The Cheese Test Bed Facility

Stage 1 of the "grand plan" is remodelling the second kitchen we have at the back of the house. Once this has been completed we can recommence our cheesemaking endeavours and start honing our cheesemaking skills. The Test Bed Facility is now about half complete and we should have it operational sometime next week with a last concerted effort. General farm duties will of course slow the process but we believe lambing is now done (we have 4 ewes who have shown no signs of pregnancy so later next week we will turn them out into the main flock).

The little lamb we saved whose mother died soon after he was born (we have named him Ram-Bo because he's a little fighter) is doing extremely well and is now fuller and healthier looking than many of the other lambs. We'll keep him after the effort of saving him. In the jugs at the moment we have another runt. She was born on Feb 23rd the day after my birthday. Both her and her brother (who unfortunately died) were bags of bones and it has taken a full week for her mother's milk to finally come in. We fed her a couple of bottles to get her going but she's now much more active and feeding well.

On March 15th there is a cheese festival down in Central Point at the Rogue River Creamery. Should be a great day and an opportunity to get to meet some more local cheesemakers and learn.

This is just so cool:

The Good Life

Today we began the cultivation of the acre or so that will become our vegetable garden. The previous owners had used it for the same purpose and the fenced area has several apple trees, pear trees and a cherry tree as well. It has remained unused for a season now though and it badly needed weeding and tilling. Thanks to our Roto-Tiller the job will be much easier on the back.

Jen has already begun the planting with onions, and this week will see the addition of peas and spinach. The soil is rich and dark and a far cry from the manufactured beds we created in Arizona.

Apart from the cheesemaking, the prospect of becoming virtually self-sufficient was one of the factors that influenced our decision to make the move to farming. One bonus to all of this is that the farm hasn't used pesticides or chemicals for many many years and there is an extremely good chance we can get ourselves registered as organic which might be yet another avenue for us down the track.

The irony isn't lost on me

In the last few years my mother has been doing a lot of genealogical research on her family name. The name SHIPWAY is derived from the term Sheep Way - a path that the sheep farmers used to drive their flock to market along, and our forebears were firstly Gloucestershire sheep farmers, and then worked in the cloth trade. In a way you could say I've come full circle and the irony hasn't been lost on me.

The Vision: Clarity at last

We have a long journey ahead of us, the plan of which I thought I would share with everyone so they know exactly what it is we're doing, and where we hope to end up.

Stage 1:
Completion of the second kitchen in the house. Yes we're lucky enough to have a second kitchen. We are presently renovating it so we can turn it into our "test facility", that is we can recommence our cheesemaking activities and use it to hone our skills and our cheeses.

Stage 2:
We intend to sell all but a half dozen of our current crop of lambs in order to finance the acquisition of a dozen springer (pregnant) ewes and 2 rams (East Friesian/Suffolk crosses). We have sourced a breeder in California who I will likely visit in the coming week.


Stage 3:
Completion of the milking facility. This is the first part of the construction phase and involves the reworking of the existing milking parlour into something that will accomodate sheep rather than the cows its currently sized for.

Stage 4:
Completion of the cheese facility. Phase 2 of the construction involves building the cheese room, the bulk storage room, the anti-room/entry, and the upstairs office into the old milking parlour.

Stage 5:
Breed our Dorset ewes with the rams we get this year to produce good East Friesian/Dorset crosses. Sell the other lambs and the older ewes from our original flock that we no longer need and as per stage 2 use the money to acquire another dozen springer ewes. This will give us a working flock of at least 24 East Friesian/Suffolk ewes, approximately a dozen Dorset ewes and up to 24 lambs, the rams of which will be sold as stud animals and the ewes probably kept.

Stage 6:
By this stage we will have been milking for some time and making farmstead cheeses. At this point (or possibly earlier) we will make the move to properly commercialize our venture.

Of course while all of this is going on we will be repasturing at least 2 of our fields, upgrading some of the farm's other facilities (including the one bedroom "apartment") and looking into some other ventures including hay sales and growing mushrooms.

Cheesemaking 101: Basic +

I returned from Portland on Thursday evening after my three day cheesemaking course at Oregon State University. The course was fantastic and crystallized a lot of what we want to do in a way that I know is now achievable. Full credit to Marc Bates and Dave Potter who did most of the coordination, and the teaching staff of OSU, particularly Lisbeth Goddik.

