I Worked at a Goat Dairy for Thirteen Months and All I Got Was this Persistent Ringworm

Marvel at my unmarred alabaster skin!

Is a t-shirt I'm having made post-haste. 

But seriously. 

Chalk it up to hormones, stress, over-tiredness, but last week when I went into milk at 4 am and found myself being quizzed on the difference between hay and straw, I nearly burst into tears. It's a simple thing, a distinction I recall actually googling at one point during my tenure at LLF, but that I'd forgotten the specifics of, so when Michael asked if I knew how they were different, I sheepishly said "One is used for bedding and one is for feed." WRONG. (The raw ingredients are the main diff - straw is made from dried grains and hay is grass and legumes, the latter of which is harvested before it goes to seed, thereby retaining the vast majority of its nutrients and making it more better for animal feed.) When I answered incorrectly, Michael chuckled and joked, "What exactly DID Laini teach you up there?" 


I've felt some combination of anger and embarrassment at exactly this question for the last two weeks. Of course, I only have two farms to compare to one another, but while on the surface they seem similar (small scale, roughly 40 head alpine goats) that's the beginning and end of their likeness. Laini kept me at arms length regarding just about every aspect of the process in the cheeseroom, outsourced all hands-on training to less experienced employees and left cryptic notes detailing our daily tasks. There was a lot of room for error because the lines of communication were so foggy and Byzantine. By the end I think I had partially decoded a little bit of Laini language, but it was a constant effort to understand what was being asked of me, and I got zero feedback (unless you count being told I was cutting curd wrong eight months after I had started cutting curd). 

At Twig, the inverse is true. Michael is incredibly generous with his knowledge, makes his expectations explicit and has been methodical about having me observe and slowly begin to take things on as I get more comfortable. The goal is, it seems, for me to understand pretty much every aspect of the farm's inner workings so that if he isn't around, I can do everything myself. It's an incredible amount of responsibility but also a huge vote of confidence. As I've mentioned before, the cheesemaking itself seems to be the most straightforward of the components of the operation, though I've yet to do much more  in the cheese room than administer antibiotic milk testing, help to stir the vat (which now that I've discovered MORE ringworm on my upper arms I am going to have to curtail for the time being) and mold cheese and flip cheese and take pH and begin helping to clean the vat and the table and the bulk tank. 

Last night was my first time doing the milking more or less alone (though I still haven't taken the girls back out to pasture by myself, because usually by the time I'm done cleaning up it's well past dark and Michael's patience in waiting for me has, understandably, waned.) You would not goddamned believe how difficult it is for a smart, able-bodied human to assemble a pump system and milking can. It was like watching a monkey try to figure out how to use Facebook. But I persevered (albeit with a tangle of tubes that made milking a lot more difficult than it had to be.) The clean up was even more confusing, and with the added bonus of a bunch of caustic chemicals, which I've been having a fun allergic reaction to. Let's just say no one died, but it was close. 

Overall, things are much more inclusive at Twig. Every day we break for lunch at noon and Michael invites us into the house and gives us lunch, which is normally freshly baked bread and some of his dope cheese plus other accoutrements, followed by "dessert" (ie some obscure variety of heritage apple, being that Michael is a cider freak) and "pudding" ie a cookie. It's still a little strange for me to feel fully comfortable just wandering into his kitchen and getting plates out of the cabinets and helping myself to things in his fridge, but I suppose I'll get there sooner than later. Seems that this is not an uncommon farm thing, the communal midday meal, but it was never something I experienced at LLF, being that I normally had a long afternoon break in the middle of the day. 

Since I'll be traveling to NYC this weekend to clear out the last of my shit from my little apt (holler if you want to hang out) and thereby missing a day of work, I offered to come in an extra day this past week, with the caveat that I didn't know if I'd be of any use quite yet on my own. Michael had me do some cave work, which took me five hours (ie approximately 2 hours longer than it should have but who's counting?). I spent the vast majority of that time hyperventilating as I attempted to NOT drop 30 lbs worth of aged cheese while flipping and circulating it from a top shelf to a bottom shelf and painstakingly washing those insanely beautiful washed rind with a cloth and some custom mixed morge (cider lees + brine). Where Laini's cave was dubbed The Cave of Emotion, Michael's might well be nicknamed The Panic Room. I'm pretty sure I shaved a year and a half off my life gripped with anxiety over what sounds like and seems like a very simple and basic task. 

Thus far I've gleaned what little satisfaction I can extract from a combination of NOT FUCKING THINGS UP ROYALLY (see above) and semi-successfully executing tasks I was shown how to do once. (I quite litrully patted myself on the back for cleaning out the chicken coop and draining the grey water tank. It's the little things.)  

So far I haven't had a ton of time to explore my new environs, but it is for sure much more populated and comparatively cosmopolitan than the NEK. I have spent pretty much all of my free time and money at the co-op -- a girl needs her luxury liquids after all. But I plan to try staking out some semblance of a Life Outside of Work That Is Not Binge Watching Netflix Bullshit in the very near future. 

I know it will take some time and distance for me to regain my appreciation for all that Lazy Lady meant to me. Right now, at this moment, I'm mostly frustrated with myself for staying as long as I did in order to fulfill some arbitrarily set goal. I overstayed my welcome, and remained stagnant for much longer than I should have, and ultimately I have only myself to blame for that. I feel that I wasted a lot of time there and left with little cheese or farm knowledge to show for it (and am quietly worried that Michael is regretting hiring me now that its become clear how little I DO know.) I'm still unpacking the things that I did learn, and hope that I'll come back around to feeling only fondness and amusement for my wacky year up north. 

Soon.