This isn’t me milking the goat. It’s Nancy, a lovely woman who welcomed me to her farm; introduced me to her sheep, milk goats, chickens, chicks, roosters, enormous turkey, cute cats, and sweet billy goat; and taught me how to milk goats.
It took me a couple of tries to get anything to come out of the teats. I was surprised by how hard I needed to squeeze. One of her milk goats is pure saanen, and she was the easiest to milk. The others are saanens bred with pygmies, and their teats are teeny tiny. Even my small hands seemed too big to do the job until I got the hang of it.
Nancy let me take some goat milk with me. The book I had just read about raising dairy goats insisted that goat milk tastes no different than cow milk, but I was skeptical about this. I've had chevre and goat milk yogurt that both had a distinctly musty taste (which is good in the cheese and totally gross in the yogurt), and I was expecting to be able to detect at least a hint of this in the milk as well. But no! It’s delightfully mild and creamy and wonderful.
I’m looking forward to visiting again in the near future. Nancy lent me a bunch of books about goats and gardening, so I have some reading to do first. At this point, my initial impression of raising dairy goats is extremely favorable. I see lots of these lovely animals in my future.
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