Black Mesa Ranch
Snowflake, Arizona, USA
Artisan Cheese
Nubian Goats
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Updated!
6/07: We have revamped our Ranch Workshop Packages!
In addition to our one and three-day cheese making and goat management workshops learn about our free open- house days and lodging accommodations.
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Award Winning Artisan Goat Cheeses
4 Awards 2005 ADGA National Competition
3 Awards 2004 ADGA National Competition
(available seasonally)
2 Awards 2005 ADGA National Competition
2 Awards 2004 ADGA National Competition
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Click here to read the online version of Kathryn's booklet
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This site last updated:
October 11, 2008
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Arizona Grown!
From July 1 thorough July 21 2004 we kept a special, in-depth logbook which was subsequently submitted to the trade magazine Dairy Goat Journal in article form for their "Commercial Dairy Diary" Section and published the following month.
We've reprinted the log, which differs a bit in format, content, (and length!) from our usual daily entries, here in its entirety.
Thursday, 7/1/04
Welcome to Black Mesa Ranch! I’m David, the co-owner and Cheesemaker here and I’ll be writing most of the entries for this daily diary. Kathryn (I’ll call her “K” from now on) is my wife, partner, co-owner and Herd Manager for the Ranch.
Our typical day starts with the 6 o’clock morning milking. While K sets up the Milking Parlor and gets the milking machine ready to go, I get the Cheese Kitchen ready to receive the milk for filtering, get the unweaned kids nipple bucket ready for filling, prepare a morning beverage for us, and start up the big diesel generator. We are completely “off grid” here, relying primarily on solar and wind power for our electricity. Our Ranch’s little power plant is pretty extensive. Without the dairy operations, we’d have more electricity than we’d know what to do with on most days but the energy requirements of the milking equipment are rather high. We end up running the generator for a little while during every milking session.
Our milking machine is set up to handle 2 goats. The milking parlor is equipped with 4 custom steel milking stanchions and we bring in 4 goats at a time. Two are prepped and put on the machine then the others are prepped and put on in their turn while they all munch happily on their grain. We call each rotation of 4 goats a “shift” and we’re running just 4 shifts (3 ½, technically) as of this writing.
The milkers have a very specific order by which they come into the Parlor and each one has a specific milking stanchion that is “hers”. This pecking order is mostly of their own making. First Shift starts with 4 goats and includes, of course, “Trudy”, our herd queen who is always first through the door. She takes the first stanchion and is followed by two of her daughters and one granddaughter who all assume their proper positions. Second Shift in to be milked is a group of four first-fresheners. Third Shift is our “prima dona” goat “Flasher” (a 3-way Top-10 Breed Leader, but a real handful on the milk stand) plus Laurel, a first freshener. Fourth Shift is “The Girls From Washington” – 4 new additions to the herd we acquired this spring from our friends Sandy and LeRoy (Reuel Dairy Goats) in Spokane WA.
An integral part of our milking procedure is the recordation of the quantity of milk from every doe at every milking. K has found that by closely monitoring the individual does’ production she can keep an eye out for a number of important herd management indicators from timing heat cycles to seeing the early-warning signs of a possible health problem.
We included a pair of specialized goat milk metering devices when we designed our milking machine set-up – one for each set of inflations (teat cups). The meters look like tall, clear flasks with markings on them in liters. The milk from each doe passes through a meter on its way to the collection bucket. A portion of the milk is separated out and accumulates in the meter’s flask where, after the doe is done, a number can be read and recorded. The milk in the flask is then allowed to pass on to the collection bucket and the flask is ready for the next doe.
This information is converted from liters to pounds and hand recorded on a worksheet immediately at the end of each doe’s milking. One of us then periodically enters the information into a computer database program which can generate a number of spiffy reports, charts and graphs for analysis.
After getting milked, each doe gets a little food treat as an extra “thank-you” (and to get them motivated out the door). Most love the special biscuits (we call them “BisGoaties”) that I bake for them weekly. A few prefer animal cracker cookies and Laurel will only accept a small handful of raisins as her parting nosh.
This milking regime will be followed every day at 6 AM and at 6 PM, from now until we begin to wind down year’s the lactation in late December. The milking work this morning went smoothly, with no difficulties or surprises. The herd is healthy and looks great! We have no extra duties (hoof trimming, worming, CDT vaccinations, copper bolusing etc.) to lengthen the process today. We finish milking in about 45 minutes – fairly typical. Once the girls are gone, K cleans the Milking Parlor and milking machine while I continue working with the milk.
Today I’m making a test batch of cheddar cheese – a cheese we’d like to add to our line at some point. Making cheddar is a rather time consuming process, so I start the pasteurization right away, at 7am. While the milk is pasteurizing I do some regular morning chores like pressure washing the Milking Parlor deck and also get caught up on some computer work.
Once K is done with her cleaning work she feeds, waters and tends the bucks, ducks, chickens and rabbits. She then takes the whole herd (minus the 4 bucks) – 26 goats, plus most of the 6 dogs, on a long browsing walk. They return at about 9:30 with K lugging a large box. Apparently a FedEx driver had decided to leave the package at our gate instead of troubling to drive the extra ½ mile to the buildings. The package was several hundred dollars worth of printing cartridges that had been hanging there in the heat and rain. Since we only leave the ranch about once a week, who knows how long it was sitting there? This sort of thing happens all the time and we are not at all pleased with FedEx.
The pasteurizing process is done and the milk is cooled to working temperature so I add in the dairy culture. While it starts to do its work I head out to the vegetable garden for a little while.
The garden is doing great so far this year. It’s fully irrigated (we only get about 12 inches of rainfall a year here) but with the several very nice monsoon storms that passed through a few days ago the plants have really taken off. The herbs section is fantastic. Last week I took some around to a few of our wholesale cheese customers as samples and we already have herb orders in for next week’s delivery.
While I was out, K did office work – she does all the bookkeeping for the business. She also took a call from the local Chamber of Commerce. They had someone at their office who wanted to come out and buy some things. They, along with many of the would-be visitors who call us have a hard time understanding that we aren’t really set up for retail sales. We enjoy showing off our place to the occasional, intrepid visitor by appointment and try to have a nice selection of cheeses ready for sale when we know someone is coming, but it’s not at all our main focus. The Chamber seems to want to just give out directions to anyone who expresses an interest in us. That would make for a scenic (but probably disappointing) 45-minute hard drive for anyone making the trip without calling first.
Back in the kitchen, I add the rennet to the cultured milk. A little while later, once set, I cut them and slowly raised the temperature while keeping the curds from knitting, then allowing the acidity to build for a while. In the mean time we had a nice lunch: omelets with fresh picked spinach from the garden and BMR Feta cheese.
After lunch I started the “cheddaring process” with the cheese. This entails forming the curd into blocks and repeatedly flipping, turning and stacking them in the warm cheese vat, allowing the acidity to continue to rise. The process requires working the curds every 15 minutes for about a 2-hour length of time so I can’t go far or get too involved with other projects.
2PM: K takes the goats out for an afternoon browse/walk. The weather is beautiful – sunny, dry, temperatures in the high 70’s, with a nice breeze. Not bad for Arizona in July so they stay out for a couple of hours. I continue cheddaring the cheese and squeeze in a little work on the plans for building a shed for our new diesel generator.
