A Milking Update

It has been two weeks since we started milking and so far everything has been running relatively smoothly. We seem to have got most of the routine down to a set time give or take a few minutes depending on how the sheep are behaving. We have a couple who are problem animals. They don't like being touched on the insides of their back legs so it makes moving their legs to clean their teats interesting to say the least. I've only been covered in iodine once, not bad really all things considered.

Over the weekend Will and I built a ramp from the main barn into the milking lane just in front of the actual entry to the milking barn. It means we have the ability to properly separate the two flocks of sheep without having to resort to pasture rotation acrobatics or the moving of sheep and the closing of multiple gates. Luring them in with pea pellets certainly help and they only need to do something a couple of times before they learn. That's one good thing about sheep, they're such good....sheep.

So we've been recording milk temperatures as well to make sure we comply with the PMO (Pasteurized Milk Ordinance) which is like the milk producers bible and is what we had to ensure all our construction plans adhered to when building. We are required to reduce the temperature to a certain level in a certain amount of time (50 F or 7 C or less within 2 hours of the completion of milking). We're freezing the milk, but a regular fridge/freezer or chest freezer doesn't have the capacity to lower the temperature fast enough, hence our purchase last year of the laboratory freezer.

On a personal level I am looking forward to the time when we can shear the sheep and the wet weather ends. Cleaning them at the moment before milking is the biggest chore.

This week we plan on starting to make some cheese finally. We're producing enough milk on a daily basis now so its just a question of exactly where we are going to go with the cheese. We have already got a list of maybe a dozen we are going to experiment with, but there are a core 3-4 we want to concentrate on. One of the lessons I have learned from other cheesemakers is that you should choose a small number to use as your starting point rather than trying to produce lots of different varieties. Only selecting a few means we can perfect the process quicker.