Image by acme under a Creative Commons license
One of the things I’m looking forward to this year with having two Saanen does who are (hopefully) going to kid sometime in April is having an ample supply of goat’s milk to try my hand at, among other things, making goat cheese. I love cheese, especially aged cheeses, and I freely admit that I’m one of those people who even likes smelly cheeses. I’m curious to see what the process is like for making cheese and to see just what kinds of cheese can be made from goat’s milk. It should be a fun and interesting experiment. I’m also looking forward to attempting to make goat butter, which I understand is really quite easy, yogurt, cottage cheese, and other goat milk-based dairy products. With any luck we’ll have a couple of gallons of goat milk every day, so we’ll have plenty of supply with which to experiment with our dairy-making activities.
We’re also currently investigating what it will take to certify our farm as a dairy with the state of Indiana so that, if we’re successful making dairy products, we’ll also be able to sell those products to interested customers. There is a fair bit of paperwork involved, most of which is written for large dairy cattle operations, so trying to figure it out for an operation like our that has just a couple of milking goats has been a bit of a challenge. We’ll update again later on as we find out more, so stay tuned!