Being the first of the month, my computer dutifully pops up a rather lengthy list of periodic chores for both of us to work on. They won’t all get done today, but we’ll knock them off as we can sneak in the time. The chores include everything from simply checking the levels in our 3 propane tanks to regular tractor and generator maintenance, to special vaccinations or treatments for the animals, to monthly checks and work on our solar/wind power battery bank and equipment.
K completely disassembles the milking machine lines, tubes, meters, inflations, etc and detail cleans all parts then re-assembles it all, ready for the PM milking.
I did some sales calls between cheddaring turns and got some nice orders from our loyal restaurant chef customers. One, at a resort in Show Low, has decided to add some of our Butter Almond Toffee candy to their regular cheese order and will be including it in a number of their high-profile desserts. I also committed to donating a large assorted cheese platter and some goat cheese desserts to a Big Brothers, Big Sisters black tie event in August that is being co-sponsored by the local American Culinary Federation chapter.
Once the acidity was right in the cheddar curd I milled it by hand into small pieces, salted it and packed it into two, cheese cloth-lined, nine inch round cheese molds and put it to press for a little while. When I went to flip the cheese in the mold I found that the curds had not knit as well as I wanted. This has been the main defect with most of my test cheddars this year and until I fix the problem and get them perfect, I won’t feel comfortable offering any for sale.
6PM: The evening milking went smoothly. While the milk was quick-chilling, I flipped the two cheddars for the second time and added more weight in hopes of still being able to pull the curds together a little tighter.
Once the cheese room is all cleaned up for the day and all the pots and dishes done we head out to the girls’ barn to feed them, restock the alfalfa pellet cart and sweep the hay room. We quit for the day just a little after 8PM.
Friday, 7/2/04
Our two youngest kids (almost 9-weeks old now) have become very interested in coming into the milking parlor in the morning. This morning they managed to sneak in past us as we were coming in the door to start milking, jumped up on 2 of the milking stanchions and started in on the grain in the feeders - just like the big girls do. It was so cute, we left them to their own devices while we set-up. They really didn’t want to leave when the time came to get to work.
The morning milking went smoothly, as did feeding the 5 remaining kids still on the nipple bucket. We have 2 milking does who have been showing minor signs of hypocalcemia and to whom we are now giving CPMK (a balanced Calcium oral drench) twice a day at milking time. Both girls are heavy milkers and kidded with quads this spring. Because of an ordering mix-up our new supply of the drench has not shown up so I will have to run into town and get some from our herd vet.
Once the milking parlor is clean and all the other critters taken care of, K takes the goat herd and dog contingent on a walk down the big dry wash for some good browsing. I’ll be making Feta today so, after milking, I start pasteurizing a 14.5-gallon batch of milk, do some dishes, catch up on emails, re-stock the milking parlor with grain and pressure wash the dairy deck. While the sprayer is out, I also power-clean a couple of cheese room carts and racks. The kitchen is designed and equipped with almost everything on wheels so it can be easily moved for cleaning and servicing. I got the milk cooling in the vat then headed out to the garden.
K got back with the goats just as I was finishing in the garden so we headed back to the dairy. The milk was at the right temperature. I added the culture and rennet and did some office work while the curd set. The Vet called and said that his supplier was not able to ship the CMPK yet. There is nothing else pressing in town so there’s no need to go.
K and I worked together entering the most recent milk production data into the computer. I then formatted and printed out our year-to-date “Lactation Summary Report”, which includes oodles of facts and figures and lots of pretty charts and graphs, and passed it on to K for review/comment/action. The herd average is at just over 7 lbs per goat per day. Not bad considering that fully half of our milkers are first fresheners, many still coming up in milk. Our total herd production so far this lactation is just over 9500 lbs (almost 1200 gallons). We laugh at the fact that some “artisan/farmstead” dairies work with four times this much milk in a DAY!
Got a call from one of the insurance agents we’ve been trying to get to find us good all-‘round coverage for the ranch and business. She’s been “working on it” for over two months and called all excited that she had finally found an underwriter who actually had some experience with farm policies and she now had a quote for us. We about fell on the floor with the price she told us, which came to about a quarter of our expected income for the whole year. She faxed a copy of the breakdown and in looking it over it didn’t even cover some of the items (like our truck) we need covered. Hopefully the other agent will do a better job for us.
I contacted a local bus shuttle service operator who operates a daily route between town and Phoenix to explore the possibility of using them for delivering orders to the Valley. Their rates are very good compared to what we have been paying USPS and UPS and they will get a package from here to their depot in 4 hours instead of 24. Now we’ll contact some of our customers down there and see if they’d be interested in saving some shipping costs in exchange for having to go pick-up their packages from the depot.
K worked out at the buck pen doing some fencing and setting up a new feeder for our free-range Pekin ducks. I finished the batch of Feta, getting it into the draining pan where it will stay for 8 to 24 hours, until the right acidity and consistency have been reached.
After lunch we finished the duck feeder project together. The buckling kids had already figured our how to get to the feeder so it needed to be isolated from their access with a strategically placed cattle panel section.
We worked the rest of the afternoon on moving a new cover into place over an old, abandoned well on the property. The 30’ deep dry well is about ½ a mile from the buildings and in an area that the goats have just decided to show a lot of interest in. It is an attractive nuisance for them and an inherent danger. We have been concerned for some time that the existing cover – not much more than a few deteriorating logs thrown across the opening, was not going to last much longer. Using the tractor we took a hugely heavy 12’x12’ cattle grate, and slowly & carefully transported it to the well site. After removing the old cover material we positioned the grate over the 8’ diameter rock-lined hole, then covered it with rocks and other debris. The new cover will remain secure for a very, very long time.
7/2/04: moving an iron grate over an abandoned well opening
While working at the well we noticed a very large smoke plume in the distance to the west. It is wild fire season here and, as we are in the middle of a protracted regional drought, it will likely be another long summer.
Back at the dairy, our friendly UPS driver delivered a replacement wheel for one of the hand trucks which I installed while K talked a new goat owner through some difficulties she was having with two goats she had purchased from another breeder.
6 PM: Tonight’s milking was… different. We are now completely out of the CMPK that we really wanted to give 2 of the girls to treat for possible calcium deficiencies, but they are doing OK without it, so far. K found a molar-type tooth in one of the grain dishes. It didn’t look freshly broken or extracted, in fact, we’re not even sure it’s a goat molar. It could have been in the feed, but we’ll have to really check all the girls over who had access to the dish anyway. A little ways into the milking we noticed that the pressure regulator on the milking machine sounded funny. Further investigation showed it full of milky water. We had forgotten to dump the sanitizing solution out of the catch bucket before starting and it had overflowed into the vacuum lines as soon as we had pumped in enough milk from the girls. Had to dump the whole bucket out, of course. Irritating mistake, but accidents happen.
After finishing with the girls, while the remaining milk chilled, I unmolded the Feta. It was ready very quickly today, probably because the temperature in the cheese kitchen got almost to 90 this afternoon. I cut the curd into approx 1 lb blocks, dry salted them and put them in the cheese cooler (55°F, 85% RH) to “toughen up” for 24-48 hours before they get moved into their brine solution.
We wrapped up at the dairy just about 8 PM and head home.
