I hope you enjoy reading this blog. I will never claim to be an expert on cheese making, goat milking or farming (everyday I learn something new). However, I have learned so much from others who have generously shared their experience in books and on the web and hope to use this blog to pass it on to folks considering goats. I am completely enchanted by these creatures and how they have enriched our life. The amount I have learned since we got our first two goats has been exponential. Now our herd of 21 Nigerian Dwarf Goats is a big part of our daily life and I can't imagine it any other way. This blog will chart the seasons of milking and cheese making as a record for myself and a resource to others who are looking for a window into what it is like to own these adorable mini dairy goats. For more information about our farm, please look us up on: Our Farm Website
Big Time Blueberries
Each summer there is a small window for each type of delicious berry, miss the blueberry week or the advent of blackberries and you will likely be kicking yourself all through the long cold winter as you are faced with the sad versions shipped from a million miles away. This year we hit the blueberries dead on!
Chevre with Blueberry Chutney-THANKS for the great new idea Travis!
Classic Summer Pie
Our first goat milk custard with berries-YUM.
Big day in the barn results in Big day in Kitchen...We milked our 5 goats this morning (they are separate from their kids at night) and got 12 cups of lovely milk. Each goat is averaging over 1/2 a quart -although in truth a couple pull more than their weight and give a quart of milk at each milking- unless they get bored with the process and begin to dance! We will begin miking twice a day once the kids are gone. With more milk we are able to make more treats. This week we made cajeta (Mexican caramel-see Sunflower Farm website for pictures and recipe), yogurt, ice cream and chevre.
Big day in the new cheese kitchen...Meanwhile, the cheese kitchen is looking great. The framing is complete, skylights are in and 3 windows go in today.
3 windows and 3 skylights in cheese kitchen
Big day for the kids...This week we also sent off our 9 goat boys to their new homes. It is crazy how attached we got to them and the farm seems quiet now. To fill a bit of the void we are bringing home a new milking goat and kid early in August! Then we will have 5 doelings, 6 milking does and 1 wether. Stay tuned for new pictures.
Leo, Moe and Zion all went home with a sweet couple from Mass.
Over the past year, virtual visitors have popped in to the
Sunflower Farm Dairy Blog from all over the United States, Germany, France,
Canada, Japan, Singapore, Cambodia, United Kingdom, Ghana, Malta, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Korea, Russia and Thailand. In total 1000+ folks have stumbled in
for a moment of small farm life in
Cumberland, Maine.
I love this for so many reasons. Unless you grew up farming (and I imagine even if you did) there are always a million curious questions which pop up on any given day. Knowing that there are people out there with a million different answers makes the journey less lonely. Farming allows us to disconnect in many ways from the insanity of modern life, but virtual and real live visitors to the farm remind me of how much the simple act of planting a garden, tending goats, collecting eggs and making cheese connects me to people, traditions and history which have persevered throughout all time, all around the globe. I am hoping to add a forum soon where we all can share our hard earned wisdom with each other on topics related to goat herding and cheese making! Also coming in August to the blog, hard cheeses and more on the creation of our dairy! For now my small gift to those in their first year or two of goats...
5 things I have learned this year.
Note: these are simply my observations based on experience with my goat herd. I am interested in what others have experienced! PLEASE leave a note about something you learned this year!
Giving Shots is worth doing yourself...for sure there are things we call the vet for, but to have them make a farm call to give shots was getting pricey and unnecessary. This year we saved about $900. giving our own antibiotics, BoSe and CDT when they were called for. It's easiest with kids if one person can hold the goat while the other gives the shot. Set adults up on the milk stand with some food and they will not even notice a shot. To be prepared buy: alcohol, wipes needles- it is worth having a variety (Banamine calls for a tiny dose, CDT always a whopping 2 cc.), and a scale. Side note: The bottle of CDT says to dispose of the bottle after opening and using once. I asked my vet and he said it was fine to keep it between the first round of shots and the second round of shots 3 weeks later. Be sure to wipe bottle with alcohol wipes, use a new needle for each shot and to keep the bottle in the fridge when not in use.
