Saturday, May 19, 2012

The kids are getting bigger, all of the babies at Rainbeau Ridge are on bottles, some of them have already gone home as pets and sadly, a few of the boys have gone off to the stew pot. It breaks my heart, I tried my hardest to get Curry Shishkabob adopted...
This baby boy came up to me like a dog, face to face, put his little head down in front of me so I could see his perfect horns, and then looked me in the eye and cried out BaaAAaah! I melted into a puddle... But he's a boy, and that means stewpot. Although I have to say, CURRY is a pretty cute name for a pet goat. I got more experience feeding the bottle babies...
Now i'm taking two weeks off Rainbeau Ridge to travel back to Spain and help out my farmers Maxi and Samuel. The men need a vacation, so I volunteered to run things for them for a week so they can go off on their manly Horse and Donkey through the mountains vacation. Talk about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (who, evidently, travelled through the area of Guadalajara Spain where I will be staying). Since I left, the goats have all kidded, the baby pigs are at least 50 kilos each **That's just what I need. Not one monsterously large pig, but six... I might as well stop at home depot before I jet off, because I'm going to need some prison-grade fencing to keep them in... What I'm most excited about are two things. Actually three. Number one: These goats are free ranged, and since they've evidently been very naughty goats, eating neighbors apple trees and breaking into the wheat fields of local farmers, the new policy is to accompany the goats out daily. So i'll be a true sheperdess in the mountains of Spain. It sounds very dreamy to me. Number two: I will be hand milking the girls, so I will get a true level of understanding of how to milk out 30 goats twice daily. And finally, there will be CHEESE! And none of this fresh pasteurized cheese like I've been making at Rainbeau. I'm talking about honest and true, raw goats milk cheese, Spanish style. I can't fricking wait! The jet leaves tonight at 5:30. Of course, internet being what it is, I'll pretty much be out of touch with limited connectivity.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

The kids had me at Baa-AA-aaa ~

The last of the DEFINITELY PREGNANT goats had her kids just the other day. So now all of the goats are in high milk production, everyone's online. The girls produced 56 quarts of milk in the morning milking. And since we pasteurize after about 80 quarts, and there's an afternoon milking, it looks like the cheese house will be pasteurizing daily for the next several weeks. I like my work on the farm. I love being down in the barn with the girls. Every goat is named for a different female singer, and they definitely have different personalities. Kim's a screamer. Alanis will kick anyones' butt with a headbutt to have a few more minutes of horn scratching all to herself. The girls don't really have horns, just little buds because this farm takes them off at birth. I went down and witnessed it. It seemed pretty awful, this sweet baby boy goat, just two days old, being held still by the farm manager while the assistant took a big iron and ringed the horn buds to stop them from developing. It smelled like burnt hair and the wound looks charred, but this brave baby boy didn't make a peep. Which makes me love him all the more, and then when I think that the baby boys will most likely end up on a dinner table as cabrito makes me want to cry just a little. But it's also part of that circle of life, which I have to remember. Although honestly, there's a part of me thats still eight-years-old and I want to scream out "It's not fair!" I mean, these sweet kids are going to be supper and only because they were born boys. ***Advertising plug here, the boys will be sold to chefs unless they are adopted by a family as a pet. They're really good lawn mowers, they're great companions and trust me, nothing warms the heart like listening to them call to you... BaaAAAaaah! And at only $35 each, they're a bargain pet. And, if you really really can't stand being a goat owner, you can always eat them, because that's where they're headed otherwise. I posted a video on youtube and facebook of some of the babies. The youtube link is here: http://youtube/u0EyNzzMq3c But ultimately I am okay with the fact that the boys will go to the table. I sort of have to be, it's part of that pact of farmer and animal. I think Novella Carpenter, of the book FARM CITY said it best although I read her book ages ago and am having difficulty finding the exact quote right now, not to mention that I don't even have her permission to publish an exact quote, but it's a really good read (Shout out to Susie Russell Lueth for recommending the book to me and to Lauren Dobkin for putting it in my hands). The really interesting thing is I started on this goat journey with the end-up goal of being a cheese maker. But it's the animal care that really has captured my heart and my imagination. It's like connecting to this entire village of really cool beings, and learning a new culture, a new language. I dig it. Baa-AA-aah.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

I see the Rainbeau...

