Farmstead Cheese Comes Home to Woodlawn Creamery
From Saxelby Cheesemongers, October 18, 2024
Do you know what your great-great-great-great-grandparents did for work? Seth Leach at Woodlawn Farm does. Seven generations of his family have been raising cows for milk in the town of Pawlet, Vermont (population: ~1,500) since 1831. In that time, the Leach clan has seen the commodity market for milk rise and fall more times than anyone could count. These days, small farms like Woodlawn are beholden to whatever prices giant dairy buyers set, and most can't make the economics work. So Seth and his wife Kate decided to do something different.
Vermont Businesses: Woodlawn Farmstead vertically integrates to survive
From Vermont Public, September 24, 2024
A new video series from Vermont producer and host Rocket features a visit with Seth Leach, the seventh-generation farmer at Woodlawn Farmstead in Pawlet, to explore how vertical integration has been essential for this small dairy farm’s survival.
Pawlet's Woodlawn Farm Leverages Consider Bardwell's Award-Winning Cheese Recipes in a Shot at Survival
From Seven Days, June 25, 2024
One mid-April Thursday, Seth Leach began his morning at 3 a.m. as usual in the milking barn of his family's seventh-generation Pawlet farm. The rest of his day was far from standard for a Vermont dairy farmer.
Over the next 16 hours, Leach drove 200 miles from Woodlawn Farm in the Mettawee Valley to the Upper Valley, then on to Montpelier and Chittenden County. On the way, he stopped at 11 co-ops, specialty markets and restaurants, leaving a trail of cheese samples and sales materials behind him like Hansel and Gretel's crumbs.
Woodlawn Creamery now makes Consider Bardwell’s Pawlet cheese
From the Manchester Journal, May 13, 2024
Sadly, for cheese lovers, Consider Bardwell Farm has stopped making its most popular cheese. Happily, though, Woodlawn Creamery is continuing two of Consider Bardwell’s cheeses, named after local towns, Pawlet and Rupert.
On a recent day at Mach’s Market in Pawlet, locals sampled the new Woodlawn Pawlet cheese and talked to Woodlawn Creamery’s owners, seventh-generation Vermont dairy farmer Seth Leach and his wife, Kate.
From hay to hanger steaks, it's all farm-raised at Woodlawn Farmstead in Pawlet
From the Manchester Journal, February 13, 2023
PAWLET — The retail store at the Woodlawn Farmstead opened in January 2021, or about 190 years after members of the Leach family began milking dairy cows on the lands beside 8128 Route 30.
Inside the store, there are cuts of beef from cows that were raised almost entirely on feeds grown by the farm. Inside another refrigerated case are cheeses and butters produced from milk given by the farm’s cows, which also feed mostly on crops grown in-house.
Vermont dairy farm celebrates decades of farmland conservation
From The Vermont Land Trust Newsletter, September 12, 2022
Not long ago, thousands of dairy farms dotted Vermont’s landscape. Farm families could count on a steady income as long as they took good care of their herds and produced a lot of milk.
Among them were Tim and Dot Leach. Their beautiful dairy farm in Pawlet has been passed down through Tim’s family for seven generations. Dot remembers that farming was sometimes challenging, but in the early years, it was rarely a hardship.
The Fertile Mettowee Valley Fights To Save Its Farms
From The Herald, August 22, 2013
Mach’s General Store in Pawlet is nerve central for the Mettowee Valley. From early morning on, cars and trucks and the occasional tractor—all the rolling infrastructure of a working farm community— pull in to the white-painted brick store, seeking coffee, a sandwich, groceries, or hardware.