Holding a baby lamb may seem simple, but in fact involves an escalating battle of instincts.

As you’re cradling this docile creature like a warm, fuzzy bread loaf, your parental impulses kick in, and you feel like you want to take care of this baby. The lamb also wants to be taken care of, so it starts crying, “Maaaaaa!” Whereupon a fully grown nearby sheep perks up and hurries over, bleating, “MAAA. MAAAAAA.”

“That’s her mom, and they’re talking,” says Tamara Hicks. “It’s amazing that every mom and baby have their own call for each other.”

Hicks is the co-owner of Toluma Farms and Tomales Farmstead Creamery, a sheep and goat dairy in Marin that produces award-winning Provencal-style cheeses. Toluma is one of several cheese-making operations in the North Bay that offer public tours, and right now is an idyllic time for that. Chilly fog from the Pacific is at bay, and the sun shines on spring grass grazed by herds of animals and their newborns.

“We never thought we’d get into a farm, let alone a dairy, because dairy is the Marine Corps of ag,” says David Jablons, Hicks’ husband. “It’s one thing if you have vegetables, like, ‘Whatever, I’ll get there in an hour. Or maybe three days — they’ll survive.’ But dairy is 24/7. There’s always some crisis, and you always have to be milking.”

Despite Tomales Farmstead Creamery being a relative newbie — at least compared to the 100-year-old cheesemakers on the scene — it has won competition medals from the American Cheese Society and the Good Food Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that fetes the nation’s organic and sustainable producers. The farmstead’s Atika, a manchego-like aged cheese named after the Coast Miwok word for “two,” is a regular winner.

“The Atika is powerful, because it’s a goat’s-milk cheese, but it has sheep’s milk in it,” Jablons explains. “Anything you add sheep’s milk to gets that much better. You get the nutty flavor, and then you get the basso of the butterfat.”

When Hicks and Jablons aren’t competing, they’re running a Dogpatch bagel shop, Daily Driver, where the cream cheese is made from Jersey-cow milk from a Marin farm. When they’re not doing that, they’re supplying cheese to some of San Francisco’s trendiest restaurants, including Che Fico and Californios, or holding farmstead dinners at the creamery with Michelin-starred chefs.

And when they’re not doing that, they’re giving creamery tours that might start with a “guard goose” stationed in the road by the entrance gate. It’s aggressive, and keeps the raccoons out. Near the goose is a steely-eyed dog, currently herding a cat, slinking low on the ground to steer it to corners of the yard. The two might’ve been doing this all day — the cat certainly looks exasperated.

We enter a “Goat ICU,” where penned animals receive extra care for infections, parasites and procedures. A sheep bellows loudly to nothing in particular. Another lies quietly. Its chart reads: “Poopy Butt.”

The farm handles all of its veterinary work in-house, which is no big deal for Jablons, a thoracic surgeon at UCSF. Years ago, one of his patients was a silverback gorilla from the San Francisco Zoo — Kubi, the brother of Koko the signing gorilla.

“He had an infected, destroyed right lung, and we operated on him,” he recalls. “The joke was, ‘Well, what are we going to do when this gorilla wakes up? You better have good sneakers.’ ”

Then it’s outdoors to scoop up a 3-day-old lamb. In human arms, the baby becomes limp, gazing up at the sky in wonderment. “When you’re trying to catch them, I don’t think they understand what you’re doing,” says Hicks. “Then once you’re holding them they’re like, ‘Oh, if I would’ve known this!’ They love the attention.”

We begin a hike up through the pastures past what looks like an alien spaceship. It’s a grain tank that once belonged to Laura Chenel, whose cheese log Alice Waters used to make her famous Chez Panisse mixed-greens salad. A Great Pyrenees mix does a great impression of a beanbag chair dumped in the grass.

“People see the dog and say, ‘That’s a nice life. He doesn’t do (expletive).’ But you forget: They sleep during the day. They work at night,” says Jablons. Among the predators the farm faces are coyotes — good fences keep most of them out — and mountain lions, one of which stole in a few years ago. It killed all the black-colored young animals, for some weird reason.

The fires in Napa and Sonoma relocated a large population of raptors here, where they hunt high on the coastal breezes. “They come out of nowhere at 80 mph and the babies are helpless,” he says. “The hawks like to pluck the eyes and liver out. Welcome to the world.”

Outside the milking room, the animals gather on a concrete patio called the “skating rink” — it gets slippery, and they slide around in comical fashion. Then they hustle to their favorite spots on a platform for machine-assisted hand milking, with vacuum pumps that sound like a powerful metronome. The goats stick their heads into feeding slots and get milked 12 to a row. The sheep can only fit into eight spots due to their somewhat deceptive size.

“You might see a sheep upside down and say, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to save the sheep?’ ” says Jablons. “You don’t want to try to pick it up and embarrass yourself. But then you” — he mimes clutching it and flipping it over — “and it only weighs like 14 pounds. They’re all fluff.”

The milk gets heated up to kill bad bacteria, then spiked with good bacteria to make a variety of original-recipe cheeses.

Each lives for a period in a cloistered cave with its own bacterial environment, where it is observed, hand-flipped and otherwise pampered until ready to eat. And speaking of which, Hicks has set a table with an elaborate spread of cheeses, bread and fruit, inspired by her time doing slow-food agritours in Italy.

There’s Bossy, a soft-ripened cow’s cheese that looks like nothing less than a big, melting cube of butter. It’s funky and gooey and delightful, like brie left on the counter for a week.

Koto’la is a riff on feta, with a brininess that pairs wonderfully with apples, and Liwa is an all-goat chevre, two or three days out of the mold. Sprinkled with flower petals, it’s as fresh as you can get cheese on a farm, and eats like a dairy-essence cloud.

“With fresh cheese, you shouldn’t really ever have that ‘goaty’ taste, like you’re licking a buck,” Hicks says. “It should take you a minute to be like, ‘Huh? What kind of cheese is this?’ ”

We wash everything down with glasses of “teat-to-table” sheep’s milk, then move the guard goose away and prepare to head home for a night of cheese-inflected dreams. As we leave, the dog is still busy herding the cat around the property.

“She tries to ignore him,” says a farm employee. “When he gets too annoying, she smacks him.”