The Frets of a Feeble Farmer

Our herd of nine goats - 5 mini-Lamancha does, 1 mini-mancha buck, 1 Nigerian Dwarf doe and 2 Alpine does - has had me hand-wringing worried as of late.

Let me digress a tad. Because of the state of my knees, I can't make the walk to the upper pasture and back, especially in mud season. So I haven't been up to visit my babies in a long while, and it really, really sucks. I miss these sweet faces!

Valentina, Blue & Chardonnay, February 2012

So the daily visitor to Goatlandia for the past 9-months-plus has been Bill, exclusively. And the goaties love their Papa.

The daily love-in/treat shakedown.

In fact, they even know the sound of Billy's truck pulling into the driveway and start bleating to beat the band when they think Pops is home and headed their way with chow. He does right by them and they love him for it. 

Alas, Billy is a dude. 

Now, at the risk of coming across as some sexist Neaderthal, I'll attempt to explain how this hinders him ever so slightly as a goatherd. He takes amazing care of our guy and gals, but as a fella himself, lacks that sixth sense about babies and critters that I feel is inextricably tied to the X chromosome. It's a nurturing/intuition/mothering thing that goes bone-deep. I don't know how to explain it really, but I know when something is a little off with one of my goats (or dogs, or hens), even when they're "fine". It's a skill that I unfortunately have not been able to translate to the world of plants and my garden is living (half-dead) proof. I can also usually tell by one means or another if and when my girls are pregnant. Unfortunately, since I haven't had a face-to-face with my gals in a while, and can only see them from a distance out the window, I have no idea whatsoever who might or might not be pregnant, and I'm worried. In fact, I don't know whether anyone is pregnant so we might be looking at a very dry year.

This past Fall and Winter we finally found a profitable way to use our goat milk in soapmaking. There are a lot of very talented craftspeople and artisanal products made and sold here in Olympia, including a good number of small-batch soaps, but our beautiful, organic goat milk was the ingredient in ours that set us apart. In fact, we sold out of it! And now that we have a product that sells and have begun to build a knowledge base about making and marketing it, we're looking at the possibility of not having our magic ingredient available to us for drinking, cheesemaking, soapmaking or as a protein-rich food for the hogs that we'll soon have. The loss of it would be pretty major for us.

I started wondering if Buckley, our lone buck, did, in fact, have "the goods" or not. Billy and I talked about what our next steps would be if it turned out that Buckley was sterile. Our only viable option would be to cull him. Neither of us were looking forward to that possibility.

Well, a reprieve came in my inbox yesterday in the form of an email from my friend, B. The mini Lamancha does that she bought from us last year, and boarded here for a few weeks this Summer, were both successfully bred by none other than Buckley himself. Fritzen delivered healthy twin girls yesterday, Blackey & Wobble.

Wobble is the tan gal in front, and Blackey is the girl way in back. The mini-Lamancha breed is achieved by crossing a standard Lamancha with a Nigerian Dwarf. Blackey somehow ended up with tons of the Nigerian traits, including her long ears and frosted nose. My more experienced fellow goat ladies tell me that long ears can occur about as often in mini-Mancha kids as blue eyes can, as much as 25% of the time. But this is the first long eared baby mini-Mancha that we've had, out of 10 born. 

B says that her cry is even different sounding - loud and whiny like a Nigerian. Genetics are fascinating!

B's other doe, Oreo, is due any day. :)

Anyway - there is hope yet that at least one of our eight lovely ladies may give us babies and milk this year. I think I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and truck my tushie on up the hill, wonky knee and all, and give my girls a thorough once-over to see who, if anyone, might be in the family way. I think that Bill had pretty much resigned himself to the fact that we wouldn't be milking anybody this year when B's email came. Now he's worried that we could end up with babies and milk times eight!

Aye, chihuahua. 

