk cans to be made into cheese.
Mike told me most of the wool shorn from the sheep in early summer is sold to Swan’s Island Blanket Company in Maine and some goes to Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney. Judy Lidie in Bellows Falls has a soap making operation on the island in Bellows Falls and makes sheep’s milk soap. I guess you could say 6’ 7” Mike is living his dream, one that means following the cycle of sheep’s lives. And do you know anyone else who has been a farm worker for ten straight years?
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.