After almost 20 years farming, I am now a part time farmer ever since I took a position with Penn State Extension two and a half years ago. This means that each day my wife Holley and I spend about and hour and a half doing chores when we get home from work followed by another hour or two working on other farm related tasks particularly during the growing season.
Spring is the time of year when the "to do" list looks very over whelming. We make our priorities by focusing on "food first". That is, whatever is going to feed us, takes highest priority. One of those tasks is milking the goat. If you ever owned goats, you'll know that goats have the intelligence of dogs. They also have individual personalities and temperaments which makes me question whether I own goats or do goats own me.
A few months ago, our goats birthed and Holley is in charge of milking which is good because Holley can match the persistence and stubbornness that a goat who doesn't want to be milked can display. Agnes was chosen to supply our milk needs because she is the easiest for hand milking and she is a veteran at it. Agnes had other ideas.
Everyday we had to coax her into the barn and have Nana, our Border Collie, block the doorway, grab her by the horns and drag her into the milk stand, hobble her legs so she wouldn't kick Holley or put a hoof in the milk bucket and for all this effort we were rewarded with about two cups of milk. What's the deal! Now, I can hear a chorus of farmers questioning the economics of this effort. Too time consuming for too little return and they may be right and I can certainly buy all the raw milk I want from a neighbor who produces it for a living but economics is not the point of this daily exercise.
If you are going to keep livestock, you have to learn to not necessarily think like them, but to be sensitive to what makes them feel safe and secure. I stood in the barn with my hands on my hips and goat manure on my jeans and looked at where we were milking her.
In front of the milk stand there were bales of straw. Agnes couldn't see anything except straw while she was in the stand. I moved the straw bales and we move the milk stand to where she could see her daughter while she was being milked. Like all of us, Agnes has her good days and bad days but slowly and surely, she is coming around. Last evening, Holley didn't even hobble her and she has been giving more milk.
The point I believe is the satisfaction that many people now a days receive by producing food for themselves and recognizing the amount of work it does take to produce food. Besides that, milking and feeding gives us a chance to practice what Phillip Landis, a farmer in Lancaster County, calls "high touch" husbandry. That is, daily physical contact with our animals that will give them a sense of calmness and security and gives all of us, a happier existence for our time on this farm. We don't even really need the border collie to heard the animals down to the barn and block the doorway to prevent Agnes' escape anymore, but Nana enjoys it so much.
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