In the event that rampant fecundity ends up being the way that this all shakes out, this year Bill won't be alone in caring for our girls. I'm getting a brand spankin' new knee next week, and after a month or two (or three) of rehab and therapy, I'll hopefully be able to get right back in the trenches! I suspect that I may actually be the first person on earth who looks forward to mucking out a chicken coop or cleaning birth goo off of a newborn goat, but I do. I totally do. 

Farm chick Chelle will shortly be back in the saddle again. :)

The Goatses with the Mostest

Dairy time is about done for us here. The does have all been dried off, and have very likely already been  re-bred by our escape-artist of a buck, Buckley. So we'll be buying milk until February at least, but not having to milk in the cold and wet makes the trade off quite fair.

On a day like this, when I'm missing my goat milk in my coffee, I come across a post from a fellow farm chick, Matron at Throwback at Trapper Creek. She has a gorgeous Guernsey, Jane, who gives her four gallons of milk per day. I have a mild case of cow envy.

Sure, we'd drown in 4 gallons per day, but the stuff is golden and just...amazing. I could make a whole different assortment of cheeses, and enough butter that I wouldn't have to hit up Costco whenever a baking jag hits. And we could feed the extra to the pigs that we plan to get this Spring. Oh, the things I could do with all that milk...

But.

But, we only have 3 1/2 acres.

A full acre of that land (the bog) is under water 9 months out of the year.

We have well water and a septic system, which means that we basically recycle the same water constantly. I try really hard to maintain balance in those systems by not overwhelming the septic with chemicals, phosphates or tons of cow poo. Goat poop is in "jellybean" form, and can be cleaned up/moved easily, and breaks down slowly. A giant cow pat in the rain will end up running off into our bog, and eventually our septic/well system. Simply put, it would just be too much for our little foothold to handle.

We've already committed to pigs this coming late Winter/early Spring. And their care and "output" will be plenty for this little farm to take on. The reason that we green-lit the pig idea, rather than the cow, was primarily because there is an end date to it. The pigs will be with us for no longer than 9 months, at which point we can evaluate whether the cost/work/impact was worth the trouble.

So, for the foreseeable future, goats will be where our dairy begins and ends. And really, these little gals do a pretty bang-up job of providing us with milk for our coffee, little batches of snowy white butter, some really intense aged parmesan, and the secret ingredient for our lovely homemade soaps.

These are the gals who make it happen. Thanks again, girls.

Milk Mania

I'd love to include pictures with this post, but my camera was riding shotgun when I took my little tumble in the desert back in May, so my words will have to do until really nice Canon SLR's start raining from the sky. It could be a while...

Anyhoo, we're up to our eyeballs in milk lately, and still only milking one of our two lactating does right now. Bill's been doing the milking, which means that I'm the one who gets to figure out what the heck to do with all our milk.

Today we have 2 1/2 gallons on hand, so I'm making a mighty batch of cajeta, in addition to a small, first attempt at goats milk butter, which I learned about (how else?) via youtube.

Sidney's milk seems to either have higher butterfat than her Lamancha sisters' milk, or is somehow less homogenated, because after a day or two in the fridge, it gets a lovely layer of cream on top that is perfect for scooping off.

That being said, it takes FOREVER to get enough cream to make the whole shebang worth while.

Well, I've got nothin' but time... and goat milk. So here goes!

Our Swiss Misses

Our new girls, Sophie & Sydney, both bred Alpines.

These little gals joined our herd absolutely seamlessly, almost 2 weeks ago now. They are the sweetest little ladies!


Yo.

Being used to having Lamanchas here, it's kinda weird to have goats with ears, especially those ears. :)

S & S were bred to an Oberhasli buck (another variety of Alpine dairy goat) and are due to kid in May. We've never had three milkers at once, let alone full-sized milkers. We're looking down the barrel of a full-fledged dairypalooza over here.



And I could not be more excited!

Cheesy Suggestions?

I have a few gallons of goats milk in the fridge just waiting to be put to good use, and I'm going to use it to make another cheese. So I thought I'd ask, what kind of cheese should I make?