Disbudding will hurt you more than it hurts them. In my opinion it is best to get someone with a lot of experience to do it. They will do it once, right, and be quick about it. We tried it the first year on our own and had to have the ones we sold redone by the vet. He used lots of painkiller and took a long time which in my opinion added a lot of stress to the goat kids. We were keeping Luna, so we let her one horn grow calling her our One Horned Wonder. When done correctly the whole process takes about 1-2 minutes and they will yell most of it, but when they hop down, they run to nurse and act as if nothing has happened. It does not appear to cause them lasting pain. Side note: Luna broke her little horn off the other day wrestling over food with another doe. It
was a bloody mess and an excellent argument for disbudding. When I called the vet in a tizzy, he sensibly suggested that if I stopped chasing her and trying to DO SOMETHING, her blood pressure would drop a bit and the blood would likely stop on its own. If your goat ever breaks off their horn apply some blood stop and
iodine or blue cote and let them be. Keep an eye on it and step in if needed, otherwise let nature heal her up. Her little horn nub healed up
great without any real help from us.
Elastration is easy on the owner but clearly is not fun for the goat. In addition to shots, we elastrated 8 of our little bucklings this year. We waited until 7 weeks to give them time for their systems to develop as much as possible to help prevent urinary calcifications later. They are fertile at that age, so waiting longer than that was not possible with our setup. You might imagine burning the hornbud would be far more painful than placing a band at the top of their testicles, but this is not from my observations true. We gave our goat babies Banamine this year, an antinflamatory painkiller prescribed by the vet which did seem to shorten their discomfort. The procedure is cheap and easy to do yourself or with a partner. No vet needed for this either, save the $300 for an emergency! Weigh them and give the correct amount of Banamine. Then wash them up with an alcohol wipe, put the band on and then cover the area with Iodine. Quick and easy. At first, they are fine, they run and nurse and seem unaffected. Then it hits them and for 2-4 hours the poor kids are miserable. They all draped themselves on their moms and took turns crying piteously. Chris left the farm that evening! He could feel their pain. That night life was back to normal and after a week or two the nuts were shriveled up and ready to fall. If you think about the surgery we do on cats and dogs...or humans for that matter, I suppose the 2-4 hours of discomfort is not any worse and perhaps better. I am looking into other methods though. Many folks seem to use the Burdizzo which I am curious to hear more about.
Goats will Waste Hay-No matter what hay feeder you buy or build, goats will waste hay. It used to make me a little crazy (second cut costs about $3-5 a bale in Maine and our goats each eat about 25 bales a year.) Then I read someone's blog who said that you need to see it as food and then bedding and you will not go so crazy. They are able to spread the hay feet from a feeder and it does provide them with a constant fresh source of bedding! This is a good reminder to fix what you can and to let the rest go until you find a better way! HAY, if you're not having fun what is the point?
Goat Families Love Each Other-We can't keep all the goat kids born on our farm, but boy do we wish we could. This year as our herd grew we were able to see how sweet the goat families are together. Pick any summer day to observe and you will find piles of goats laying on top of or following around their mom. Luna our doe born last year still follows around her mom (now with her 2 kids in tow.)Watching this touches my heart and is why we have chosen to let the mothers nurse their kids naturally. Many bottle feed the babies to increase the amount of milk they get and to avoid spread of CAE, but I hope we will always be able to balance the farm profit with the daily gold of seeing goats being goats together. Our herd tested negative for CAE, so we are not worried about spreading something we do not have on our farm and for now we have plenty of milk. We separate the kids and moms at night and milk in the morning in the first 8 weeks, then once the majority of the kids go to new homes this weekend, we will begin twice a day milking. Even with all the kids still here, we get a range of 2 cups to 2 quarts a day from each doe. Our goal in the next few years will be to add more 2 quart a day goats! Since we started with goats as pets, milk production was not our original concern. Side Note: We want does to expand our dairy herd but only 4 out of 13 kids were girls this year. We leased a buck who ran with our does for the month of December. I recently heard that many farmers believe that a buck who is allowed to see the does and build up his interest and is then given one shot to mount a doe in heat, will be more likely to produce does! Very interesting! I'm sure there are great number of humans who have tried crazier things to improve their odds of creating offspring of a certain gender! I'm guessing each time, you've got a 50% chance of the trick working! Hopefully the coin flips more in our direction next year, but I wouldn't trade this batch of sweet kids for anything this year.
