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.