A few other cheesemakers were ready for the boom. Cabot Creamery, the cooperative that is by far the state’s largest cheesemaker, produces cheddars that are sold across America; it has long offered tours of its facility, and its shop is open to visitors seven days a week. At Shelburne Farms, south of Burlington, which welcomes 100,000 visitors a year, the cheesemaking room is just one facet of a large operation that’s as devoted to educating people about sustainable agriculture as it is to producing top-notch cheddars.

Other, smaller farms have had a harder time adjusting to the burdens of being loved. This is especially true of those that aren’t on main roads or near major tourist centers like Stowe. “We don’t encourage a lot of visitors,” says Barbara Levin, who, with husband Harvey, makes sheep’s cheese at Hope Farm in East Charleston, about a 20-minute drive from the Canadian border on sparsely trafficked, unpaved roads. “We’re happy to have them come by if they call first, but we’re just a small farm.”

Problem is, they usually don’t call first. Doe’s Leap Goat Farm, where George and Kristan van Vlaanderen tend 44 goats and make about 80 pounds of cheese every other day, has no sign. There is no number on the mailbox. Even so, “people find us. They stop at the post office and ask where we are. They come, and they want to ask questions and buy five dollars of cheese,” says Kristan. “We’re not set up for that. It’s just the two of us and an apprentice, and it’s disruptive.” Mateo Kehler, who, with his brother Andy, runs Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, agrees. Despite its location down a hilly, unpaved road, Jasper Hill has attracted a steady stream of visitors who have sampled its Constant Bliss and Bayley Hazen Blue cheeses at restaurants such as Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York and French Laundry in Yountville, California. Kehler says his farm gets enough guests “to be annoying but not enough to justify spending the money to hire a staff person to handle them.”

Jaime Yturriondobeitia, Shelburne’s head cheesemaker, believes that the industry has no choice but to embrace visitors—and that transparency is especially important at a time when people are curious and concerned about the authenticity and provenance of what they eat. “I don’t always like having visitors, but it’s part of the job. It’s taught me grace. I could be jumping up and down and kicking things sometimes, but instead I have to smile and wave,” she says with a shrug. “Anyway, if you’re making a food product and you don’t want people to see, they have to wonder why.”

Kristan van Vlaanderen’s answer to that is simple, and it’s shared by many other farmers: She’s a cheesemaker, not a tour guide. “You go into this business because you like to be alone,” she says with a small smile. “A lot of us aren’t in the tourism business, and we’re not interested in being in the tourism business.”

But she also acknowledges that attention to Vermont cheese has been good for sales of her Camembert-style Caprella and her aged, washed-rind Trappist. So good, in fact, that she often has to turn away buyers. And despite their reservations about visitors, the Van Vlaanderens tacitly acknowledged the tourist trend in their recent farm renovations: Their new cheesemaking room has Plexiglas windows onto a hallway with no other purpose than to let people look in.