Like many modern women, somedays it seems I am almost entirely consumed by a losing battle with "bad" smells. The real breeze filled with a mixed perfume of goat manure, herbs growing in the garden by the kitchen, the lawn just mowed, dog hair and pig musk is fought with Febreze. I'm sure air freshener is far more dangerous to my senses than any "bad" smell, and to be honest I can't even say I enjoy the Linen & Sky or Meadows & Rain fragrances although I am a big fan of how fresh linen, meadows, and a rainy sky smell in their natural form.
Somehow in the the last 50 years, we have been brainwashed to believe that no smell equals status; a sanitized home is a sign that we have made it, that we have conquered nature and all its unmanagable assaults on our senses. But recently it has occurred to me that it is not just our sense of smell that we are providing with a clean (BLANK) slate, but our other senses as well. I have begun to think that maybe by banishing the real world of smells from our daily landscape, we also arrest our happiness which depends on all senses to craft the memories which anchor us. We are constantly barraged with temptations to adopt a goal of "living well" with all the elegance of Martha but none of the gritty and memorable fun of a real experience. We have been tricked into thinking we can control our environment and too often give up the deliciously dangerous world of bee stings and mud and manure.
This summer spend a day in the mall, then another on a farm. I can bet which one your brain is more likely to store away and revisit on a cold winter day. I can't remember a single day I've spent at the mall, although I often comment that I wish my house smelled like Origins and always inhale deeply while passing Abercrombie. These shops smell great, but these manufactured scents are not connected to my life or memory bank and 50 years from now it will be the smell of manure and hay that take me back to hours spent waiting for the birth of a new goat kid or piglet. Those "bad smells" will work their magic like no other can.
In an August 2011 editorial in Cook's Magazine, Christopher Kimball wrote, "One experiment asked participants to sniff 10 common household odors and then to identify them; most correctly matched up fewer than half. Perhaps that's because our brains are given such lousy material to work with; laundry detergent doesn't make much of an impression...As a kid in Vermont, however, I collected unforgettable memories: the aching cold of a swimming pond, the sweet smell of fern dappled wetland, a good snort of wood smoke drifting through the first cold October evening, the wet vanilla and caramel steam from a sugarhouse, the scent of a workhorse-all dried sweat, heat and manure-and afternoon light filtered though spider-webbed, fly-specked windows of the dairy barn. There was nothing between sensation and memory: the senses smashed headlong into the mind, burying deep, leaving immutable patterns of smells, sights, sights, tastes and sounds.
The modern world, however, filters the pleasure of living through infinite layers...Unhappiness steps through the door when we find ourselves removed from the world, from the shock and pleasure of the five senses. Thats' why we cook, to remind ourselves that we are alive...Living with zero degrees of separation entails risk-yes, that glass of raw milk may contain pathogens-but nothing worth doing is entirely risk-free."
So the next time company swings by I will not rush around with a bottle of Febreze but instead will welcome them into the kitchen (which will likely smell like cheese curds) and the barn (which will smell like manure) and perhaps this will be my gift to the visitor and myself...a good stiff wiff of a simpler time, not too far out of our reach if we are willing to step into the wonderfully messy world.
We bought a Euro Cuisine YM260 2 Quart yogurt maker and took it for its first ride this week! Tess (my 13 year old chef and daughter) has been waiting for the UPS truck to pull up our driveway every day and when it finally came, you would have thought it was Christmas for how excited she was to get it unwrapped. The idea is that it keeps the yogurt at the perfect temperature (110-115 degrees) for it to turn yogurt like. There all lots of ways to do this, but most of them take more attention. (Ex. Putting jars of hot water in a cooler with the jars of milk and culture.) The great thing about the yogurt maker is that it hod the temperature for 8 hours and we can be sleeping!