Saturday, 7/3/04
Anise, one of the does we were worried about having hypocalcaemia now has a high temperature. She has had a couple of nasty bouts with a summer fever in past years so we put her on Excenel at morning milking time before the temp spiked too high this time. Both little Sassafras and her twin sister Sage snuck into the milking parlor with us again this morning and helped themselves to a little grain. This is getting to be a real habit - one we may learn to regret. None of the girls show any signs of having trouble eating this morning so we hope that the tooth K found in the grain last night was not one of theirs. We found that it is very hard to take a good look at a goat’s back teeth to check them out. Milk quantity was good this morning and the quality excellent, of course.
K took the herd on their regular morning browse. I drained accumulated whey off yesterday’s feta and left it in the cheese cooler to continue firming up then did the rest of the regular morning chores. Next, it was up to our well (about ¼ mile from the dairy) to start the generator and pump to fill our 4500 gallon holding tank. Then I worked in the garden for a while.
Back in the office, we finalized the updates to our ranch’s emergency evacuation plan – a prioritized list of things to do and to bring with us if we are ordered to leave because of fire or other threat. I posted copies around at the various buildings and filed one with our corporate paperwork. We both did a little computer work – me entering and printing out orders, K doing some online research, both of us procrastinating on getting started with our next job: a series of vaccinations and BoSe shots and copper boluses for the herd.
We are in a very mineral deficient part of the country here. Copper and Selenium are so low, the goats require regular supplementation for good health. We only ended up doing the small-fry today. The order with the rest of the large boluses we need to do the big girls and guys hasn’t arrived yet (it’s with the CMPK and other goodies for which we’ve been waiting to arrive). The job went very well and quickly – much better than we had anticipated.
While lunch was heating K and I did some email corresponding. I am in the middle of a very interesting discussion with several other on-line cheese makers about my cheddaring difficulties. The Internet is one of the best research and communication tools available, especially for folks like us in extreme rural situations and with off-beat or, at least, uncommon interests (like goats or cheese making). We both belong to and participate in a number of online discussion groups geared toward these areas of interest.
After lunch I headed over to our fledgling orchard to do a bit of work. The goats took K out walking again, this time way out the other direction from the dairy to the far end of the property for their afternoon browse. We both got back to the dairy around 4:30 PM and did some more office work until milking time.
At evening milking Anise’s temperature was still up. We will re-evaluate her condition in the morning. While K settled the girls in their barn, I drained the Feta again, prepared a pH adjusted brine solution (pure salt and a touch of citric acid to lower the acidity of our slightly alkaline water) and immersed the cheese pieces in the brine. I moved the new containers of Feta to the cheese fridge where the cheese will age for a week or so before it’s ready to sell. We finished up a little after 8pm.
Sunday, 7/4/04
Fourth of July! Happy Independence Day, America!
6 AM: Despite the regular chores and work we make a few concessions to the holiday. We put the American flag out just for ourselves, as we’re much too far away from any neighbors or roads for anyone else to notice it. We discuss the annual town fireworks in the milking parlor. The past few years’ displays have been cancelled, postponed or significantly scaled-back in deference to the extreme wild fire hazard they tend to pose – especially during this ongoing severe drought we’re experiencing. Our first year here we were delighted and surprised to catch the top edge of the tail end of the display from the rodeo grounds in town, glimpsed over a hill, as we sat on our front deck. Twice since then we’ve made the exhilarating steep climb up the mesa (all the more fun in the dark!) which rises about 400 feet up behind the ranch buildings in order to better see the fireworks. Twice we’ve come back with nothing but a little bonus exercise to show for it. We tried to find out when they would happen this year but got conflicting “official” information. The fireworks might have been last night, or tonight or tomorrow night. Nobody was really sure. We’ll keep an eye out from the deck and if they really have the show, maybe we’ll climb up on the dairy’s roof to watch it.
I started pasteurizing right away for another batch of cheddar cheese. In discussing my recent problems with this cheese with a number of knowledgeable cheese makers online we think that between the new equipment I’m using and the larger batch sizes I’m making I need to make some significant adjustments to my procedure. I incorporated a number of suggestions into today’s cheese making and the results were a dramatic improvement in the cheeses. Not only that, but the new process take considerably less time – nearly 3 hours quicker than the last batch I just made a few days ago.
While the milk was pasteurizing and cooling I worked on some candy orders. I’m a trained pastry chef and we sell a few specialty confections as well as cheeses from the ranch.
When K returned from her walk with the goats she worked on a proposal (a counter-proposal, actually) to present to the State Dept. of Agriculture to be able to sell some raw fluid milk, and value-added raw milk products from the ranch. Their reply to our initial proposal was filled with many requirements that we felt unnecessary. She put together a very reasonable letter that we hope will sway them.
I made a small batch of Chai Tea today for personal consumption. “Chai” is our morning beverage of choice. It’s a wonderful sweet milk tea flavored with green cardamom. I make a couple of gallons at a time every so often, as needed, from our own ultra-fresh raw goats milk. It is fantastic served either hot or cold, winter or summer. As we pursue our quest to get our raw milk certification, Chai will be one of the value-added milk products we will be looking at offering for sale.
After I got the two cheddars in their molds (Looking GOOD!), we portioned Fresh Goat Cheese for packaging tomorrow.
K continued work on her fluid milk proposal while I did my cheese affinage for the week. Every Sunday I clean, flip, rotate and evaluate each hard cheese I have aging in our cheese “cave”. We’ve been selling cheeses so well since starting production for the season in March that I have not been able to get very far ahead of orders. That means that there are only a dozen or so Caprianas, and some test Cheddars and Blues to work on today.
I got out to the veggie garden for an hour around 4:30PM, about the time K took the herd out for a late browse up to the mesa to the North.
At evening milking we noticed a problem with the vacuum indicating gauge on the milking machine. Tapping it didn’t help, so tomorrow I’ll pull it off and see if blowing it out with a little compressed air does it any good. Anise is doing better, with her temperature back in the high/normal range.
8PM: After milking and clean-up, the cheddars got their cheese cloths removed and were flipped in their molds and re-weighted for overnight pressing. If the fireworks were tonight we missed them completely.
Monday, 7/5/04
A Monday holiday for most of the country in celebration of Independence Day, work on the Ranch and in the Dairy goes on. The animals all still need tending, the girls all still need to be milked twice today, cheese still has to be worked with regardless what the calendar says.
This morning we are still out of the CMPK with which we had been treating two goats for calcium deficiencies. Coming into the milking parlor, they both showed noticeable signs of relapsing – their temperatures were low and they were acting quite “off”. Fortunately, we had obtained an RX injectable form of the supplement from our vet and were able to dose them that way. Both responded well
Along with the normal chores we did a lot of packaging for tomorrow’s deliveries. We design and print all of our own product labels, brochures, and promotional materials, right in our own little print-shop in one corner of the office. We never intended to get into the printing business, and never really wanted to, but between the outrageously high printing costs we were incurring, the frustratingly poor service we were getting and the constant difficulties and road blocks we were running into in dealing with the “artsy graphics types”, we decided to give it a try.
We’re now completely sold on desktop publishing as a printing solution for micro businesses. Sure there are some up front costs, and some new skills to learn and no, our printing is not going to be as ultra-slick as a top-job printer can put out. Nobody is going to confuse us with the big kids on the bock like Laura Chennel or Coach Farms, based on our packaging, but that’s not who we are trying to be anyway, is it?
The afternoon chores and milking go smoothly.
