With their mixed herd of goats—Alpine, LaManca, Nubian, and Saanan—Redwood Hill Farm makes award-winning artisan cheeses (from fresh chèvre to a buttery bucheret), yogurt, and kefir. But the Bice family has been breaking ground with their sustainable dairy farm for 45 years.  In the 1960s and early ’70s, during the natural foods craze, Redwood was ahead of the curve with its bottled goat’s milk and its kefir (the first goat’s milk kefir in the country). When the older generation had enough of farming, daughter Jennifer Bice (who had raised goats since she was a child) and her partner Steven Schack took over, and in 1982 introduced the nation’s first goat’s milk yogurt.

More firsts followed: the first Camembert-style goat’s milk cheese (Redwood’s Camellia) in 1994, and, in 2003, the first goat dairy to be qualified to use the Certified Humane Raised and Handled label. Jennifer Bice has won numerous awards for breeding from the American Dairy Goat Association, and was inducted into the American Cheese Society Academy of Cheese as a pioneer of artisan goat cheese in the U.S.

In 2010, Redwood branched into cow’s milk, with Green Valley Organics, the first lactose-free cow dairy products to be available nationwide.