Quote:
I love a good,
mild goat cheese.
I do as well! Yummy! Aubrey remember in order to get goats milk the goat must have a baby first and then you can milk her twice a day to make the cheese, I haven't made fresh cheese yet but it's a dream of mine to learn. I was going to start with ricotta and then move on from there.
Hi all! For some reason the computer dropped the notifications again and I just went through the last 15 or so pages...
Love goaties... Used to raise and milk them and some day when I get back into a farm friendly neighborhood I may just get into hobby dairying, but I definitely plan on having a big coop, a veggie garden and a goat or two.
Let me suggest a couple of things to consider before you get into goat husbandry....
1) Ask somebody if you can milk their goat. Surprisingly, carpal tunnel really shows up with hand milking and ten minutes into it you may be cramping so hard you'd wished you hadn't started the undertaking. (Spoken from experience... Luckily, if you have $$, you can go the milking machine route -- big hassle with cleaning all the tubes, so you probably want lots of goats to make it worth while -- or the hand pump milker route, which is a suction bottle you can buy for $150-$180 that essentially works with a squeeze trigger...picture like a Spray-n-Wash hand pump as the moving mechanism)
2) Try making some cheese. Ricotta is really simple to do (See recipe somewhere in this thread for my crockpot recipe). You can also get nifty kits on-line (
Amazon carries Rickie's line of cheese making kits). Just remember that you can use any type of milk EXCEPT ultra-pasteurized. Some people find the project fun...others find it a chore. If it's too much of a hassle or too sloppy for you, find that out now and save some goat the hassle.
The reason I bring this up I'd hate for goats to go to a home that suddenly changed their mind.
Goats are surprisingly smart. Make sure you have a secure pen....Goats can and do climb trees. Goats are easy prey. They're also extremely fun animals.
Just what I remember from my goat days. (The most unusual job on my resume is "Midwife and boarding barn for show goats".... Seriously, I actually made more money on mini goats than I ever did on horses....go figger!)
Good luck with the goats (and cheese!)