Tuesday, 7/6/04
After morning milking, K walked the gang while I started a batch of feta, then worked on packing cheeses, candy and fresh herbs for various orders I’ll be delivering today.
After lunch I headed into town and down to Show Low. Made deliveries to restaurants and natural food stores in the area, got the flatbed trailer tires fixed, and did some assorted shopping. I got back around 4 PM.
While I was gone K bagged the feta for me and started it draining. The UPS driver delivered the copper boluses which K had been waiting for. K was subsequently able to get almost every one for the gang treated.
Some friends came out to swap a few copper boluses for several nice porterhouse steaks from a steer they had just had butchered. Those steaks are already earmarked for a special dinner for tomorrow.
After PM Milking I cut and dry salted the feta and put it in the cheese cooler to firm up overnight.
Wednesday, 7/7/04
Double anniversaries today! K and I were married 22 years ago and the dairy received its official State certification to operate just one year ago today!
We slept in a little and were almost ½ an hour late getting to work this morning, but it wasn’t in celebration of our personal or business milestones nor, in fact, intentional at all. We’ve never had to set an alarm clock, depending instead on the sun coming up and the gentle noises of the barnyard coming to life to awaken us. This morning was different. The sun didn’t make its customary brilliant appearance and, all the critters were unusually subdued. Both of these events were the result of the blue haze of wildfire smoke that had settled over the ranch during the night. Obviously, the gentle night winds had shifted and the still-growing “Willow Fire” over 90 miles away, whose distant smoke we’d noticed a couple of days ago, was now going to start impacting us directly.
In addition to the normal milking routine K ran California Mastitis Tests (CMT) on all the girls this morning. Everybody got a clean bill of health, which we expected.
I did my regular morning chores and started another batch of Feta while K took the girls out for a little while. Between the smoke and the quickly-building heat of the day they didn’t seem to want to do much browsing and came back to the dairy early to rest in the shade most of the day.
K noted with interest that the vegetation that the girls were preferring to browse on had changed over the past few days. No longer concentrating on barberry leaves, salt bush and various grasses, they have now switched their attentions more to the newly forming prickly pear cactus-, juniper- and barberry-fruits, yucca plants and other succulents. It is seasonal dietary changes like this that can make a real and interesting impact on the cheeses we make. While some changes are subtle, and others quite striking, they are all part-and-parcel of making artisan cheeses, and surprisingly well accepted by our clientele. Many of our more sophisticated customers, especially the chefs, will call up after receiving an order and comment on a subtle taste changes they have noticed. “Is something new in bloom up there? There’s a flavor almost like chamomile in the fresh cheese this week”. They seem to really enjoy designing special dishes around the new flavors they have uncovered, relishing this special connection between the food and the land. And as K says, “we’re not here to make Velveta!”
Back at the dairy, K worked more on her Letter of Understanding for the Ag Dept and looked into getting a particular brand of alfalfa pellet, that was working well for us, delivered from the valley. Their minimum was 22 tons, way more than we can handle at one time, so I will be planning a trip down to Phoenix to pick some up very soon. We figure that I can bring up 3 or 4 tons between the truck and trailer. I do a bit of office work while waiting for the various cheese intervals and make a couple of calls to accounts who are behind in paying us. They seem well motivated by the fact that they will not get any more cheese until we are square. I also put together a cheese order to take into town.
We got a proposal from another insurance agent whose numbers are much better than the previous agent. We ask him to get us the details to go over, along with some various coverage and deductible options.
After lunch, K and I work together on rounding up a group of rabbits I will be taking in for the local feed store to sell. We keep our rabbits “colony-style” (limited free-range, not caged) so it takes some time and ingenuity to catch them.
2:30 PM: I headed into town to do a cheese delivery, drop off the rabbits and then drive down to Show Low for a meeting with a USDA Rural Business-Cooperative Service representative from Phoenix. The meeting was to get more information on a newly announced Value-Added Producer Grant for which we are considering applying. The grant money would be used to help us purchase equipment so that we can expand our business into a couple of new niche markets we have identified, but which have rather high front-end price tags attached. The meeting went very well and, if the rep comes back with the correct answers to a couple of our key questions/concerns - we will have to jump right in on putting together the proposal, as the deadline is the end of this month. In the mean time, we will write up a brief narrative on the proposed project and a preliminary budget for the rep to preview.
While I was gone, K knocked off a number of small projects and cleaning/maintenance chores and still found the time to bake a scratch cake for our anniversary. She ended up doing more than ½ of the evening milking by herself until I returned and could assist. In addition to the normal milking procedures, K gave all of the does their BoSe shots.
A new wild fire “The Ponderosa Fire” erupted today about 60 miles from the ranch and in the same direction as the first bigger wildfire (“The Willow Fire”). The effect of the combined fires has been dramatic. The Ponderosa, while much smaller in size, is in a much worse area to do more real damage. A number of main roads have been closed because of fire and smoke, a couple of towns evacuated, a fiber optic trunk line burned through (many communication disturbances regionally now) and a huge 345kV power line that supplies much of Phoenix is imminently threatened. It is also producing a lot of dense smoke that, with a shift in the winds this afternoon, came rolling in over the ranch like a massive, slow-motion tidal wave.
Our animals don’t like the smoke at all and the whole crew (including K and I), is unsettled and a bit on-edge tonight. In 2002, the Rodeo/Chediski fire– Arizona’s largest wild fire ever, hit the region hard and no one here has forgotten it’s ferocity. While that fire was concentrated well to the south of us, near Show Low, it still “spotted” small fires and hot embers within a dozen miles of the Ranch and rained ash here for days. The following summer, during a powerful thunder storm, a lightening bolt struck a tall cedar tree thirty feet from our house, exploding it into flames which quickly spread to the tinder-dry grasses around the base. Only the quick response by K and I, with garden hoses and 5-gallon buckets of water dipped from the goats’ drinking trough, kept things from getting seriously out of hand. We’re a good hour’s drive away for the town’s fire department so, yes, we all get a little edgy when there is smoke in the air or a fire nearby.
8 PM I unmolded the new Feta, dry salted it and put it in the cheese cooler to “harden-off” until tomorrow.
Thursday, 7/8/04
We awoke (on time) to a bright and clear morning. Prevailing breezes had shifted overnight (around 3 am if the dogs finally settling down is any clue), pushing the wildfire smoke in another direction. The fresh air was wonderful.
Morning milking and chores proceeded without notable incident then I drained yesterday’s Feta and knocked off a bunch of miscellaneous small projects and minor plumbing jobs while K took the goats out and headed up to the well to fill our water supply tank. The tractor battery was dead again when I went to use it but I can’t blame the goats turning the headlights on this time (despite the tractor being their favorite jungle-gym in the world). I think the battery has just reached the end of its useful life.
K and the girls got back around 10 am as I was heading out to the garden and she started some preliminary work on the VAPGrant proposal, and looked into buying another couple of small stock watering tanks.
This afternoon we both did office work, concentrating on pulling together information for the grant proposal and finalizing our proposed Memorandum of Understanding on raw milk bottling for the State Ag Dept.
