Spinning Spider Creamery

Marshall, North Carolina

The “spider” of Spinning Spider Creamery might once have referred to owner Chris Owen—back when she raised Angora goats and spun their fleece into yarn. Now, though its poetic name remains the same, the operation is home to a herd of 50 dairy goats, the Angoras gone.

The switch from fiber developed organically, over the course of a few years. The first dairy breed showed up on the farm in 1999. It was an all-white kid, weaned from the best milking doe on a neighbor’s farm and given to Chris’s son Cullen. Nine years old at the time, Cullen needed an animal to raise and show for a 4-H project. The family needed an alternative dairy source because of allergies to cow milk.

Soon the Saanen goat had her own kids and became the family’s source of milk. It wasn’t long before Chris was experimenting in her kitchen with cheese-making--and liking the results.

As the goat herd multiplied and the milk supply grew, Chris began selling cheeses at farmers markets around Asheville . She was one of a handful of folks peddling small batches of cheese made in uncertified home kitchens; it eventually caught the attention of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. To a collective sigh of great disappointment among a loyal goat cheese clientele that had built up around these vendors, they were all barred from the markets.

For Chris, it was a wake-up call to put all her eggs in one basket, let go of the spinning and become a full-fledged certified cheese-maker. With the help of her husband Jeff, she finished construction of the milking parlor and cheese plant, installing a 100-gallon bulk tank, self-cleaning lines to run the fresh milk from the parlor to the plant, a 50-gallon pasteurizer and a walk-in cooler. She got the set-up certified for commercial use and headed back at the markets.

Chris milks about 30 does twice a day from February through December, and makes fresh chevre, feta, gouda and raw milk cheddar, as well as some aged varieties with soft mold rinds. Between Jeff--who only moonlights as a cheesemonger and is an extension agent by day, Cullen--now a high school student, and herself, Chris hits six farmers markets a week with her artisan cheeses. Spinning Spider also sells to a food coop and other health food stores, and occasionally to restaurants.

“I just really like making cheese artistically and not just lots of bag-drained cheese,” she said, explaining her preference for retailing cheese to wholesaling it to restaurants. The chevre Chris makes for individual customers she drains in individual cups to separate the curd from the whey. That results in a slightly denser cheese, she explained, and gives her the opportunity to season blocks according to the diverse tastes of her customers, who range from youthful hippies to upscale sophisticates who’ve been to France and sampled goat cheese at its cultural source.

Cullen hopes to do that too. Stepping avidly in his mother’s footsteps, the teenager is taking French lessons in preparation for getting an internship overseas to refine his cheese expertise. Through 4H, home-schooling and managing a store account and two of the farmers’ market stalls for Spinning Spider, Cullen is practiced in all aspects of the family business. Chris says providing a healthy learning and growing environment for her children was much of the reason she and Jeff wanted to start a farm. The mother home schools her younger two sons as well, who are responsible for feeding the goats and laying hens.

Besides providing for the family’s dairy needs, the five-acre farm also produces just enough eggs to feed three growing boys and their parents. For veggies, Chris barters at the farmers’ markets.

“It’s much more satisfying to come home with someone else’s organic lettuce and know that I’ve contributed by providing my cheese to them,” she laughs, recalling organic kitchen gardens of yore overrun with weeds. Not a horticulturalist at heart, Chris also buys all the alfalfa hay she feeds her goats. The ruminants have access to four acres of open pasture and get nutrients from high protein dairy goat grain mix.

Perhaps it was destiny that the East Coast gal, born and raised in the dairy heartland of Wisconsin , would become a cheese-maker. She never thought so back then, as she watched with no envy the lights in her neighbors’ dairy barns go on at 4 a.m. each morning of the year, and still saw family farms go bankrupt. But Chris’s value-added dairy gig is something different. From the first batch of cheese sold, Spinning Spider’s hungry customers haven’t been able to get enough. The Owens see the dairy as a long term project they will depend on financially well into their retirement years.