PONY — A farmer based in Pony, Montana, is connecting her customers to the landscape with her handmade cheese made from the cows grazing in her pasture below the Tobacco Root Mountains.
"I think being able to be that front door and the one who says, “Welcome, come in. Try this. This is delicious.” That’s the most important part of what we do," says Shauna Stephenson, the owner of Good Mama Farm.
Meet Shauna Stephenson of Good Mama Farm in Pony, Montana - She's crafting amazing artisan cheese from Jersey and Montbéliarde cows beneath the beautiful Tobacco Root Mountains
Stephenson says her mission is to provide organic food to rural communities that may not otherwise have access to locally grown, handmade products.
"It’s absolutely the goal. We really want to bring local cheese, handmade .... cheese back to, like, rural communities, and when you taste the difference, I mean, there really truly is a difference."
Since 2020, Stephenson has been offering fresh organic produce at area farmers’ markets, but Montana’s short growing season and fickle weather challenged her to diversify.
"We live in a really short growing season, and inevitably something happens: it hails or it thunderstorms, or it freezes or whatever. So, we needed to really diversify both for our customers but for our business as well."
Over the past couple of years, her experiments with cheese production have really taken off.
"We started out in goats and couldn’t keep up with that, and then added some cows, and then added some more cows, and now we’re primarily in cow's milk cheeses."
Stephen's cheese is made from the milk of Jersey and Montbéliarde cattle. State and federal grants have helped her build a cold storage facility and a cheese cave. The updates allow Stephensen to experiment with new flavors for her adventurous customers at the Butte farmers market.
"I will say, Butte has a phenomenal ability to be... they’re adventurous eaters, for sure. They would come to the market and they would be ready to try something different and new, and they're not afraid to try different flavors and think about things a little bit differently."
Just in time for the holidays, Good Mama Farm is selling cheese boards for the holidays on the farm's website, and Stephenson will be at the Hollow Top Senior Center from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Pony on Nov. 17th for the annual holiday show.