I've been back stateside for over a month. In that time, i've been looking for jobs on a dairy. And there are jobs in dairies, milking or herding goats and making cheese. Just turns out, one month in Spain does not make me an ideal candidate for a paid position. So i'm volunteering. Again. But this time here, within (well, just within...) driving distance of my home. In Westchester. On a goat farm. Rainbeau Ridge is a small farm in Bedford Hills, NY about 51 miles away from Brooklyn, per Google Maps. It takes about an hour to get there, about two hours to get home. (Rush hour. Argh). And I've spent three days on the farm so far, although my first day was just to check the place out and see if I wanted to commit to a volunteer schedule. Thursdays and Fridays are my days there. Thursdays I arrived at the farm at 6:15 am, spent the morning down in the barn and milking parlor, doing everything from milking the goats (well, duh...) to changing all the water feeders to cleaning dirty goat baby butts. Baby goat butts can be a little gross when they're just born *but thats pretty much true for all babies*. And just for kicks, my first day one of the goats had a really difficult labor and I got to help hold her still while the farm manager pulled the baby goat out of his mama. Here's a photo of the goat, about five minutes after the birth.
Seriously cool. That was my Thursday experience. So in addition to learning how to milk goats by hand, by automatic machine, and after birthing a goat, I headed up to the cheese house, where I'm helping the farm intern, Ian, make cheese. I got up to the house around 9:30/10am, where I helped ladle curd into cheese forms. ***I'm learning the cheese making process not start to finish, but sort of mixed up because they're in the middle of production every day and its impossible to start the cheese process start to finish for the product that they're creating. But i've seen pretty much every step at this point, with the exception of rennet addition. Which brings me to Friday, where I had the relatively late start of 7:00 am, starting right away in the cheese house. Right away we started transferring the fresh unpasteurized milk from the chiller into the pasteurizer, which we had set up the day before. Then right in the middle of getting the pasteurizer up to temp we got in the morning milk (45 Qts), and had to clean the chiller, strain the milk and get it into the chiller to await the next pasteurization in roughly a day. I won't bore you with the details, but its a straightforward process, and voila! I know how to make cheese. So hmm. No wonder I haven't gotten hired by any farms as of yet. I didn't even realize how little I knew until I learned a whole bunch in one day. But now I know a whole bunch more, and I have to say, I love it. I'm back up on the farm tomorrow and Friday, can't wait to see what they'll throw at me.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Por La Taina

I´ve spent the day today taking apart a stone wall which has fallen. It´s a job where I basically am removing all of the humungous stones, and moving them to a pile on the side, and then cleaning out all of the fallen stones, sticks, and leaves, to make room for the farmers to rebuild the wall, using the same stones and cement. It´s pretty heavy work, but I don´t mind it because I´m outside, in the sun, and because of how physical the work is, I stay pretty warm. By nightfall it´s pretty cold, especially in the house where the warmest place is near the fireplace.

I´m not really sure how cold it is in the house. All I can say about that is -- it´s so cold, the olive oil is solid. I´m pretty much living in all of my clothes at once. I feel a little bit like a mouse, I pretty much keep all my clothes in the bed around me, so that in the morning I don´t have to get out of bed to put anything on. I just dress under the covers.

I have to say, I´m interested in how the farmers, Maxi and Samuel, are doing things. Everything in the farm is from recycled parts that they´ve found or salvaged from the town dump. For example, the pig broke her gates the other day. One door was fixed using baling string leftover from feeding the burros straw. The other side was repaired with nails and broken wood from a wooden pallet. Yesterday I built a doghouse. We used two pallets for the A-frame, plus a few pieces of a third pallet for bracing wood. Then I wrapped the thing with a broken summer lake floatie, and a large strip of rubber which I have NO IDEA where they found it.

So i´m in the town of Santamera, which I´ve mentioned before only had two residents before I arrived. I made three, and for the past two weeks we´ve also had a woman named Krystal, from Switzerland, on the farm. Life is actually pretty easy. In the morning, after a cup of coffee and a few crackers, we head off to the taina, a few hundred feet away, where usually Maxi (the boss) and Krystal feed all of the animals while I take the goats up the mountain. It´s a job I specifically requested because I want to get a little physically fit while i´m here, and there´s nothing like climbing a mountain twice a day to really get the blood pumping.

After everyone gets fed, we accomplish small tasks like digging six pails of rocks out of the vegetable garden, or repairing the chicken enclosure fence with baling wire. Oh what I wouldn´t give for a staple gun at moments like this. Instead of five minutes with a staple gun, clack clack clack and it´s done, I get to spend two to three hours wrapping baling wire around the bottom of a two by four and attaching it to some hardware cloth to make a secure fence.

All in all, it´s great to use things at hand, but after the pig breaks her gate three times in a week, it sure makes sense to me that a visit to home depot would do these men a world of good.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Life in the country

I´m still having a great time, even though life in the country is always, constantly, work. Today I spent three hours with two people cutting logs and piling them, so there would be enough wood to keep us warm in the uninsulated house.

Life in the country is great, I don´t even mind the mice in the house, but it´s seriously cold. Okay okay, it´s not MINNESOTA cold, but it´s Spain cold, and without a MINNESOTA INSULATED house. Which means that I can actually feel a gust of wind blowing over me while I¨m brushing my teeth in my stocking feet. Which I no longer run around the house in anymore, because i´m freezing my A·% off.

It´s cold, but that´s cool. It´s still amazing fun to scamper up the mountain. Which is one of those types of fun where it´s super fun to say you did it, especially after, but during the scampering part it´s actually more like a ¨my chest is pounding so hard I can hear my heart in my ears, if they weren´t filled with the sound of whipping, howling wind¨ but at least I can know in my heart that it´s good for my health. If it doesn´t actually kill me first.

K

Thursday, February 2, 2012

And Kami makes three...

So I am in remote Spain, in a teeny tiny town where I am now adding to the population, making person number three in the town of Santmera. The biggest town to find me on a map is Siguenza, where the train is. But there is no internet in the house, and going to town is something that happens only twice a week, so.this has got to be short. The goats are great, but climbing up.the mountain to collect them is not so cute. I have adorable photos but must post them later. More later

Monday, January 30, 2012

A Preview of whats to come

I was just double checking the details of the farm where I am headed tonight, sight unseen. Except that I found these three photos of where I'm headed. Can I just say, for the record, that I can't WAIT!!!