A) Another Parmesan!
B) FetaFetaFetaFeta
C) Chevre (most of which I'll have to share, because Bill's out of town, and this is not my favorite cheese)
D) Cheddar
E) A metric ton of Mozzarella
F) Something else - you tell me!

And maybe, just maybe, I'll finally document a cheese making from beginning to end this time. Maybe.

My First Farmhouse Cheddar!

It just came out of the mold, and is now sitting on a bamboo cutting board under the watchful eye of Lorelei, the Goat in a Coat, to dry for at least three days. After it has dried well, I'll be waxing it. It is ready to eat in as few as 8 weeks, but supposedly tastes best when aged for at least six months.

So somewhere in the neighborhood of Valentines Day, I should finally get to find out whether or not I'm any good with cheddar and/or whether goat's milk cheddar is better or worse that the good ol' cow cheddar that I was raised on. Fingers crossed...

P.S. - Check out the picture of The Goat in the Coat and other amazing batiks by my friend, the lovely and talented Lisa Telling Kattenbraker, at her Etsy shop or at lisauntitled.com. :)

Product Review: The Henry Milker

Hand milking, for me, is an exercise in frustration. Maybe it's because I have mini breeds of goats, with corresponding mini ta-tas, or maybe it's because I'm just an awkward klutz. Either way, I was getting pretty discouraged about our prospects of ever getting milk from our goats. Then, one day while perusing a copy of Dairy Goat Journal (do I know how to have a good time or what?!) I saw it (cue angels singing) - The Henry Milker.

In my more desperate moments of failed hand milking, I'd dreamt of getting my hands on an electric milker. But they are:
a) HUGE - big time overkill for three little goats,
b) Expensive! Three and four figures expensive. Do you know how long I'd have to milk my goats to get $700 worth of milk out of them?
c) Complicated as all get-out. Pulsators, tubes, compressors, yada yada. Too many things to break. And, if you have to have a degree in mechanical engineering to assemble the thing fresh each day, well... it's not for me.

Which is why a Henry Milker was so appealing to me. It has seven parts total - a hand pump, teat cup, two tubes, a quart mason jar, modified jar lid and ring. C'est tout. Now, what they charge you for this simple little set up is a bit hard to swallow at $139, but I used the code "DAIRYGOAT" at checkout and got $10 off and a spare jar, lid, ring, size small teat cup & pair of tubes, which lessened the sting of the price tag a bit.

Setting up and using the milker were both a piece of cake. Even I can't mangle it too badly when there are only seven parts involved.

The quart jar comes with a lid that has had two hollow plastic spike-like fixtures set into it (I can't, for the life of me, think of the proper word for these things). You set the lid on the clean jar, then tighten it down with the ring. You affix one tube to each of the spike/receivers. One of your affixed tubes will now hook up to the hand pump, the other tube, to the teat cup (a large, blunt syringe with the plunger removed), and then you're ready to milk!




Fritzen, our mini LaMancha herd queen, giving up the goods.




The good stuff!

As far as using the milker, the advice that I have to offer is:

a)After cleaning the udder/teats, you'll need to clear the teat by hand milking once or twice before attaching the milker. This will not only clear any old/funky milk and debris from the orifice, but also encourage your goat to let down her milk. (I also massage the udder a little while washing her up. If all else fails, you can give her a little bump like the baby kids do to get the milk to let down.)

b) You need to be sure to get your teat cup straight on. A bad approach can lead to pinching, which can lead to a kick in the head.

c) Watch the pressure! The literature that comes with the milker advises that you not go above 10 on the gauge (I don't know what the unit of measurement is. PSI?). I've noticed that my does require between 5-7 to flow well. The lower that you can get away with, the better.

d) Let the pressure fluctuate. Once you have the milk going well, letting the pressure fall (and consequently, the milk flow) will not hurt your overall output. In fact, keeping the pressure constantly high without a break can damage the teat over time. I pump mine up until it begins to flow, maintain that pressure level for 10 seconds or so, then take a break from pumping to let the pressure fall gradually. When it hits a point where the flow is down to drips, I pump it back up.