The course covered everything one could possibly need to know to start up their own cheese making venture, from construction of the site, to marketing the final product. There was even a field trip to two farmstead cheese makers to further clarify everything presented in the course. The balance between the chemistry and the technical detail, and the hands-on side of things was handled well, certainly well enough not to discourage people.

I now have a decent list of contacts, both fellow cheesemakers and USDA and OSU people willing to answer questions and help out where they can. It's a small community, but certainly one where advice and help is easy to come by. I look forward to tapping these resources in the future and keeping in touch to see how my fellow cheesemaking students fare in their own ventures.

Job Description: The Shit Shoveller

There's something about waking early, barely able to see through the fog, bitterly cold hands you can't feel fumbling with gates and a frost on the ground that crackles as you walk through it. The water in the feeder hoses has frozen, and the thawing dew is dripping through the roof onto your head as you feed a ravenous flock of sheep and their progeny, followed by the hauling of 50 gallons of fresh ice cold water.

For someone who has lived in either a sub-tropical or "arid" environment for the last 20 years where there were two seasons, summer, followed by a cooler summer that people claimed was really winter, getting back to a real winter has come as a shock to say the least. While the snow on the surrounding hills has all but gone now the morning's are still below freezing and it's afternoon before our new world finally warms up. Thankfully we have coffee, the wonder drug that revitalizes and refreshes.

The days of incessant rain before we arrived and the sheep imprisoned in the barn and feed area had left the place a veritable sewer. Yesterday we cleaned it. 20 years in IT, and I'm now shovelling shit for a living. In some places the straw and the manure were so thick and trampled it was like lifting carpet, wet shag-pile carpet. But the end result was satisfying and even if the sheep didn't acknowledge the effort, we were pleased with our efforts.

Our daily runs to Lowes or Home Depot are beginning to cost us less finally. Yesterday we were at the DMV as well changing the titles over on all the farm equipment (including the 1955 Chevrolet Truck we got with the property).

Jumping in at the Deep End

Someone described us once as never doing anything by halves, and we're not about to change either.

We arrived at the farm on 1st February, right in the middle of lambing, at the end of a cold snap and just as the rain had broken after more than a week. The fields were sodden, the sheep had been cooped up for days, and the jugs were full of new mothers. There was no time to "feel our way", no grace period, and certainly no time to sit back and enjoy the peace and tranquility of life on the farm while we eased into things.

Jen is a bookworm. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders know us well. She'll read a dozen books and digest every word so she knows what's supposed to be done. Me, I'm a "dive in get your hands dirty and learn on the job" person, so we complement each other well. Running a farm requires both types of personality. We learned that on day one.

So there we were, feeding, docking, cutting tails, castrating, worming and moving newborns around all on our first morning, and loving every minute of it. Things have settled down now that we know what we're doing and there are only a half dozen ewes left to lamb. We have our goals set for the coming weeks which includes constructing a proper examination chute, replacing some gates and fencing, and I'm off to Portland next week to do a short course in Cheesemaking at Oregon State University.

We have a long laundry list of things we want to buy and we've slowly started to redecorate the inside as well. Everything at the moment seems to be a "work in progress" as we try and divide our time equally between all of the things that we want to do and that need doing. We've had a couple of neighbours drop in already as well and it seems that our intended exploits (the cheesemaking) have already got the locals talking.

The Seachange

Everyone thinks we're crazy but I know they harbor a secret desire to be able to do the same. A belief in whether they can or not is all that holds them back.

Hi, I'm David. I'm what you call a British-born ex-pat Australian, now living on a 50-acre farm in Roseburg, Oregon with my wife Jennie. We've both lived and worked all over the world. I was in IT for 20 years, Jen was in printing, advertising and then IT for longer. After burning ourselves out working in Florida, we moved to Arizona to contemplate our next move, and now here we are in Oregon, sheep farming and starting on the path to become cheesemakers. Yep, you read that right, we've gone back to the land and are forging a new life away from suburbia, away from the rat-race, and away from the grind of 9-5, or in our case 6-midnight.

The purpose of this blog is two-fold. It will keep everyone interested in our pursuits updated, but it will also serve as a record of our achievements and failures, of which I am sure there will be many, for those who choose to follow us and learn from us as we in turn learn from others.

So, welcome to Catesby Farms.