A sign at Villa Villekulla Farm in Barnard reads “hand-hugged goats.” It could just as truthfully include “goat-hugged farmer.” Technically, of course, the goats cannot hug farmer-cheesemaker Lauren Gitlin, but their abundant, comforting nuzzles keep the one-woman, 50-goat dairy going.
“I got into this line of work because I loved food and I loved cheese and I wanted to learn how to make it,” said Gitlin, 44, a former Rolling Stone reporter, New York City cheesemonger and employee of several Vermont goat dairies.
But over the five years since she started her tiny farmstead operation, Villa Villekulla’s goat milk skyr has become “a means to an end,” said Gitlin, a longtime vegetarian who has an unusual no-kill policy when it comes to her herd. “The big-picture goal is just to be living with these animals that are so incredible and that have been really nourishing for me.”
Gitlin sells her skyr through specialty distributors to select stores and restaurants in New York, Vermont and other New England states. Hand-packed in 16-ounce glass jars, it retails for a minimum of $13 and fetches almost double that in the Big Apple. She describes the tangy, spreadable, creamy product as “if chèvre had a baby with labneh” — essentially, fresh French goat cheese meets Middle Eastern strained yogurt.
“The big-picture goal is just to be living with these animals.” Lauren Gitlin
Skim-milk skyr from Iceland was Gitlin’s inspiration, though she makes no claims of authenticity for her version, which she crafts with whole milk in her small, aquamarine-colored hilltop creamery.
The creamery is one of four brightly painted farm buildings clustered with the home Gitlin shares with her husband, Teo Žagar, at the end of a steep gravel driveway that must be hair-raising in winter. As Gitlin chatted with a reporter at a picnic table, a striking, percussive rhythm emanated from the coral-red goat barn.
Gitlin explained that the “amateur instrumentalist,” a goat named Rippy, likes to rub her teeth against the barn’s metal gate. “She’s a big John Cage head,” the farmer quipped, referencing the influential avant-garde composer.
The goats — “all of [whom] have distinct hobbies and interests” — motivate Gitlin to keep putting in 14-hour days as she plots how to steer her money-losing farming enterprise toward covering its expenses.
The flame-haired farmer, who has a goat tattoo peeking from her décolletage, acknowledged that she did not set herself up for success, at least in capitalist terms.
“If I had had more business savvy, I may not have undertaken it at all or would have maybe made some different choices,” Gitlin said. “The economics aren’t great.”
Gitlin had already made several trips to Vermont to study cheesemaking and visit dairy farms when, in 2014, she sublet her New York City apartment, “bought a crappy used car, and moved my cat and my books up to the Northeast Kingdom.” She was thrilled to have landed a job with trailblazing goat farmer and cheesemaker Laini Fondiller of Lazy Lady Farm in Westfield.
From Fondiller, Gitlin said, she learned “what commitment and devotion and hard work it takes” to be a farmstead cheesemaker, which entails both tending the animals and turning their milk into products.
After working on a couple of other Vermont goat farms, Gitlin decided to launch her own in 2019. She started in a rented barn and creamery in Tunbridge with three of Fondiller’s pregnant goats and named it Villa Villekulla after the home of Swedish kids’ book heroine Pippi Longstocking, another spirited redhead.
“I was scared shitless,” Gitlin admitted. “I saw Pippi as a beacon of strength: playful, kind and extremely strong.”
Physical and mental strength are requirements for her job, and May is an especially exhausting month. It starts with kidding, during which Gitlin midwifed the arrivals of nine baby goats, eight of which survived. With the assistance of a short-term apprentice, she has been juggling twice-daily milkings with bottle-feeding kids four times a day — on top of making and marketing her skyr.
That schedule leaves little time or energy to map the future, yet the need to do so gnaws at Gitlin. She knows she’s lucky that her husband had land on which she could establish Villa Villekulla, she said. But she also invested a significant amount into erecting the barn, the kid and buck sheds, and the creamery with a second-floor apartment to house apprentices and interns.
Among the potential obstacles to financial success that Gitlin listed was her decision to make skyr — something “that a lot of people don’t know” — and to package it in expensive glass jars, instead of the plastic she despises. While some have counseled her to add flavors, she prefers to keep it pure, “a clean slate.”
Sticking to her guns, Gitlin has been able to sell the 60 to 80 jars she makes a week.
