With my oldest daughter leaving home to attend graduate school in Texas and my youngest daughter attending nearby Shepherd University I was loosing my labor force! So in late 2016 we made the difficult but necessary decision to down size our herd and begin purchasing some of our milk for cheese making. An extensive search resulted in the discovery of a lovely goat dairy in PA: Liberty View Creamery. They follow similar herd practices – producing quality milk that matched what we had been producing here at Shepherd’s Whey. We re-homed nearly two thirds of our herd and greatly reduced the daily demands of our dairy. Instead of the 60 plus babies born here in 2016, we had just 37 kids in 2017, and 24 in 2018. We plan to breed 17 does for the coming season. It has been a very successful transition; we have been producing about 60 percent more cheese – and selling nearly everything we are making!
The seasonality of farm life is something I have come to really appreciate. Lazy days of summer are upon us – the goats have such a rhythm to their days – milking first thing, hydrating and then filling up on hay in their hay feeders followed by morning nap time – everyone hangs out chewing their cud in the shade. Afternoons they usually get time to browse “the bottoms” when we take the herd for a walk into an overgrown section of the farm and then later they can be found grazing their upper pasture. Evening milking, drink and then they settle in for the night.
Fall welcomes breeding season, winter marks the close of our seasonal markets and we dry the goats off in December to allow them the lat 2 months of their pregnancy dry to recover and put their energy into growing healthy babies. Babies start arriving late Feb and March and cheese production ramps to full production in March and April. And it all starts all over again….