Production Begins - Earning their keep.
Posted by Farm at June 14th, 2009
Well, milk test was today. And the new season of cheesemaking has begun. Saturday I made a chevre, and while trying to be a bit too progressive in controlling the heat, I successfully overcultured it, one less batch of chevre.
So yesterday I tried my hand at a Colby. Since ND milk is so high in milk proteins, and we’re early in the lactations, I knew that I would have some adjustments to make. Now that the cheese is out of the press, we’ll have to wait 8-12 weeks to see if my “adjustments” were more errors, or appropriate.
This morning I can make chevre the way I like to make it, right out of the barn, no heating involved. It’s so easy!
It’ll be a week before our test results are back, but I was thrilled to get more than 3 gallon s of milk out of a combination of 9 does, in just 24 ours. Two of those does are stale in their meager lactations, and 4 did not give me all they had, because their babies are still very young, and yes I am a pushover. But given those two facts, we probably made closer to 4 gallons of milk during that 24 hours. Not bad for 9 goats that together don’t weigh as much as a Holstein heifer.
I’m going to try and make a chart that I can update here, to show you all how much cheese, yogurt, ice cream and milk we get from our little herd. Granted, our total numbers are closer to 20 breeding age does, but we milk less than 10 on average, so it’s a good size for people to judge how worthy these little goats are in making fresh dairy products for their families.
