Goat Graces

After reading and worrying about the hormones and antibiotics and health issues associated with homogenized cow’s milk, and not being really big milk drinkers, I thought owning a milk goat would provide our family with enough pure healthy milk I set out to find myself a goat.
 
Lo and behold, we had neighbors wanting to downsize their milk goat herd, and off I went.  Everyone (but me) knows a goat can get lonely, so I was talked into two, goats who were already in milk.
 
Tabby and Milk came into our lives and they were the perfect goats to get a couple of greenhorns started into milking.  I’ll never forget that cold February morning, it’s 20 degrees outside, and I’ve got to get these goats milked before their udders burst.
 
I’d milked a cow many years before, but geez, this was not the idyllic scene I’d imagined.  This was work, and it was cold and it wasn’t easy.
 
My arms were killing me, and I feared I was going to run out of sweet feed before we got that first milking done!  Jud and I managed to get the two of them milked enough to release the pressure, but it took an hour for us to get a quart of milk from the pair.
 
Boy! were our hands and arms sore the next day!  I can’t imagine how those two goats must have felt.  Patiently, they allowed us to perfect our milking technique and Jud, my 12 year old son, can out-milk anyone!
 
Milking time has become the ‘dinner table’ time for us.  When the weather’s mild, and we’re all three in the barn milking, or tending to our animals it’s one of the most pleasant times we can have as a family.
 
We catch up on all those little things we missed.  We love sharing milking time with our farm visitors, in the hopes that they can take a farm memory of their own home with them.
 
Tabby and Milk are as patient with strangers, as they were that first time with us! They regularly give us a gallon of milk at each milking and from the fresh milk, came yummy cheese and yogurt, butter and cottage cheese.
 
We ended up feeding excess milk to chickens, dogs, and hated to see it ‘wasted’, so we began offering it to others.  We have several customers who come regularly during the milking season, and rarely do I throw milk down the sink anymore.