In Burlington, executive chef Nick Frank, 38, has used Villa Villekulla’s “tart, grassy” skyr at Hen of the Wood, combining it with handfuls of soft, green herbs and swirling the mixture into a base for a salad of local beets and watermelon radishes with Cara Cara oranges. He’s dreaming up a new fish dish with skyr under warm, coal-roasted spring onions.
Huntington pastry chef Cortney Lucia, 41, who makes desserts for caterers and private chefs with her business Backyard Briar, has long been a fan of “creamy, thick, custardy” skyr in general. She recently whipped Villa Villekulla skyr with a burnt honey-citrus caramel to top a citrus olive oil cake served with bitter orange marmalade, lemon curd and candied cardamom pistachios.
Lucia ate some of the remaining plain skyr with granola, berries and a little honey. “It’s such a beautiful product,” she said. “It doesn’t need much.”
Andrew Clark, 43, owner of Manhattan’s Formaggio Kitchen, has known Gitlin since her New York City days. “Then she ups and goes to Vermont, tends goats, and makes a food that is unique and vibrant and very satisfying,” he said.
Clark described Villa Villekulla skyr as having “the feeling of the best dense Greek yogurts, and then the goat cheese-ness follows for a long, long flavor.” The cheesemonger suggests eating it like any fresh cheese for breakfast, “topped with something crunchy.” Formaggio also sells it slathered on sandwiches with olive oil, prosciutto, figs and arugula.
With more marketing and milk, Gitlin could most likely sell more skyr. But, owing to another firmly held principle, she has no room to expand her herd.
Villa Villekulla is what Gitlin called a “no-kill dairy,” meaning she commits to keeping all of her goats until the natural end of their lives — or until she can find good homes for them elsewhere, a time-consuming task. Dairy operations need, at most, a couple of breeding bucks. So, after every kidding season, the farmer must invest time in rehoming young males, too.
“I’m really picky about where they go,” she said.
Gitlin has been vegetarian for most of her adult life — a choice with which she had always considered cheese to be aligned, she said. Then she learned from her work on Vermont dairy farms that milking goats must regularly produce offspring to continue lactating and that efficiency-minded farmers cull less productive milkers. Both bucklings and mature goats are often sold for meat.
“The collateral of cheese is that animals are going to die,” Gitlin said flatly. “There’s no such thing as vegetarian cheese.”
Villa Villekulla skyr is as close to vegetarian as Gitlin can make it. Instead of traditional animal stomach rennet, her cheesemaking process uses rennet made from cardoon thistles.
Among her current herd are seven adult goats that are no longer productive milkers or are otherwise “charity cases,” Gitlin said fondly. They include Cuddles, who had an abnormal udder and needed a mastectomy; and Frida, who has deformed hooves and lost her ears to frostbite on another farm.
The farmer estimates that each goat’s care runs about $175 per month. “There’s no way to get out from underneath that economic burden unless I start shipping them for meat,” Gitlin said, “and I’m not going to do that.”
Instead, she is investigating new income sources to cover her expensive ethical choice.
Draining skyr generates a lot of whey, which she currently barters for vegetables to a neighbor who feeds it to pigs. Gitlin is talking with two other Vermont entrepreneurs about using the whey to make soda and skin care products. She’s also trying to offer a raw milk share, which requires minimal processing and could yield a better profit margin than skyr.
Some potential strategies leverage caprine assets other than milk, such as their omnivorous browsing appetites: A future apprentice will look into hiring out goats to manage invasive plants.
Another idea is deeply personal for Gitlin.
Her tattoo honors Mouse, a 9-year-old goat she first encountered while working on a southern Vermont farm and who later joined the Villa Villekulla herd. At that farm, Gitlin would often stay back in the field to fence off a fresh grazing paddock after a colleague had led the goats in for milking.
“Mouse had this habit of hanging back with me,” Gitlin recalled. “She’d be like, Not leaving you here, buddy. Like war buddies.”
As she shared this memory, Gitlin choked up. “They give me so much,” she said of the goats. “They’re so affectionate and funny.”
During years when she dealt with depression, “They saved my life,” she said of the goats. “I know that they can do that for other people, too.”
Gitlin has talked with a mental health care provider about training her retired milkers to become therapy animals. It’s another possible way for them to earn their keep — but mostly, she said, she believes others will benefit from the joy of goat snuggles.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Bleating Hearts | Villa Villekulla Farm’s herd delivers more than delicious dairy”
This article appears in The Animal Issue 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
