Sheep grazing in pasture, shown for illustration only — not the actual flock at Bellwether Farms.
In 2026, Bellwether Farms picked up Good Food Award wins for its Basket Ricotta and Sonoma Herb Sheep Cheese — hardly a surprise for a creamery whose ricotta alone had already won six of these awards by 2019. But the more interesting question isn’t how many trophies sit on the shelf at this Petaluma, California creamery. It’s how a family that bought sheep to mow an overgrown pasture ended up building one of the only serious sheep’s-milk cheese operations in the country.
A farm that wasn’t supposed to make cheese
Bellwether Farms started in 1986 the way many small farms do: with a problem to solve, not a business plan. Cindy and Ed Callahan had just bought a stretch of overgrown pastureland in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, and needed something to keep the grass down. Cindy, who had spent years as a registered nurse before turning to farming, chose sheep over cattle for a practical reason — they were cheaper to keep and far less likely to hurt someone during handling. The flock’s first lambs arrived that winter, and for the next few years Bellwether was a lamb operation, selling meat to Bay Area chefs who were just starting to care where their ingredients came from.
The question that changed the business
The pivot came almost by accident, the kind of thing that only looks inevitable in hindsight. A friend visiting the farm asked Cindy something nobody in the family had seriously considered: had she ever thought about milking the sheep? At the time, that wasn’t a small ask. Sheep dairying barely existed in the United States — nearly every American cheesemaker worked with cow’s or goat’s milk, and sheep’s milk cheese was something you read about in books on Mediterranean cheese, not something anyone made near San Francisco. Cindy and her son Liam, who had just finished college, decided to figure it out anyway.
That choice — to stop selling lambs and start making cheese and yogurt from the milk instead — is the real founding moment of Bellwether Farms as a creamery, years before any awards existed to win (Bellwether’s own account of the shift describes it as an offhand suggestion that turned into the family’s whole second act).
Milk that behaves differently
Sheep’s milk isn’t just cow’s milk with a different label. It is higher in fat, protein, and carbohydrates, which is part of why sheep cheeses taste richer than their texture alone would suggest (as Culture magazine found when it toured the creamery) — and it also means sheep’s milk can’t simply be dropped into a process built around cow’s milk. Bellwether handles the two separately from start to finish. The farm keeps roughly 300 East Friesian sheep on-site, milked twice a day, and supplements with sheep’s milk from Haverton Hill Sheep Dairy, a neighboring producer, while sourcing cow’s milk from local Jersey herds for products like their Crème Fraîche and Basket Ricotta. All of it comes from animals raised on pasture year-round, without hormones — a detail that shows up in the flavor more than most shoppers realize, since what an animal eats and how it lives carries straight through into the milk.
The cheese that won in 2026
This year’s Good Food Awards recognized two Bellwether products: the Sonoma Herb Sheep Cheese and the Whole Milk Basket Ricotta. The sheep cheese is a fresh, herbed log made from Bellwether’s own sheep’s milk — the creamery describes it as delivering “the creaminess you want from fresh cheese, but with none of the ‘goaty’ flavor,” which is a fair way to explain why sheep’s milk cheese tends to win over people who assume they don’t like strong-flavored cheese.
The Basket Ricotta is different, made from local Jersey cow’s milk instead of sheep’s milk. The technique is the interesting part: rather than machine-pressing the curds, cheesemakers hand-scoop them into small woven baskets and let them drain naturally under their own weight, as Italian ricotta makers have done for generations (Culture’s cheese library has the full technique). It’s sold in that same basket, which is where the name comes from, and that gentle draining is why the texture is closer to soft-set cream than the grainy tub ricotta most grocery stores carry.
Basket ricotta shown for illustration only — not an actual Bellwether Farms product photo.
This isn’t the ricotta’s first trophy, either — it had already won six Good Food Awards by 2019, which means the 2026 win extends a streak running well over a decade. That’s a more useful fact than the award itself: one good batch can win once. A product that keeps winning, year after year, says something about the process behind it, not just the recipe.
Cheese is only part of the story
Ricotta and fresh sheep cheese won awards this year, but they’re not the only thing Bellwether is best known for. The creamery has grown into the country’s leading producer of sheep’s milk yogurt, which says something about how the business actually scaled: not by chasing every award-friendly wheel, but by finding one category where being a sheep dairy was a genuine advantage and building a national business around it. The aged side of the lineup shows the same instinct at a smaller scale. San Andreas, their raw sheep’s-milk wheel, ages for roughly three and a half months before it’s ready — long enough to develop a smooth, pale-straw paste with notes of butterscotch, hay, and toasted nuts, the kind of flavor that only shows up with real time. According to a 2026 profile in Sonoma Magazine, Liam Callahan’s habit of aging cheeses on wooden boards rather than plastic or steel is a slower, more hands-on method that most large creameries abandoned because it requires more labor.
Small on purpose
Visit the creamery, and you’ll find something closer to a tight-knit shop than an industrial dairy. They run close to a made-to-order model: most of what the creamery produces, from yogurt cups to ricotta baskets, is already sold before it leaves the building, which lets them run production five days a week without holding excess inventory (per Culture’s reporting). That’s a deliberate trade-off. Staying small and pre-sold means Bellwether rarely has to discount cheese to move it, but it also means growth happens slowly, one new piece of equipment at a time — their newest vat is sized to roughly double output, whenever they’re ready to use it.
Liam Callahan, who now owns the farm and makes the cheese himself, has put the underlying philosophy in plain terms: “With ‘whole is better,’ everyone wins. The sheep and cows live full, healthy lives; farmers are rewarded for taking care of these healthy animals; we get to follow our passion and craft exceptional products we’re proud of — and folks enjoy food that is deeply nutritious and remarkably flavorful” (Bellwether Farms). It’s a tidy summary of a business built backward from most conventional advice: don’t scale first and figure out quality later. Get the animals and the milk right, keep the batches small enough to control, and let growth follow whatever pace that allows.
Getting it onto your table
If you track down the Sonoma Herb Sheep Cheese, treat it like any soft fresh cheese: let it sit out for ten or fifteen minutes before serving so the texture softens, then spread it on something with enough structure to hold it — a dense cracker or grilled bread does better than something delicate. The herbs already do some of the pairing work, so a crisp white wine or a dry rosé is a safer match than anything sweet. The Basket Ricotta is closer to a blank canvas: good with honey and fruit for breakfast, or folded into pasta the same day you buy it, since the texture is best within a few days of leaving the creamery. If you’re building a full spread around either one, our guide to building your first cheese board covers the basics of balancing something soft like this against harder, aged cheeses, and our guide to cheese and fruit pairings has more specific ideas if fruit is going on the board too.
Why we’re telling this story
Bellwether Farms didn’t set out to become one of the only serious sheep’s-milk cheese producers in the country — that happened because a friend asked an odd question and a family decided to take it seriously. Forty years later, the awards are a nice confirmation that the harder path worked out, but they’re not really the point. The point is a farm that chose small batches and has kept making that choice for four decades. It’s a similar shape to the story we told in our spotlight on Point Reyes Farmstead — another family-run California creamery whose consistency in competition traces back to decisions made long before any trophy was on the table.
This piece is part of Nahitra’s ongoing series profiling the people behind the cheese we all eat, and there’s more where this came from. Follow along on Pinterest and Instagram, or subscribe on the homepage to catch the next one.
