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
Bonnie & Junie B. Jones.
It is cute how the kids look like their mom even if their coloring is completely different.
These two are inseparable.
We made the decision to allow the kids we keep to stay with their mothers as soon as we got goats and saw the amazing closeness among families. This means we get less milk at evening milking since the kids enjoy drinking throughout the day, but it is worth the trade off for us to see them all together. At night all the kids go in one pen together and the mothers enjoy a break. That leaves plenty of morning milk for us.
This was the arrangement until this week when our little goat Junie B. Jones, now eight months old, decided she had a different plan in mind. Just recently she has developed the trick of jumping out of her pen in the morning and evening as we are delivering grain. Because she was the smallest of our kids, she is spoiled and feels she should get her breakfast and dinner first! The other night, she did not go back in with the other kids after she ate. I was a little worried she would get stuck out in the barn so later in the evening I went out and found that she had jumped into the pen with her mom and Don Pedro (he is a wether who has been Bonnie's friend and stall mate since we got them as kids). They were curled up together in a little ball, enjoying the visit. Every night now she does the same trick of sneaking in with her mother after we have shut off the lights and closed the barn door.
As I prepare to let my oldest daughter head off to college in six months, I must admit I found this especially touching. There is a pull between mother and daughter that defies any walls of space or time, a connection which no one can sever. Because I think part of the fun is that Junie thinks she is being naughty, I will still put her in with the kids each night and delight each morning when I find her stretching into the day next to her mom. Why not keep kids close for as long as they want to be with us? I am savoring each moment I get with Lila for sure! Animals provide the simplest reminder of what is right and good in the world.
Snowy day made for cranking the music in the kitchen and making caramels.
Our goat milk, butter and salt.
There is a simple beauty in simple ingredients.
What a luxury to get to watch the mixture caramelize...and it takes about 3 hours less than our cajeta.
This year, after 21years of full time teaching, I am trying a new schedule - teaching 4 out of the normal load of 5 classes - which allows me to cram them all into one day of our alternating day schedule and have the other day free for farming and cheese making. This has been a lifesaver all fall as we adjusted to the demands of being a licensed dairy and found ourselves often busy each night until 11 and waking up to do it all again at 5:30 a.m. Although a bit of a financial pinch and tiring at times, the change in schedule and the natural energy which comes with following a dream made our new enterprise possible.
Then January hit and the world finally slowed down. Today is the first day since May when I feel completely calm and unrushed. We are drying off the goats which means I am only milking every other night, and since there is very little milk, that means it is time to close up the cheese kitchen until April when we will be eager to start up all the excitement again. The days I am not teaching now take on a unfamiliar calm which I have a few weeks to learn to savor! It is amazing how we (especially in New England I think) become so used to busyness that we forget how not to be. The race comes to define our self worth and even when we could have a quiet day we fill it with running around. I am talking myself out of this insanity this week...it helps that snow has settled again over Maine and I have a delicious goal I have been waiting for a long time to pursue.
I am going to perfect goat milk caramels. While most caramel candy recipes call for cream, I had read that goat milk makes especially creamy candies and figured it would be fun to work out a recipe suited for our Nigerian Dwarf goat milk. The results so far are heavenly. Today I began the process of keeping a more detailed record of my process so that I can pin down the best approach. Sea Salted Vanilla Bean Caramels this week. Next week I'd like to play with an espresso caramel. By April I hope to have the caramels perfected and cool packaging developed so that we can sell them!
There were a few bitterly cold days recently. When I came in from the barn my pinky fingers (the only ones not involved in milking) were little blocks of ice. If you had visited on those mornings I would have said that I couldn't wait to stop milking. But in truth, when I begin to dry off the herd it always feels a bit sad. Morning and evening milking becomes so much a part of my life, that I begin to depend on these half hour breaks at dawn and dusk as a quiet time to refocus and reflect. The same is true for the daily routine of cheese making. The simple beauty of cracked pepper on a plate, plain cheese in a stainless bowl, the scent of freshly sliced herbs and garlic, and cheese hanging in a flour sack never gets old. The whole process is so aesthetically pleasing that it feels more like reward than work.
Time away from what we love, however, refuels our passion and the goats have earned the weeks of rest when their only job will be to grow the 1-5 healthy kids which are now brewing in all of our 13 bred goats! So I began by switching to just evening milking and soon will milk every other day and by the end of January, they should all be dried off.
Perhaps the perfect celebration of this transition in the season was our final cheese making class last weekend. Eight eager cheese makers gathered for an afternoon to try their hand at milking a goat, snuggle our kids who are now 8 months old, and to make chevre, feta and cajeta. It was such fun to share the magic of turning milk into cheese with others and we had a ball. When the class was done, my energy was renewed and I couldn't wait already to start all over again in the spring.
There will be mornings in February for sure when I miss the splash of milk in a pail, miss leaning against a warm goat to fight the cold, the soft sounds of a goat enjoying grain, but there will be plenty of cold ones, when it will be just fine to ignore the first alarm and sleep in an extra half hour. There's always next year.
