Lazy Lady Farm

The Special
This week we are pleased to feature goat cheese from Lazy Lady Farm of Westfield, Vermont. All this week, Chef Casey Graham will use organic Lazy Lady Farm products in main dishes, appetizers, soups, and salads. Be sure to ask your server about tonight’s Lazy Lady Farm Special!

The Farm
Lazy Lady Farm is an off-the-grid, organic farm located in the town of Westfield in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Owner Laini Fondiller milks 40 registered Alpines goats and produces over 21 varieties of goat and cow cheese, raises pork with whey from the cheese plant, and produces grass fed beef raised in her farm’s lush pastures. Lazy Lady Farm products can be found in locally and nationally in farm stands, natural and gourmet food stores, and fine restaurants.

Lazy Lady Farm

Like the state of Vermont, Lazy Lady Farm of Westfield was “green” before “green” was cool. In the late 1980s when owner Laini Fondiller started her small, organic off-the-grid farm, this meant using candles, gas lamps, hand water pumps, an outdoor privy and a car battery for running a radio. Today, Laini and an apprentice milk a herd of 40 goats and raise whey-fed pork and grass-fed beef using power from 17 solar panels and a one kilowatt wind generator. Laini's approach to farming has nothing to do with trendiness and everything to do with environmental sustainability and an appreciation for quality food. “I make natural food because that’s what I like to eat!” she says. “I don’t want any chemicals in it.”


Lazy Lady Farm, Laini's small, successful cheese plant and meat farm in northern Vermont, has been many years in the making. After graduating from college in southern Indiana, Laini moved to Vermont during the “Back to the Land” movement of young people from urban to rural areas that was a hallmark of the 1970s. She spent some time working for Butterworks Farm in Westfield, another one of Juniper’s Restaurant’s featured farms, where she learned to work with cow milk. In the early 1980s Laini visited Corsica, France where she spent two years learning to make French style goat and sheep cheese. When she returned to Vermont, Laini began making goat cheese in her kitchen to sell at local farmers’ markets and in gourmet food shops in Stowe and Montpelier. Her first licensed cheese plant, a 10 by 12 foot room where she made cheese in five gallon batches, was finished in 1995, and her first geothermal cheese aging cellar was built in 1996. In 2003 a loan from the VT Community Fund allowed Laini to build a cheese plant capable of housing a 50 gallon cheese vat, and this year Laini completed a second cheese ripening cellar.


Lazy Lady Farm currently offers 21 varieties of cheese made with both goat and cow milk. Laini enjoys creating so many kinds of cheese for a number of reasons, number one being her own enjoyment of the flavors that goat cheese is capable of. “I have such fond memories of the cheeses I enjoyed in France,” she says. Political humor is another aspect to her productivity. “An underlying pulse to some of the cheeses is my addiction to politics and political figures,” she says. “I can’t resist creating a cheese to fit a politician or a political topic.” Examples of cheese with names that are politically inspired: BiPartisan is a combination goat and cow cheese, Barick Obama is a square goat cheese, and Tomme Delay is a French style tomme cheese. Another influence is “the environmental factors of the farm, cheese room and cellar,” she says. “Certain cheeses can only be made at certain times of the year, where it is enhanced and made possible by the external conditions.” Laini stops milking her goats in November and only offers cow cheese, made with milk from Butterworks Farm, during the winter months.


Laini is very proud of her herd of 40 registered Alpine goats. “I like goats,” she says. “They have good personalities. They’re not dopes. Well, they are, but they’re not too bad.” The herd is meticulously managed in order to produce high quality cheeses. They are pastured in the summer, May through October, using intensive rotational grazing, and in the winter they are fed on hay produced on the farm and on grain from Green Mountain Feeds in Bethel, Vermont. The goats are also given plenty of minerals to keep them healthy, vital, and productive.


Lazy Lady Farm currently produces around 12,000 pounds of cheese per year that is sold to gourmet food stores and fine restaurants as far as New York City and Chicago. Laini’s cheeses are the recipients of multiple national cheese awards and her farm has been featured in the food section of the New York Times. Beyond being part of the local foods movement, Laini sees Lazy Lady as part of a growing national appreciation of better-tasting food. “Local foods have gotten so good, now it’s just associated with being good versus being local,” she says. Laini enjoys eating her own cheese, and takes a simple approach to its use in her meals. Contrary to her farm’s name, Laini doesn’t have time to be lazy, and accordingly she says, “I don’t cook. I just like a big blob of cheese on a cracker or a piece of bread.”

Lazy Lady Farm
973 Snyderbrook Road
Westfield, VT 05874
802-744-6365
www.lazyladyfarm.net
www.vtcheese.com/members/lazylady/lazylady.htm