Besides the relative affordability of this milker versus others, and it's idiot-proof operation, the Henry Milker has one additional benefit - cleanliness. I am a germaphobe, and the idea of milking by hand, allowing hair and straw and God-knows-what-else to fall into the bucket while milking really grossed me out. There's also the issue of the doe either stepping in and spoiling, or knocking over the bucket of milk. These are all non-issues with this milker.

I do still filter my milk, because you never know, but I'm far less concerned about contaminants when using this contained system.

So overall, I would recommend this milker for folks who have just a few goats to milk and are slow or inefficient at hand milking. It comes with a 30-day money back guarantee, which seems like a reasonable length of time for a farmer and goat to determine whether or not this sort of set-up is for them. We're using the heck out of it over here, and the does like it a lot better than my clumsy, endless hand milking, so we'll be keeping ours. ;)

Cheese Advice?

I'm looking for a fairly easy cheese recipe in which I can use a mixture of goat and cows milk. I'm leaning towards Romano or Parmesan, but the whole idea of waiting a year to try my first cheese makes for a rather lame start to my cheesy adventures. I could go for some more instant gratification-style cheese products. Maybe feta??? Does anyone have a recipe to recommend?

We only have about a quart of goat milk right now, so first things first, I'm going to make some cajeta. Cajeta is a Mexican caramel sauce, akin to Dulce de leche. I foresee it having a starring role in my goat milk lattes during our Farmer Feed Thyself challenge next month. If I have to go cold turkey off of chocolate, I hope that I can at least appease my sweet tooth with a down-home caramel macchiato.

Come on out of the woodwork, cheese people. What's a good beginning cheese making recipe that works well with some goat milk in the mix?

Six Ounces of Triumph...

...look just like this!



Yes, it's only 6 ounces. Six very hard-earned ounces! In fact I can honestly say that I haven't sweated and sworn over an amount of milk this bitty since I was the one lactating.

I would have taken pictures of our inaugural use of the Henry Milker, but even with my three assistant goat wranglers, things were hectic. Gertie was the least willing milker, Chardonnay the least fruitful (I seriously think she shut her milk ducts DOWN) and Fritzen the easiest and best producer. Considering her long history of pig-headedness, who'd have thought?

Our does' milk supply is beginning to wane, so this milker got here just in the nick of time. Now, if I can train my goats (and myself) to be up for using it twice per day, we might just be in business.


My fellow milk maids, enjoying a post-milking water balloon fight.

Today's the day! I think...

I've put it off for much too long now, milking day is here.

I'm trying to psych myself up for this ordeal and commitment by trying to downplay the fact that milking dairy animals every day without fail is an ordeal and commitment. I'm sure that someday I will find the whole process of miking my goats peaceful and fulfilling, as ancient poets and shepherds have written and sung of it throughout history, but at the moment it is still awkward and stressful for everyone involved. I'm clumsy, and my mama goats' patience runs thin with me mighty quickly. But regardless, it's go time.

Part of the source of my stress surrounding milking is the equipment issue. Do you have any idea how many odds and ends you need to properly, sanitarily extract and use your goat milk? Pails, strip cups, filters, brushes, washing water, a hanging milk scale, udder wipes, teat dip, etc., etc. It's a whole heck of a lot of stuff to haul up the hill and back, especially for a gravitationally-challenged gal like myself. One slip on that East Bay clay and I'm covered in milk, iodine and mud.

My means of mentally skirting the awkward equipment/fall hazard issue is to drive everything up the hill in the cart of our little tractor. Driving the tractor will also be a first for me. I'm about 5 miles out of my comfort zone right now.

Today, if I live to tell, shall be a real litmus test of my farm-girl skillz. If I don't get kicked in the head, end up wearing warm milk, crash a tractor or lose a limb, I'm going to chalk it up as a win.