UPS delivered a VHS Video tape and DVD disk from our good friend Martha McClements (SideKick Productions in Tucson, AZ), a professional videographer who came to visit the ranch this spring. While here, she was able to fully tape a goat kidding from start to finish. It was our littlest first freshener, Laurel, who cooperated by coordinating the delivery of twins in what Martha called a “perfectly made for TV event”. The kidding was about the smoothest and quickest we’d ever seen and Martha caught every second in vivid, living color. The thoughtfully edited version she had just sent us takes the viewer from the early stages of Laurel’s labor through her twins’ first sips of milk and shaky first steps. We were delighted with the result of Martha’s hard work.
The smoke from the Willow Fire drifted in this afternoon but was not nearly as dense or oppressive as yesterday. We headed right home after the PM milking to have a nice, belated dinner celebration of our dual anniversaries..
Friday, 7/9/04
We awoke to a cloudy sky with sprinkles, something rather unusual for us here in the high desert. The goats, of course, think they are going to melt with the first drop that hits them, but the ducks are loving it. We hope the higher humidity and cooler temperatures help the crews get a hold on the local wild fires. The downside, being primarily on solar power, is that we’re not making much electricity today and will probably need to run the generator a bit this evening.
Today I’m making a batch of our Fresh Goat Cheese. Right after milking I start with the milk, warm from the milking parlor which I strain. It immediately goes into our little 15-gallon Vat pasteurizer. The milk is heated to 150°F and held there for 30 minutes. Cold water is then run through the jacket of the vat to cool the milk to about 90°F.
The whole heating, pasteurizing and cooling process takes about 3 hours all together during which time I’m usually running back and forth from there to the next room doing office work. Today during pasteurizing I made a 50 lb batch of “BisGoaties”, the special little biscuits we give the girls after milking. The biscuits are a combination of bran, corn meal, oatmeal, flour, eggs, cheese, cheese whey, garlic and parsley. They will be baking and drying all day, probably longer, and man-o-man do they smell good!
10AM: Working again on the Fresh Cheese, I added a couple of teaspoons of freeze-dried dairy culture and 12 drops of liquid vegetable rennet to the milk (the amount depends on the point of lactation and temperature in the cheese room) and leave the curd to set up for 8 to 48 hours (again depending on various environmental factors).
K and the gang returned from their browse and we headed out to the buck pen to do the last of the copper bolusing, and BoSe shots on the boys. We also did the dry yearlings. We then finished up and emailed off our raw milk proposal to the State Ag Dept. and a short narrative grant proposal for the USDA rep to review.
After lunch (garlicky chevon sandwiches on home made bread), the afternoon was taken up with working on photographs for this diary and some gardening work.
We got some rain sprinkles this afternoon again but not enough to even really get anything wet. Mixed blessing for the firefighters as the moisture and cool temps helped with the existing fire but the accompanying dry lightening made new ones a real threat.
7:30 PM: We finished with the evening milking and chores and I found that the Fresh Cheese curd had set up pretty quickly today. It was quite warm in the kitchen (almost 90°F at peak) which accelerated the activity of the culture. Not having any air conditioning or other summer climate control in the building makes for some widely variable working conditions which add to the challenges of making consistent products, but it does force me to be very “in-touch” with what’s going on with my cheeses and that’s a lot of what artisan cheese making is about. I gently scooped the curds, dividing them between four sanitized cheese cloth bags which I hung from my cheese rack, suspended over a pair of plastic tubs. The whey will drain from the cheese in the bags into the tubs for 12 to 48 hours, depending on room conditions.
Saturday, 7/10/04
After morning milking I started a batch of cheddar and will be working with it periodically for most of the day. In between, I will get a few other things done.
8 AM: Yesterday’s Fresh Cheese has drained nicely overnight and is already ready to come out of the bags. I weigh the total amount of the drained curd and get just over 26 lbs for a yield of about 1.9 lbs per gallon – pretty typical for this time of year. Last year, during late lactation I was getting as much as 3.8 lbs of fresh cheese per gallon as the milk got higher and higher in butterfat, solids and proteins. I add a touch less than 1%, by weight of salt and briefly mix it with the cheese in the 20-qt mixer, then pack it in 5 lb portions and refrigerate it for later use.
I am working on finding us some new computer software with which to do our regular back-ups and do more research between the times the cheeses need me. I also got the rest of the BisGoaties finished drying and put away.
After lunch, I head out to the garden while K started a wall-paneling project in the milk parlor. Lots of equipment had to be moved out to get to the wall which she then prepped. I helped out by making the various cut-outs for the electric receptacle and the milk machine vacuum pipe. After getting the panel in place and securing it there K did bit of trimming and caulking then put all the equipment back and got the room cleaned and ready for the next milking.
The cheddars got flipped and undressed (cheese cloth removed) and set for their overnight pressing after the PM milking.
Sunday, 7/11/04
7 AM: Unmolded the two cheddars from yesterday, and they looked and smelled great. Air dried them for a few hours, wrapped them and put them into the cheese cooler where they’ll stay for several months, getting turned every few days at first, then once a week as they age.
Having no pressing business work for today, K and I also decided to take the day off from projects. I went along on the morning walk and the girls took us out to the flats, the other side of Hay Hollow Wash. That area of the property is particularly rich in Anasazi Indian pottery shards and tooled stones so we always love when the girls want to take us out that way. This whole valley was very heavily settled during two separate eras at around both 700 and 1000 years ago. As a matter of fact, most experts on the subject believe it was a great deal more densely populated then, than it is now. If the girls had taken us up the mesa, we would have been in the area rich with petrified wood pieces and other fossils – another of our favorite places to accompany the goats for walks.
7/11/04: just a little goat lovin'
Back at the dairy (we tend to gravitate there even when we don’t have to), K spent most of the afternoon researching and downloading trial versions of various dairy and herd management software to check out. I did some work in the garden until PM milking time, which went smoothly.
Monday, 7/12/04
To our surprise, all of the does and kids were out of their pen and hanging out on the dairy deck, already waiting for us, when we headed out for morning milking. I guess we’d forgotten to latch their gate last night. We lock up the pen not really to keep them in, but to keep predators out, should any sneak in past our livestock guardian dogs. A quick head count showed that everybody was present and accounted for so no harm was done, though the LDG’s (who had pulled an extra duty shift) looked at us like they expected over-time pay. The tractor survived its “jungle-gym” function with grace. Should anyone ask, eight, 3-month-old goat kids can fit on a John Deere 4600 tractor, just fine!
After morning milking I jumped right in on making a couple of raw-milk cheddars. The consensus of both expert cheese makers and consumers is that raw milk cheeses are far superior to those made from pasteurized milk, not to mention the plethora of purported health benefits from raw milk products as compared to pasteurized. While these products are explicitly illegal to produce or sell in some states, Arizona permits raw milk products, from fluid milk to cheeses under a variety of special conditions. For cheeses the main criteria (aside from being made in a certified facility) is that it be aged a minimum of 60 days before being sold. I age my cheddars longer than this anyway before they are ready to sell so they might as well be raw milk cheeses. An added bonus I had not thought about was the time savings for making the cheese from raw milk. My pasteurizing and cooling takes nearly 3 hours on most days so today I was way ahead of my normal time frame. The cheese making went very smoothly and well.
K took the goats out for their morning constitutional and ended up turning it into a work session. When one of the goats managed to get tangled in some barb-wire along an abandoned section of fencing, K got the hint and took down several hundred feet, making it much safer and nicer looking for everybody. As a bonus, she freed up a couple dozen “T”-posts that we need to start fencing the doe yard at the new barn (we still only have construction fencing up).