•Heat 2 quarts fresh goat milk to almost boiling. Cool to 110.
Separate 2 cups of milk in bowl and add yogurt with live cultures. (We used 1 cup of yummy Plain Stonyfield organic.) Stir. Add to rest of milk and stir well again.
Pour mixture into 2 Qt container and plug in. Let sit for 8 hours.
gather what you would like to put in your yogurt for flavor and wash your storing jars
Put container in the fridge for about 8 hours. When it comes out it will look like yogurt! Now comes the fun part of adding flavor.
Maine maple syrup
jam
add vanilla
strawberry jam thickens the yogurt a bit
Add a tiny scraping of the delicious caviar type seeds inside of a vanilla bean, some vanilla extract and a touch of Maine maple syrup or some homemade strawberry jam to the plain yogurt and ENJOY.
Many folks complain that they find homemade goat yogurt too thin. You can add all sorts of things to thicken your yogurt-gelatin, powdered milk and tapioca. European style yogurt is traditionally less thick, so if you prefer you can enjoy it as is and feel cool and European! I think I'd rather have a thinner yogurt than one full of additives (something cooking at home enables us to avoid!) In our case, using a whole milk yogurt as the starter and fresh Nigerian Goat milk made a yogurt that is a good consistency, so we will not be adding a thing!
We are starting work on our own cheese making room. Lucky for us, there is an empty building next to our house with a concrete floor and working drain. Lucky me that I have a husband who loves building projects and has the summer off as teacher! When we moved in a year ago the property and this space was filled to the brim with trash. Wish I had taken pictures of it then. Just this week, we removed the last of the junk and now have a clean slate to work with. Chris can already see it finished and spent yesterday excitedly ripping out the insulation and wall board in 90+ degree heat! In the next few months we will turn the space into a small farm store and creamery! The creamery will be 18 x 17, a nice big space to grow into over the next 20 years! The farm store will be up front and about 18 x10. The dairy inspector has been by to take a look at our plans so now the fun begins. We will share pics of the process in case others who are considering taking cheese making out of the kitchen are interested. If any folks stumble across this blog who have built a creamery, PLEASE feel free to add comments sharing your wisdom!
creamery on left, house on right
Farm store/creamery entrance
Junk from previous owner almost clear
first day of work gutting the space
opening the doors for new possibilities!
The farm store will be in front until just after door, then creamery will go to the back wall.
lumber arrives for front wall!
front wall of cheese kitchen with observation window and door are framed on Day 1
The roof will peak over creamery space with north facing sky lights, door at back leads to big storage room, maybe someday it will be classroom space for a farm school?!
framing complete for roof and wall where sinks will be
Framing done for wall between shop and creamery
3 windows and 3 skylights go in for natural light
Exciting!
Our goats passed their first state required test for dairy animals. When the report came back from the Maine Department of Agriculture we were very excited. Our herd tested negative to Brucellosis and CAE. The vet drew the blood this spring. CAE cost $15.50 and Brucellosis cost $20.00 per goat. We will need to test any new animals we add to our herd. I need to find out if this applies to kids born on our farm that we want to keep and milk. They will also need to be tested for Tuberculosis every 3 years.
Once we are in action, our heat treated milk, single service containers of value added products, and any multi-use containers will each need to be tested by the Department 4 times in each consecutive six months. There is an exception that states: Milk and milk products not produced continuously throughout the year are exempt from being sampled 4 times in any consecutive months which may very well apply to us since we will be seasonal until we are making a good enough profit to retire from teaching!
And getting into Dairy means many hours spent like this!
Making Mozzarella
Look up how to make Mozzarella and like any other cheese, you will find a million different slight and major variations. There are options that take 15 minutes and others that take 15 hours. When I made it for the second time, I found myself flipping between options and ended up with a mixture of many approaches. My brain was in a distracted mood and this made it an entertaining adventure...however, I have no clear idea of what I did and what I might change next time, so generally I would advise going with one recipe and then making ever so slight changes to it over subsequent batches until it is just the way you like it!
