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.

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.