Between working with the cheese, I made some sales calls and took some orders for the week. I will be heading down to Phoenix on Wednesday so some of our customers bulked up their orders for me to bring down, avoiding shipping costs in the process. I’ll be meeting one of our new retailers down there face-to-face for the first time, having only had email and phone contact with them so far. I also got the cheese affinage work done for the week.
Made a pan of baked macaroni and cheese using a big chunk of one of the early cheddars from this year. It was not very sharp yet and not as smooth as I’d like for one I would sell, but it was great in the casserole.
After lunch I worked moving 350 or so of the concrete blocks left from the goat barn we put up in February to another location (near where the new greenhouse will be going up this fall). The point was to both get them where they were needed and also get them off the pallets they were delivered on. I’ll return the 23 pallets to the company in Phoenix later this week and collect a good chunk of deposit money for our trouble. K did her best to keep the goats out of the way by taking them on another long walk and finished taking down the section of unused barb-wire fencing she started on this morning.
Just as I finished moving all the blocks, one of the big thunder storm cells that had been just missing us all day finally arrived, delivering a good dose of rain in a short period of time. The goats were not happy about the weather at all and, not seeing the storm coming until it was too late, missed getting to the barn and ended up huddled under the dairy deck. During a lull, I ran out and got them to follow me to the barn (just 75’ away). Some of them were quite soggy and rather indignant about the whole ordeal. In addition to the much-needed rain, the storm cooled things off probably 20°F from our high near 90°F. The “peepers” will be out in force this evening, serenading each other and the night.
K and I packaged cheese for orders going out tomorrow then worked on the lists of things I will be doing and getting in Phoenix, Wednesday and in town tomorrow.
Got an email message from the USDA guy I’d met with last week about the VAPGrant. Apparently his supervisors in Washington think that the equipment we want help in purchasing through the grant is considered “processing equipment” (not allowed) as opposed to “production equipment” (allowed). I’ve asked him for a more thorough explanation of this hair-splitting distinction (if someone takes milk and adds ingredients to make “Chai Tea”, are they “processing” the milk, or are they “producing” the Tea?). If the USDA guy gets back to us in time we’ll have to decided whether we should re-work something on the grant or just give up.
Evening milking went smoothly (though a few of the girls were still a bit damp from the rain). We cleaned up, took care of the milk and were headed home before 7:45 PM – an early night! Because there was very little sun or wind today, we needed to run the back-up generator for a while this evening to charge up the batteries for the night.
Tuesday, 7/13/04
In addition to our regular milking and chores, I also had to go into town this morning. We both worked on getting things ready for me to go down to Phoenix early tomorrow.
While K took the goats out, I got the flatbed trailer loaded with the pallets. I also pulled the battery from the tractor and got the orders I was shipping today packed and ready.
After their return, K confirmed our 3-ton alfalfa pellet order with the mill near Phoenix and reminded them to have it plastic-wrapped to help keep rain off if I got caught in a monsoon on the way up from the valley. She also made arrangements for delivering the pallets to the block company’s yard down there. As an added bonus, the company owner ordered 10 lbs of feta from me to bring down to him when I came.
I headed to town after lunch and shipped orders, bought a new battery for the tractor, got a leaky truck tire repaired and picked up a pizza for dinner. While I was gone, UPS delivered my order of cheese cultures (still nice and cold in their little pack) along with a new book on cheese making.
One of our new retail accounts in Show Low called, saying they were getting very low on everything – mixed news as I will not be able to bring them anything until the first part of next week, but great that the line is being so well received by their customers.
When I got home I installed the new tractor battery, then hitched up the flatbed trailer to the truck and checked it over for the trip tomorrow. Unfortunately none of the lights worked and the power braking system wouldn’t engage (and I’ll really need those brakes to safely negotiate the hills between here and the Valley). A bit of investigation revealed that the trailer’s 9-pin plug was cracked. I did a temporary repair on it which fixed the lights, but not the brakes.
I was still crawling around under the trailer when K and the gang showed up from their afternoon forage expedition. The kids were much fun as 4 or 5 of them at a time would get under the trailer with me to “help”. We did find the trouble with the brakes - a number of broken control wires (I wonder how they could ever have gotten broken…?), and I was able to repair them.
7/13/04: The Girls playing on the flatbed trailer
Had to quit for PM milking and evening chores before testing everything out. It was nearly 8PM by the time I got back to it and found several more broken wires. Without as much goat help, those repairs went very quickly, despite it being dark by then, and soon the trailer was all ready for the trip.
Tonight I downloaded online maps and directions for some of the places in Phoenix I would be going tomorrow then went to sleep early.
Wednesday, 7/14/04
4AM: The alarm goes off and I get up to head to Phoenix. Before I left, I packed the 3 cheese orders I was taking down in their insulated and gel-iced containers and loaded them into the truck. Got everything else set, checked over the rig one more time and got out the Ranch gates about 4:30. Depending on where I’m going in Phoenix it’s a 4 to 5 hour trip one way.
Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that the trip went smoothly and was successful all around. I returned the pallets, picked up the alfalfa pellets, delivered the cheese orders, got to meet with some of my good customers and to chat about cheeses for a while with them, did some big-box shopping, picked up some to-go food to bring home and left the big city around 3 PM. I was back on the Ranch at 7:30 PM (just missing the PM milking).
K ended up doing all of both milkings by herself and taking care of the whole set of chores for the day. She also managed to make batches of both goat milk bar soap & liquid soap. The morning milking presented something of an annual milestone in that it was the very last kid feeding of the year. The last five of this year’s crop, now all over 9 weeks old, huge and cudding well, got their final nipple bucket today. All of that valuable milk they were drinking can now go directly to cheese making.
Once I got home, we unloaded the perishables from the truck, leaving the rest for tomorrow and both of us crashed pretty early.
Thursday, 7/15/04
Right after morning milking I started a batch of Fresh Cheese and brewed up a couple gallons of Chai tea.
To our surprise, the kids Kathryn weaned yesterday have taken the change very well. We fully expected them to fuss and holler at feeding time but there was no such commotion. They are, instead, just hanging out with the older kids and does, playing and otherwise entertaining themselves. I guess they really were more than ready to get off their milk.
While K had the gang off on their walk, I stocked the buck’s little feed room with hay from the doe’s hay room, getting as much squeezed in as possible in order to make room for all the new alfalfa pellets. Unfortunately they came home a bit earlier then I had expected and the goats made a bee-line for the open hay room in their barn. The room is only about 15’ x 25’ and still had a good deal of hay, grain, and other feeds so it was a challenge to get 26 noshing goats to leave.
I was going to work on unloading the three pallets of feed from the trailer but K started talking about how much easier it would be, for this and many other tasks, if we had a fork lift. A few phone calls later, a rep at our John Deere dealership in Flagstaff told us that he had a fork-lift attachment for our tractor in stock and could deliver it here next Monday or Tuesday. He threw in a nice store discount and we had a deal. I pulled off a few bags and brought them in to the girl’s feed room to tide them over until the part arrived, then moved the trailer into the fenced protection of an unused goat pen.
After lunch two women from the Phoenix area showed up at the ranch for their appointment to tour the place and see where the cheese was made. We gave them the full tour and nibbled some cheese samples with them while answering their questions all about our herd, ranch, and cheeses. They bought 2 bags of assorted cheeses then took off on their way home.
