Sir Milks-A-Lot

This is an (un)artistic photo collage - I have not asked permission to use any of the images included in my creation...

It's time for some real sharing here. Although it's a little embarassing, I have to admit, this has been going on for months. It all started a few hours into my first online goat browsing/shopping experience. We're looking for goats with great dairy genetics and part of the process is educating myself on what a great dairy animal actually looks like. I started looking at show goats to get an idea of proper conformation. Most of these star goats are shown posed like the lovely ladies above and after staring at image after image of full on udder-in-the-face, I started to feel a little...well...pervy. Yes, pervy. Not exactly something you expect to feel as a girl looking at goats! As I tried to wrap my head around my weird voyeuristic feelings, the intro to a certain special song from middle school started playing in my head..."Oh. My. Gawd., Becky" It hit me:

Read More

Clean Up Your Creamery (or any building) Design

We may have mentioned this before... We've got a creamery to design! Although a professional may have to step in at some point before we move into construction, we'd like to take it as far as we can ourselves first. It will save money and make us intimately familiar with every nook and cranny of the new creamery as well as the rules regulating its design and function as stated in the PMO (now our bible). It all started a few months ago with a pencil, plastic grid ruler, and some paper. Although they were effective and the tools were enjoyable to work with, the results were decidedly not very professional looking... Maybe if I had a drafters precision, but I don't.
Read More

Farmstead Cheese Equipment: What's a Small Farmer To Do?


Maria at Masseria la Greca outside Lecce in Salento, Italy

Since the end of last summer we’ve been acquiring the bits and pieces to put together the creamery. The primary components we’re interested in are the milking system (pipeline or bucket, we don’t know yet), the bulk tank and the cheese vat. The milking system is exactly what it sounds like. It includes the piping and the vacuum system required to milk the animals. In a bucket system you pump the milk directly into buckets and then dump it into the bulk tank. In a pipeline system you pump the milk through a pipeline that flows directly into the bulk tank. There are other variations as well, but those are the basic methods. The bulk tank is where the milk goes for cooling after milking. It cools the milk to approx 40 degrees within an hour or two. Once the milk in the tank is cool and you have enough to make cheese you open up a pipeline and the milk flows to your vat. From there you begin the cheesemaking process. Aside from the construction of the building, these three pieces of equipment are typically the largest capital expenses.

Last summer we got very lucky and found a highly affordable vat being refurbished after use at a University on the west coast. The process took six months of intensive hunting and networking. Not as simple as an eBay search. Then our inspector spoke on the phone with the fab guy, we sent the inspectors detailed photos and spec sheets and eventually we got the green light. Once we get our creamery construction underway we’ll have it shipped out and it will need to be inspected and approved all over again. 

 

Read More