Milking- June 2019 Blog #3

Milking-  June 2019

We’ve been building for several years towards an aspiration of producing artisan cheese on our farmstead from a flock of dairy sheep.  Having ruminant livestock was inspired by sitting on a tractor mowing grass every weekend for 4 hours, and the observation that when nothing else is growing in Wisconsin, grass and alfalfa are.  Having small ruminants was inspired by my lack of personal exposure to managing cattle, and my professional experience to the dairy industry in a time of transition from a small dairy being 500 cows to a small dairy being 5000 cows.  I’ve got another blog, or three, on consolidation in Ag, and at least with livestock it’s a mixed bag. But I didn’t work 30 years to own a farm and hire other people to do the farming, so no 5000 cow freestall aspiration here at Maggie’s Farm.  Setting aside truly weird things like milking camels (poorly adapted to Wisconsin) and intimidating things (like water buffalo) we’re left with small ruminants. Then the choice was simple. I’ve liked a lot more sheep cheeses, than I have goat cheeses, that’s just the way it is (hint;  it’s the FAT).  

It’s one thing to know intellectually that dairying is a committed, all-in type of farming.   Watching neighbors and friends in the industry over the years of my life showed me this was so.  I watched these committed families with a mixture of admiration, envy, and a touch of confusion. So the inherent seasonal nature of milking sheep was a strong attraction to us.  Some producers, and the UW dairy sheep program (before it’s demise), put a lot of effort into finding ways to “solve this problem”… but just like in Software, one man’s bug is another’s undocumented feature.  Milking that actually stops once a year for a while is quite a feature.

This was our pilot year with the milk line and cheesemaking experimentation in the house.  We lambed in 12 mature ewes, mostly in March, and left the lambs on for between 30 and 60 days.  We only lambed twelve and started the milkline with just 10 sheep. We learned a lot this year, and so did our sheep.  Among other things ‘what happens in the parlor, stays in the parlor’… a gentle play on the reality that stuff just get’s silly when you are trying to train a mixed group of dairy animals to a new milking parlor.  There’s a mixture of bribery, coercion, persuasion, collusion… going in all directions. Sheep pushing us around, us pushing sheep around, the first few days were a circus…(now a few weeks after drying off, the girls still try to line up to go in the parlor when we walk in the barn…).  Equally we learned that sheep have THREE personalities. Personality #1 is shown when you just sort of are walking around the barn feeding or doing chores… they range from extroverted people-sheep, to stand-offish and even skittish. Personality #2 is the ‘lambing personality’ many sheep late in pregnancy, and during the lambing process, become much more docile, even friendly. They seem to want a shepherd around and show it in numerous ways. Personality #3 is the milk parlor personality, which, as well, ranges from docile and charming to a new negative exteme… the nightmarish rabbit boiler.  The most fun fact about these three personalities is THEY BEAR NO RATIONAL RELATIONSHIP TO EACH OTHER ! My most favorite sweet Babette, could not stand the process, even after weeks, she hated the parlor, she hated me, she may have even hated herself. She peed… twice a milking, only when there was a chance to hit me. She pooped, every milking, like she was saving it…my and Amanda’s hands and forearms are covered with bruises…from kicking, stepping upon, all sorts of shenanigans… a man of my age raised in sexist time struggles to find language to describe it. She was a tough and angry lady I had not met before…

Now a couple weeks after dry off she is my sweet Babette again… go figure.

Though my spreadsheets said this would be a lot of milk, I really struggled to believe we’d get enough milk from 10 sheep to meaningfully experiment with cheeses and processing.  Boy was I wrong. Within three days of starting the line we were firmly in the throws of Milk-pocalypse. Within a few days our 2 gallon home pasteurizer was running 4 times a day, in between milk shifts, feeding, and other animal care, cropping and gardening duties. Quite an adventure and gave me better appreciation for why Amanda lost weight when she was interning for her cheese-maker licence.

We made yogurt, cheese, ice cream, butter… every dairy product we could imagine and thought we’d consume.  We even resorted to freezing raw milk, a common practice with sheep dairying that I disdain on principal because of the energetic waste.  Now about 4 weeks after the storm we still have dairy products in every form imaginable slowly expiring, or not, depending on their form. All of this at a time when I hadn’t even gotten a radish out of the garden due to an incredibly cool spring. 

There were a lot of take-aways from this whole adventure but one of the biggest was that for anyone aspiring to ‘independent living’, ‘off the land’, animals fill a gaping whole in the dietary line-up, particularly in northern temperate climates where despite great tools like plastic hoop house greenhouses we really can’t produce veg efficiently, that humans can digest, for a solid 6 months of the year.  But for 3 of those months grasses and other more adapted plant spp are knocking it out productively, and our ruminant ewes, and other ruminants, can turn this into copious amounts of human food, and with dairy, very well timed to the end of winter hole in the garden lineup. No wonder pioneer families, and small holders around the world today, prize livestock, especially dairy animals, so highly.

Well enough on milking, thanks for reading… next episode will likely be about my fabulous Duroc pasture raised feeder pigs, who are enjoying the now abundant garden produce, and the expiring fresh dairy products, and byproducts, while they spend their summer on pasture under the walnut trees, become delicious food for my family and a few select friends.