I then did some gardening work the rest of the afternoon until PM milking.
Friday, 7/16/04
Right after morning milking I started another raw milk cheddar. This one also came out looking great, but took much longer to cheddar and reach the proper acidity point for milling – nearly two hours longer. That was the end of that batch of DVI mesophilic dairy culture so the next cheddars, using new culture may acidify faster again.
Our main project for the day is to put in a support column on the lower dairy level to counteract some sagging at one section of the floor above. The project went smoothly.
We did the data entry for the milking records into the database and I printed a series of reports for K. K spent much of the afternoon continuing to evaluate several new “dairy” goat software programs. None of them did a very good job for milk production tracking or reporting, most concentrating more on the breeding/pedigree end of things and lacking on the milking section. K emailed several of the software designers with questions about their various programs but got nothing back today.
K got a very nice response from our State Dept of Agriculture inspector to her last letter regarding our status for selling raw milk. We now seem much closer to reaching a mutually agreeable understanding of the subject and that much closer to actually being able to start bottling and selling the product.
Bad news from the USDA guy in phoenix regarding the VAPGrant we were looking at applying for. These guys REALLY want to give money to consultants, marketers, accountants, and feasibility study companies – not to little, sustainable farmers for capitol works projects, like they made it sound. The equipment we were looking at getting help with is not going to pass their screening process. I only wish they had been a bit more upfront from the get-go and not have wasted my time and theirs. Oh well. Live and learn.
Another retailer called almost out of product, but I’ll not be going into town to bring them any until next Monday or Tuesday. It’s great that our cheese sales from these little stores has picked up so much recently, but it’s difficult to get the proprietors to increase their par-stocks, or give us more shelf space, so they find themselves running low fairly regularly now.
Snowflake/Taylor, AZ are celebrating Pioneer Days this week, complete with tours, special events and productions, and a big rodeo. A fireworks display is scheduled for after the rodeo tonight, around 9:15 PM. Since we missed the 4th of July show we headed up on the roof a little early and enjoyed the wonderfully cool breezes and awesomely clear, star-studded night sky, awaiting the festivities. The fireworks were worth the wait – the display went on a full 20 minutes and we were able to see a good portion of the show over the top of the mesa, despite being over ten miles from their location.
Saturday, 7/17/04
I started another raw cheddar batch at about 7:30 am, right after the AM milking. Similar to yesterday, today’s cheese took much longer to acidify then I expected, despite using the new culture. The end result looks nearly perfect again and I have no complaints, but I would like to figure out what is inhibiting the acidity development.
Since I have been finding it difficult getting everything done, K has taken over daily pressure washing the decks. She got it done between cleaning up the parlor from milking and taking the girls out browsing. On their walk, K took them up past the well and started the generator to fill the water tank.
In addition to the cheddars, I mechanically skimmed the cream from 6 gallons of milk. Using a centrifugal separator I got 3 quarts of wonderfully sweet heavy cream from the 6 gallons, a pretty good yield. I made a small Romano-style cheese with the remaining skimmed milk.
After lunch we started a small plumbing project: we need to set a new yard hydrant on the east side of the dairy, requiring some deep trenching. As luck would have it, I knocked off a hydraulic fitting on the tractor after just getting started with the work. The good news is that the John Deere guy is coming out early next week to deliver the forklift attachment anyway so hopefully he’ll be able to bring a new fitting as well. The hydrant project will just have to wait.
I gathered up some tools and headed out to our main gates and mounted the two new ranch business signs that had recently arrived. K had the girls out on their afternoon browse and brought them by to help. I then worked on installing the metal mesh screened door for the doe barn pedestrian doorway but found that the store where I bought the door had mislabeled the size so I’ll have to return it and get one the right size. Giving up on that project, I worked in the garden for a while.
7/17/04: Visitation "By Appointment Only"
K got a very encouraging email back from the designer of one of the pieces of ranch software she had been testing. The woman expressed a willingness to tweak the program and even add some better dairy functionality and reporting functions, requesting a wish-list from K.
Sunday, 7/18/04
Aside from the two normal day-to-day milkings and regular chores, we took it easy today.
We all took the morning walk together, heading up the mesa for a change. The whole area where the goats lead us was littered with Anasazi pottery shards, petrified wood pieces, and fossils. We enjoyed sitting in the shade of a big juniper tree, looking at all the interesting things while the goats spread out, browsing a variety of high forage. It was a long and very peaceful outing.
As the weather has been much more humid and the winds were dead calm, I burned some trash, then played in the garden most of the day. K hung out with the goats as they all tried to stay cool. It was in the high 90’s by late afternoon.
Monday, 7/19/04
I made a batch of raw milk Capriana, our aged, washed-curd cheese this morning. It progressed quickly and well throughout the day.
I spoke with the John Deere guy on the phone and he will be here tomorrow with the new fork lift attachment but they don’t have the hydraulic fitting in stock. It will have to be ordered and shipped, hopefully getting here by the first part of next week.
Great news! The new goat feed K has been working with the mill on formulating will be ready next week for pickup. They’ll be making a trial run batch of 1 ton to see how it sells, especially in southern AZ where they’ve had lots of interest. We’ll take ½ ton from them to see how the girls here like it and observe how it lasts in the heat etc. Looks like I’ll be scheduling another trip to the Phoenix area soon.
K did a thorough cleaning of all the milking machine and equipment, tearing it down completely and putting it back together again.
We both worked prepping the cheese orders which will be going out tomorrow.
I made 50# of BisGoaties for the girls, trying a new formula with more molasses and bran to see how they like it.
We had visitors to the Ranch this afternoon, an unusual treat for us. Some local folks who had been out for a visit last year, just after we were certified, had made an appointment to come out again. This time, they would be bringing some out-of-town relatives and guests. Two cars with seven people arrived on time and were thoroughly greeted by our 6 dogs. Having endured that, the visitors were good sports and let us introduce them to all the goats before taking the “grand tour” of the dairy. K took them into the milking parlor and gave a nice description of what she does and even let a couple of the littlest kids in to nosh some grain while she talked. We moved on into the cheese kitchen and I told them a bit about the cheese making process then, of course, brought out a nice cheese assortment for them to sample. We all nibbled and chatted about cheese and goats for a while before they had to leave, taking with them the cheese they had bought.
After the evening milking the two Capriana cheeses came out of their molds and went into a heavy brine bath until tomorrow.
Tuesday, 7/20/04
After morning chores, I removed yesterday’s Capriana cheeses from their brine bath and set them out to air dry. The humidity was high today and, instead of taking only several hours to dry, I ended up leaving them out overnight.
I did my cheese affinage work, paying special attention to the three blue cheese tests I’ve been working on. Using a cheese piercing tool, I made a few new breath holes in each and took the opportunity to sample some of the interior pate. While the outsides of the cheeses were all a bit on the dry side, the insides were apparently progressing very well. The veining seems to be advancing well, the texture is good and creamy and the flavor excellent. To be honest, they are uglier than sin, and probably not sellable in their current form but I am very encouraged by the overall development of the tests. K was bold enough to sample some as well and agreed that they would not be for sale, “NO WAY can you sell this. I’M eating it all!”
