Abby with one of our goat kids

Every two weeks we have a different chore to do. This rotation, I’m milking goats.

We milk & feed our goats before breakfast –- it’s a mitzvah to take care of your animals before yourself in the morning. And it’s an odd kind of pressure, to wake up, especially on the weekend when I *could* sleep in if I wanted, knowing that there are two beautiful she-goats with full udders, who will be more and more uncomfortable every time I press snooze. We are grateful to our animals, and we appreciate eating their eggs and drinking their milk, and I think we appreciate it more because of the work involved in getting it.

In preparation for milking, you first brush off a night’s worth of sawdust and hay from their bedding. You chat pleasantly about the morning as they stand on the milking stand, enthusiastically munching up a bowful of grain. You sanitize your hands. You milk a few squirts into a strainer to check that everything’s ok -– an infection in the udder can lead to discolored or chunky milk, which you don’t want to drink.

To milk a goat, you squeeze the teat –- hard -– right where it meets the udder. This pinches the milk in the teat and prevents it from going back up into the udder when you squeeze (think of a water balloon). Then you squeeze downwards, increasing finger by finger, till you’ve reached the bottom of the teat. Sometimes I do both at once, sometimes I alternate. It’s a challenge to get the squirts of milk to always go in the bucket, especially with Zilpah, whose teats are smaller. Sometimes you spray your thigh, or the side of the bucket, which makes a metallic tang. When you get it right in the bucket, though, you make a satisfying frothy sound.

It takes a while, though goat-milking is definitely a skill that improves with time. And while you’re tugging away, you have good time to think. This is an animal. An animal who lactates. Whose udder fills twice a day with sweet tasty creamy milk, which we drink on cereal, in our coffee, and use to make cheese and yogurt. It’s wonderful!

You also think about what it would be like to do this every morning of your life. Keeping a milking goat is not a huge responsibility, but it is a constant one. I spent about an hour this morning milking 2 goats, feeding a third, and collecting eggs from the chickens and feeding them. Not impossible, and not at all a bad way to start a day. But what if I had kids? What if I wanted to stay in bed late with somebody cozy? What if I wanted to go out at night, my kids in a play at school, dinner with friends? Goats like to be milked on a schedule; we milk Angie and Zilpah at 7am and as close to 7pm as possible every day. That puts quite a wrench in quite a number of things you might want to do with your time.

But. Our two goats, now that we’ve weaned their kids, are giving about 2–3 gallons of milk a day. That’s a lot for one family. It’s even a little much for our community of 14 people (tho some are indeed non-milk drinkers). Cheese and yogurt are a good way to make the milk last longer. But I was also thinking this morning: I would like to own a goat or two cooperatively. A few families, we could rotate who’s on milking this week, we could share the milk, we could all help with the manure shoveling and, if we chose to mate our goats, the whole amazing process of birthing and bringing new life into the world.

It wouldn’t be too unlike extended families living together –- mom, dad, kids, grandparents, everyone on the farm. It makes sense from a work point of view to have lots of people around. Though we don’t tend to live with our cousins and aunts as much today as before, I very much like the idea of a group of people sharing the cost of land and infrastructure, so that the group of them could have more than they could individually. More space, more support, more friends, more land… and more goats ;0)