Barinaga Ranch

Informazioni Generali

At Barinaga Ranch we are continuing the ancient shepherding and cheese making traditions of my Basque family and ancestors in Euskadi, the Basque region of Spain. Our small flock of dairy sheep graze year-round on over 100 acres of hilly, certified organic pastures on our ranch in coastal Marin County, California. Coming from a family of shepherds, I feel a deep connection with my sheep, and their happiness and welfare comes first in everything we do on the ranch. We recently received certification from Animal Welfare Approved. Our ewes have their lambs in March and we leave the lambs with their mothers for the first month of their lives. We love to see the bond between our mother ewes and their lambs, and while we are giving up the first month's worth of milk that we would otherwise have to make cheese, the lambs make good use of that milk, growing big and strong. We wean the lambs in April and begin milking the ewes and making their rich, delicious, raw milk into our Basque-style cheeses, Baserri ("farmhouse" in Basque) and Txiki (pronounced "cheeky," which means "little" in Basque). The lambs are raised on on our green spring pastures and the ones who will not become dairy ewes are humanely harvested in May through July, for sale to restaurants and friends of the ranch who want a whole lamb for their freezer. Milking continues through early October, when we dry off the ewes and breed them for next season's March lambing.