I made a small batch of Coffee Chocolate Chip ice cream today with a quart of the goat cream I’d separated off a couple of days ago. I make a very rich French, custard-style ice cream and usually cut the cream with some fresh goat milk. Today I forgot to cut the cream and the ice cream was actually too rich. I only added the fine dark Belgian chocolate shavings at the end to tone the ice cream down a bit. Those Nubian goats sure do make some fine, rich milk!
We’d been noticing a quicker-than normal drop in power in the evenings after the sun goes down. We had attributed it to the warmer weather making all the various refrigerators run more. I did monthly battery servicing this morning and found another possible contributing cause as well. One of the battery cables had corroded, effectively rendering one whole string – 20% of our storage capacity, useless. On top of that, it happened to be the string into which the current from the wind generator flowed, so all of that power has not been accessible for a while. I removed the cable and will get it replaced this afternoon. I also pulled off the diesel generator’s oil filter in order to get it matched for replacements ( so far nobody has been able to find a mate through cross referencing the code numbers for the peculiar Chinese-made filter that came with the generator).
The John Deere salesman bringing our new fork-lift attachment called at about 10am and said he was on his way. He’d told me yesterday that he would call from town when he got close so we watched for him for the next hour. When he didn’t show up I called the store in Flagstaff to make sure he hadn’t had problems and they told me he had just left THERE. It’s a 2.5 hour drive and he had other stops along the way so I packed up my orders and took off for Show Low, figuring I could get there and back and do all my stops almost as fast as he could get here.
In Show Low I delivered cheese orders to three wholesale customers and also stopped at the PO, Bank, auto supply store, solar power shop, and got gas for the truck. Sure enough, I caught up with the John Deere guy on the dirt road, about 2 miles from the Ranch a little before 3 PM.
He followed me in and we worked together removing the back-hoe (with the still-broken hydraulic fitting) from the tractor and off-loading the pallet forks from his trailer. He promised that they would get the fitting ordered and shipped to us ASAP and departed happily with the complimentary cheeses we’d given him.
While I had been gone, K had gotten 10 of the girls’ hooves trimmed.
Without the back-hoe, the tractor was minus most of its usual ballast and I was unable to lift the full 1-ton pallets of feed off the trailer without tipping over so we hand packed 10, 80-lb bags onto another pallet and had no trouble moving the feed split that way into the barn.
K finalized a deal with the software designer of “Animal Trac” the herd management program she had been reviewing. Donna is willing to do some customizations for her and we are, very much, looking forward to working with a good program that can do all of the things we need, on a regular basis.
We got an email confirmation that the commercial icemaker we’d ordered more than a month ago has been shipped via common carrier and should arrive early next week. We will be using the ice to chill our milk more quickly, especially when we begin bottling fluid milk.
With the evening milking, we had three does hit all time daily highs with their milk production, two first fresheners and one of the new girls from Washington State, all hitting at or near the one-gallon mark.
Following the evening milking, the whole gang made it quite clear that they were not ready to head back to the barn for the night yet. They headed off for a late browse down the valley, not going too far until K finished her clean-up and joined them. I finished my work for the day, grabbed a beverage and sat on the dairy deck. I could see Kathryn and her goats sauntering along a quarter mile away, silhouetted by an incredible maroon, orange and pink sunset. The end of another great day at Black Mesa Ranch.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Sunny am, increasing clouds, showers and breezy PM
Started permanent fencing of new doe pen around barn
made raw Capriana
Friday, July 23, 2004
Sunny am, mostly cloudy w/ showers afternoon, evening finished the new doe pen fencing minus a bit of fine tuning
finished a batch if Capriana to air-dry phase
Sunday, July 25, 2004
mostly sunny
worked a bit more on trimming trees around barn and raking up
Yesterday’s fresh cheese flopped. It was NASTY - rubbery, bad taste, stuck to the cloths, clumpy etc. Don’t know why. Made a raw Capriana today and it seemed to come out fine - in brine overnight now. Also made a test batch of Brie (3.5 gal = 2, 8” molds)
CMT’d all the girls PM and all were clear as could be.
Got word late last night that the editor for dairy Goat Journal is planning on running the article/diary we sent her in its entirety, some 12,600 words! We never dreamed they’d take the whole thing. Normal diaries run around 2500 words.
Pickled a quart of cornichons & 3 qts of beets. Also made a big pan of broccoli w/ cheese sauce and a pan of red-gold & purple-white potatoes dauphinoise.
Narita and Hank @ BMR. Supposed to be here yesterday for am milking. Then today for am milking. Showed up after we’d been done for an hour. At least they didn’t stay long - 45 minutes. Still don’t know why they made the 6 hour drive from Wilcox to come here - they weren’t really interested in anything at all.
Monday, July 26, 2004
mostly cloudy, nearby t-storms
repaired back-hoe hydraulic line. Changed oil in Sears Generator
Finished a raw Capriana. Rolled fresh logs for orders, took new orders from NR and AG.
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
partly sunny, breezes, cool and nice most of the day
Still having trouble with fresh cheese acidifying and setting up properly. Designed a 3-way experiment to help determine cause: #1 2-gallons of this morning’s milk, no sannitizer near it with regular culture. #2 2 gallons of oldest (sani treated) milk with new culture in sani-treated pot. #3 14.5 gallons mixed milkj with extra new culture and pre-sanitized vat. Only the #1 developed properly, leading us to conclude (pending further verification) that it is the sanitizer that has been causing us problems, not phage or other culprit.
New Ice machinee arrived and we spent some of the afternoon moving things around and fitting it in the kitchen, and making plans for its installation
Finally got an oil filter that fit the diesel generator! I changed the oil again and replaced the filter. Also pumped 55 gals of diesel into the generator tank.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
mostly sunny, breezes, cool evening
K worked, dry-walling new support post on dairy lower level
Finished the 3 cheese experiments from yesterday: #1 was fine, good and dandy, #2 stunk - chucked it, #3 I bagged this AM hoping for the best. It acidified OK and drained fine. Unbagged in evening but the flavor /aroma were off so it will be dog cheese. Result of test: we are over sanitizing. Several changes implemented immediately.
Made 50 # biscuits.
BMR Board meeting 1 PM @ Cocina de Eva’s
moved alfalfa pellets around and got all off trailer and into goat barn.
New water tank/trough was sitting at gate when we went out. Thanks FedEx for being irritatingly consistent.
Finally - our new trough arrives
D&K to town: vets (Flash fecal - clear), hardware, PO, Bank, BMR board meeting @ Cocina, feed store.
Saturday, July 31, 2004
mix sun and clouds, sprinkles (barely)
Finished backfilling and raking out from installing new dairy hose bib. Cleaned up dozens of piles of brush and rocks and stuff from cleaning the trees on the west side of the doe barn. Cut and capped marker PVC pipes for house septic. Re-graded ramp to hay storage.
K durabonded support post in guest room. Put new water trough on deck and moved other one in does barn and got set up.
Unbagged yesterday’s fresh cheese. OK yield, looked and smelled fine. Started a new batch but forgot to rinse out sanitizer before pasteurizing - cheese not acidified enough to bag tonight (damn, hope that was the problem) e-Note form neighbor Dennis about “large, blondish, aggressive dog harassing him at his property- is it ours?” Can’t imagine Cody or Roc being aggressive toward anything and they’re closest dogs we have to that description.
4 people, including Julie (GVO Jennifer’s mother) visit the Ranch. Bought candy and cheeses. Julie is opening a tea room this fall and wants some truffles & ?? For the business.