Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Milking a goat

OK I'm going to explain step by step the process of milking the goat. I don't know how to do it with captions by each individual picture. So I'm going to put it all out there then the group of pictures will come after the whole explanation.
1: take 2 bowls out to the milking station. One for collecting milk (stainless steel) and one full of water with iodine in it.
2: before going out to milk, fill up a large pot of ice packs and water
3: when you get out to the barn, your goat just jumps into the milk stand because you put the bucket of grain on the stand. This is a typical milk stand/station. You can buy them or make them, its a very basic build.
4. When she's on the stand, take the cloth from the iodine  bowl and wipe her down. This just gets all the debris/dirt from the day off of her teats.
5. Now milk one squirt from each teat into a mug. Give it a good look and smell it. You never want to not do this. Squirting the first squirt out into a separate cup is important. This let's you smell it and look at it and make sure its not sour or lumpy. This could be a sign of mastitis. Every first squirt that I've done has been fine.
6. Let the milking begin. There is a certain way to do your hands, its not like in the cartoons! But milk until her teats are all squeezed out. Notice how raisin-y they look when they're empty compared to how full they were before milking?
7. Strain he milk into mason jars and place the mason jar in the ice cold pot of water. We double strain it and putting it in ice cold water gets it down to a freezing temperature. This takes the place of pasteurizing or boiling.
LOVE our raw unpasteurized goat milk!