Here is what I did...
Pasteurize 1 gallon of milk, cool to 80.
Add 1 and a half teaspoon citric acid and stir (in the future I would add citric acid to water before mixing it in.)
Heat to 91.
Add 1/4 tsp thermophilic starter. (Not every recipe includes tculture or the wait time.)
Stir well, cover and let sit for 30-60 minutes.
Add 1/4 tsp rennet mixed with 1/4 cup water and stir.
(Some heat the mixture to 105 degrees and hold for 5 minutes until the curd and whey separate, others do like I did below.)
Let set until you get a clean break (15 minutes)
Cut curd into 1/2 inch cubes and let set for 10 minutes
Hang curds in cheesecloth to drain for an hour
(Save whey for ricotta. To make a little ricotta -enough for a pizza- Bring pot of whey to near boil. Then pour through cheesecloth to get curds. Let drain for a couple of hours, add salt and refrigerate.)
Make curd into 3-4 balls to dip individually in very hot near boiling salted water or whey.
Dip in hot water on slotted spoon for a few seconds. If it slides out holes of spoon it is too hot, but it should want to. This part is really fun. My kids like to come into the kitchen and get in on the action. It is funny how different in texture the cheese comes out with three different people stretching the curd. Cheesemaking has a lot to do with having a gentle touch.
Try to stretch cheese gently. Let it pull down with its own weight.
Dip again in hot water.
Stretch again.
Dip again if needed.
Fold and stretch and knead Mozzarella into a ball.
Dip ball in icy water to set shape.
Salt ball and store in fridge. Or... just eat them with some sliced tomatoes and basil. The only problem with Mozzarella is that 1 gallon of milk does not make nearly enough cheese for something so yummy. Next time I'm starting with 2-3 gallons of milk.
Olive enjoys a summer visit from Nikki and family who bought the first wethers born on our farm!
A huge part of having dairy goats is also being parent to the doe's kids each year. As the dairy herd grows so does the number of kids each spring. Nothing is more fun than goat kids! They make getting out of bed each morning a joy and I have spent more time in the barn than anywhere else since they were born 5-6 weeks ago. With this fun also comes the responsibility of finding great homes for each of the goaties who before long we grow very attached to. People faced with the swarm of kids often ask how we know all their names. This question seems funny since we spend hours with them and know each of their personalities well. We love them individually, as much as the dogs who live in our house, and want to make sure that wherever they go, they will be treated like family. We have been so lucky in finding the best homes for our kids. All 9 wethers are now sold to people who care about their animals as much as we do. I can't explain what a relief this is!
And because of all these sweet babies now we also have milk and cheese! Today the quest for the perfect Chevre continues. It is a tasty adventure! I am working to make the cheese even more creamy and smooth and this morning varied the amount of rennet a bit since my curds were setting very quickly in the first few batches. The vegetable rennet is double strength and so I am experimenting with the perfect amount to set up my Nigerian Dwarf Goat super creamy milk! Today I mixed two drops of rennet in 1/2 cup cool water and then added 1/2 of the rennet water mixture (1/4 cup) to the gallon of milk. We'll see how this goes. So far, it is not setting up as quickly, so as long as the curds still form, I think this will be an improvement.
12 hours later...looks great. It is now hanging to drain in cheesecloth. Unfortunately I did not time this well. It should be good to go in the fridge at 3:00 a.m. Boooo. Oh well. If only those 5 does could milk themselves just one morning. By the looks of the very creamy lovely curds, it will be worth a sleepy day tomorrow!
Yum, yum, yum. Will this ever get old?
I spoke today with a woman who raises Nigerians and Mini Nubians. She loves to add orange peel to her chevre and put it in English Muffins for breakfast. I will have to try that delicious idea! Breakfast is the next frontier...a yogurt maker is in the mail!
