here a goat, there a goat...

last saturday, a coworker, boyfriend and I visited a local raw goat milk dairy, St.John's Creamery. http://stjohncreamery.com/index.html it took only ten minutes to get there. and it was at the end of a normal looking neighborhood street. Marcia St.JOhn, the owner was very nice and showed us all around and introduced us to her animals. the goats where very quietly and friendly. she calls them all by name and they come running.



i took a lot of pictures, which you can see at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2062124&id=27500177&l=88b955acc3

i shot a little video:





i missed the part where marcia was talking about a clinic in the 20s and 30s that took patients that had TB and such, and put them on an all raw milk diet, and they all improved, even after medicine hadn't done anything for these people. the doctor was then convinced that food is the key to health.

there has been a mutation in Holstein cows, in australia i think she said, in the casein protein has started to cause autism and diabetes in children, both rising helth issues. so when it was found, the changed the genetic stock of their cows. this was 3 years ago, and most of the USA has never heard of this.

info tidbits:
the currently USDA leader thinks that raw milk is a human pathogen. it's a shame that the government is so overprotective of the people's health that it usually ends up hurting them.

I didn't know that goat milk burns alkaline in the body, but cow milk,even raw, becomes an acid. goat milk also doesn't cause phlegm in the human body like cow milk does.

the udders on the goat are separate, closed systems. milk doesn't flow from one side to the other.

you can keep milking a goat doe for a long time after she has a kid, years even. of course the milk will slow down in the winter, but it can come back in the spring ,even without a new kidding.



i asked marcia why there is no raw butter and yogurt. selling them is illegal right now. the yogurt is probably because it's harder to control the bacterial growth when you don't start from a pasturized clean slate. butter on the other hand.. marcia said when you separate out the cream, you are taking out the milk sugars (which bacteria feed on) and you are using the milkfat. so it should be pretty safe since you've removed the part the bacteria feed on.


she gave us free samples of milk. i can taste the similiarities between goat butter that i had in the past. i know tht when people hear "goat milk" they think os something stinky, gooey, or maybe even chunky! but it's very much like cows milk, but with a slightly different taste.

SongCroft

This post is way overdue since this event was on 10/10/10. SongCroft is a very small family farm. more like a house with a large garden, lots of pets, and a forested field. the couple teaches small groups of people to be more self-suffient, with gardening, canning, bee keeping, and animal care.
this event at song croft was part of 350.org, to raise awareness of greenhouses gases, and they celebrated withe a barter fair to encourage local trading and reusing, and a cider pressing of the fall apple harvests.
http://songcroft.com/
i really liked the place (wish it was my house!)

Ducks in a row


little boy at the cider mill. Raw apple cider for all!



broccoli


chard , i didn't realize until now that their dog, Willow, is in this picture.



Sweetie Dairy goats. Raw milk right in their back yard!









Chickens! i think they have 43!






Bunny that lives in the greenhouse

Bates Farm

I'm drinking raw milk right now, that came out of a jersey cow, either Anabelle or her daughter Sophie, less than two days ago. It's whole milk, un pasteurized, unhomogenized. it feels velvety smooth and tastes like, well, milk, but a little more buttery since it has the cream left in (which makes it a creamy color also.) the aftertaste is, like cheese? but not bad.



But let me tell you about the farm! Today i tagged along with my coworkers Beth and Teresa to visit Bates farm outside of Arlington, WA. We met the owner, Don Bates, who also has a chiropractic office there. first we went to the room where the milk it brought to be bottled and stored. it's really just a little kitchen in a cabin with a big sink for washing tools and a fridge for the milk.


then we saw the milking station, which is vacuum pumped, he doesn't do it by hand. he said from the whole process takes about 40 minutes, from fetching the cows to bottling. he milks the two cows twice a day and right now he is getting 4.5 gallons ( i can't remember if that is from the cows combined or not, from each milking) but he sometimes gets twice as much. right now the cows are "drying off" before they "freshen" again , that is, have another calf and start making milk again.

(From right to left: Ferdinand, Anabelle, Pearl and Sophie)

then we met the cows. there is the mother cow, Anabelle. don started with her three years ago just as the family cow that he kept in the neighbors yard. the elderly meighbor has fond bovine memories and gave him use of the land to pasture the cow(s). Annabelle's first calf is named Sophie. then this year Sophie had a steer named Ferdinand, and Anabelle has another heifer, named Pearl.
Here they are!




They graze on about 10 acres of land and eat grass and alfalfa pellets. they have a forest area with trails they can wander and they hide under trees when the weather gets bad. we got to pet them all (except Pearl, who is very shy) and i even got headbutted in the leg by Sophie. the cows were friendly and followed us around.






Don gave us each a half gallon of milk, 6 eggs, a giant zucchini, a glove of "chinese pink " garlic, and some salmon.! he said he used to have about 40 chickens but now he only has 7. he has production Rhode Island reds, and a banny cross? which i guess is a bantam of some kind. we didn't look at the chickens because this was really a cow event :)

I will try to let the cream rise to the top of my milk and use it to make raw butter! i know whole milk has a lot of fat in it, but i heard something about when it is raw, your body uses the fat differently. i can't quite remember what that was about.

we didn't talk very much about raw vs. conventional milk, but Don said something interesting.. he is pulling out of another seller, partial because they are trying to force him to put expiration dates on the milk he sells. "people that are familiar with raw milk look for the production date, they check that, and they smell it. if it smells off, they bake it in a cake or make it into yogurt. milk doesn't expire, it just changes."


more cow pictures available here: http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v713/feffy88/Bates%20Farm/