Playing Farm

One of my proudest moments (help)

Summer on a goat farm is sort of the inverse of summer in the city, where things hiccup to a slow, deflected chug under the languid weight of the thick air. Having reached peak production milkwise, we're settling into a plateau, our batches are as big as they will be for the entire year, and the ripening room is just about as brimful as it can be, a kaleidoscope of fuzzy, mottled molds and shiny orange rinds. The heat and humidity, not to mention the profusion of bugs on the farm, are making cellar work that much more painstaking -- Tuesday we had to break down the brining room and douse everything with peracetic acid to eradicate the risk of bug-ular infestation. Between my seasonal allergies and the profusion of chemicals I am inhaling on a daily basis, I'm pretty sure I'm doing some lasting damage to my lungs and/or sinuses and/or face.



Last week we moved the last group  of little bucklings out to the pen with their elders and disassembled the newborn wing of Twig Farm (aka the garage) for the season, scrubbing the wood panels clean and letting them dry in the sun before hoisting them up into the hay loft, which would give Barry's Bootcamp a run for its motherfucking money in muscle scorching department. I took apart all the gang feeders and washed them and recycled the jerry-rigged Moxie bottles we'd been using to feed colostrum to the tiny babies. I got all "they grow up so fast" wistful, recognizing as I did that most normal people my age apply those feelings to human children rather than quadripedular ruminants. 

Boss and fam have hit the road for a long weekend, leaving St. Helen and I in charge of ...well, errything basically. Whilst my long term goal has been to be capable of doing a make start to finish by myself, I must admit that the prospect of doing the morning milking and pump-over and culturing the vat and etc, not to mention the forming of the finished curd, had me in a panicked state of anxiety for days, until the aforementioned canonized youth stepped in and offered to tackle morning duties. For this I will be eternally grateful. I am simultaneously a little disappointed in myself for not rising to the challenge and hugely relieved that I have not yet been thrust into the hot seat of a fully solo cheesemake. That said, I recognize that things I used to find impossibly difficult (moving cheese-laden boards from the brining room to the ripening room balanced on my shoulders, getting the vat gleamingly clean, negotiating the tractor to dump whey, etc) are becoming second nature to me now. I still have so much to master, and it's taken longer than I would have wanted to get a handle on seemingly basic things, but being able to identify areas of progress make me hopeful that I'm on the right trajectory. 

Being left in charge of things, I see even more all that is required to keep a dairy running. The pasture work alone is intense as fuck this time of year -- we move the girls into a new paddock practically every day to make sure they have plenty to eat (and also as a non-interventionist method of parasite control). Opening up the fence and watching them rush into the tall grass, thrilled to stuff themselves with fresh good food is one of the most joyful things in the world to witness, and mirrors precisely how I feel when a delicious pizza makes its way to my face. 

The learning is endless, and even if I ever do get a grasp on how to do everything at Twig, that's just one kind of cheese. There are so many more styles and types and ways of making and milks and animals, the mind reels. There is always more to learn and perfect and create and if I wasn't so fucking tired and poor I might just hitch my wagon to this life forever.

Then again, I do like a challenge.