Vision of what is to come...GoGo has a family meeting with her kids who are just a few minutes old.
Think of how you feel on Christmas Eve or the night before a birthday as a kid. All the eager anticipation and possibility just hours away. This is how it feels at our farm each year on the eve of the buck's arrival.
Each year, our holiday gift to the does in our herd (11 are of legal age this year, 18 next year!) is a month long visit from a leased buck. When they are ready to visit with him (in heat) they stand at the fence making faces and we send them over for a date.
Right now our buck Hopkins is on the ride home to our farm with Chris and by nightfall tonight, likely one doe will be bred. This is the first step towards all those adorable snuggly kids who will follow in 5 months (April this year) and a fresh start of another milking and cheesemaking season. Who knows what it will bring.
We have met so many wonderful people in our first year as a licensed creamery. The folks at Bow Street Market, Walnut Hill Market, and Sweetser's Apple Barrel have been so much fun to work with and we had a great time collaborating with OxBow Brewery and Ruth Miller for a beer and cheese tasting at The Lion's Pride, Ferry Beach Ecology School for a fundraiser at Cinque Terre, and Skyline Farm for their Harvest Dinner. And then there are the families who brought home goat kids from our farm this past summer or visited this fall for Open Creamery Day, a cheese class or just because they were in the neighborhood. Hoping these connections continue to grow next season and it all begins with the buck.
If you are thinking about buying a couple of goat kids this spring for pets of milking goats, then this is the eve of an exciting time in your life too. In hours your little goat of the future may be more than a twinkle in your goat farm dreaming eyes, it may be a goat kid brewing through these cool months and ready for a new home in early June.
If you would like to come visit the girls this winter or to reserve first pick of the kids, or just want to talk about how amazing goats are and what it entails to take care of them, please feel free to come visit.
I'm off to go watch the goat show. Bucky boy is likely just minutes away! More news on the romance soon!
Fall 2013 Update: Last year 11 goats ended up bred and kidded successfully, producing a total of 29 kids (we kept Poppy & Fern). It was a pretty even split between doelings and bucklings and they found amazing homes with 13 families across the state. This year, our buck Tex has his work cut out for him. We plan to breed 15-17 does, so if our average of 2.5 kids per goat holds we should have 37+ kids in the last couple weeks of April and the first week of May. It never gets old. I am a whirlwind of excited energy knowing that by this time tomorrow night, a few goats might be bred! The first 12 does are already spoken for with deposits as are 8 wethers, again a cool bunch of families who we look forward to getting to know better through the process. I could not feel any more lucky and grateful to have discovered goats. It is incredible how fully they have found places in our hearts. Sometimes people ask us if they all have names and when we say "Of course!" are amazed that we remember who each one is. That is always funny to me. We have watched most of them be born and grow up, know each of their distinct calls without looking out the window, love each quirky personality. All 21 are family and we can not imagine the day when we start to lose them to old age, but for now enjoy every day that we share the farm with them...especially during breeding season when the magic of all that is farming is so crystal clear. The eager anticipation of spring kids is enough to pull us through even the darkest winter days. Interested in checking out the wild rodeo that is goat mating? Swing on by for a look over the fence between Thanksgiving and New Years. ;)
We may still be a couple of months away from a finished cheese kitchen and state license...but there is something about having a logo design which makes the whole adventure seem real! I had played with a million options, hoping I could make one myself, but had a vision in my head and no drawing skills to pull it off. Then one night a couple of months ago I was stumbling around on Etsy and came across amazing graphite drawings by art professor Jessica Boehman on her Hans-My-Hedgehog site. I knew this was the look I wanted. Lucky for me, she agreed to do our logo as soon as the school year ended. The end product feels like she read our mind and then improved upon what we were dreaming of. In the center of the design is a drawing of our very sweet doeling named May. We keep telling her she is famous, she is more interested in hugs than fame right now.
If you are getting a dairy going, during kidding season doelings are the equivalent of hitting the jackpot, a slam dunk, a hole in one! Imagine our joy when Sonnet, the first to freshen, delivered 3 healthy doelings! Stella, May and Greta are perfect little angel goats. Each of them is completely different in attitude and appearance. Greta is a big girl with an amazing zebra face. Stella, the last to be born, is tiny and a mini version of her mother. May looks like a cross between a barn owl (sweet arched hair over eyes) and a deer. She loves to be kissed and to nibble noses! To top it off, their mother is a great milker, so hopefully we have some future stars to look forward to! They are three days old and have already had 36 visitors, so they are very used to human love and attention, something that makes our kids extra special.
Sonnet delivered at 147 das bred. She looked ready the night before, so I sat in the barn from 4:00 in the afternoon until 6:30 in the morning when she finally started serious labor. It was well worth the wait for these beauties. With three does in the bank it looks like we will have both does and wethers to sell this year. If you're interested in buying a goat, feel free to stop by in May to visit the babies. Last year they went fast, so deposits are a good idea if you want your pick. We will likely keep these three, but there are lots more to come!
Next up this week Chianti and Tiger are due. Can't wait to see their kids.
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.
