I went in and picked up the other one, examined her. A girl. I sprayed her dangling umbilical cord with iodine, dyeing my hands yellow. The little nanny screamed and struggled in my hands. Something long and wet slapped the back of my arm, and I looked up in shock.
Buddug was eating the afterbirth (as all prey animals do, to avoid leaving a blood trail), which drooped out of her mouth like a slimy, gory piece of pasta. Hearing her kid call, she’d swung her head around and smacked me with the long, dangling thing. I’m surely going to be sick now, I thought. But I wasn’t.
Then Buddug dropped the afterbirth, which draped itself neatly over the shoulders of the deformed male kid. He staggered under its weight, and cried out. If my hands hadn’t been so goopy, I would have put my head in my hands and cried. But I couldn’t – they were covered with slime, iodine and purple foot-spray. Just as well – crying wouldn’t have been any use.
I went indoors to wash my hands and get a pair of gloves. I wasn’t prepared to handle that afterbirth with my bare hands, even after three years on the farm. But I couldn’t leave it wrapped around the little billy. By the time I came back, the afterbirth was gone – mercifully vacuumed up by Buddug.
When Benji came home, he was overjoyed to hear that Buddug had had a girl. He went straight out to see her and came in to announce that her name would be Daisy. A good name. The little male will have to be put down.
6 April 2011
Brutal day today – I was up at 6 a.m., and on the road for a two-hour drive to Cardiff, where I spent all day taking an intensive bookkeeping course on software called QuickBooks, so that I can keep our business accounts. An endeavour as foreign to me as flying to the moon! As my artistic mother says with horror, ‘It’s not in your DNA!’ And she’s right. But I find that you can do an awful lot that’s not in your DNA, with a bit of determination.
I drove home and arrived to find that Rich had brought in a big load of sand to render out the dairy, fixed his Land Rover (the one we thought was dead!) and got the milk machine going, so that it milked out the nightmarish Seren in two minutes flat.
Ron had been up on the scaffolding, painting the house, bless him. And feeding all the baby animals, of whom there are many at the moment. Another lamb had been born while I was gone. It needed nursing, so we brought it inside by the Alpha, warmed it up, wrapped it in a towel and fed it some of the extra colostrum that we milked off Buddug – since she had twins and the poor little male didn’t make it, she’s got twice as much as she needs, so we milked off the yellow creamy stuff and stashed it in the freezer. A tiny tub of it goes for £22 in the freeze-dried powder form, so we have riches stored away!
Wednesday is supposed to be our date night, but it was 9.20 p.m. by the time we were finished with all the animals, so Rich and I just called it a day and stumbled to bed. Tomorrow I have another class to get me up to snuff on business skills – this one on taxes.
15 April 2011
Getting licensed to sell raw goat’s milk has turned out to be a major challenge! I started out by phoning the council, the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) – anyone I could think of who might have information. The council, in particular, was irritatingly unhelpful.
‘I’d like to get licensed to sell raw goat’s milk,’ I told the woman on the other end of the phone. ‘Can you steer me to the appropriate department?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Riiiiight,’ I said. ‘Can you let me speak to someone who might know?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said again.
‘Can you even tell me which government body handles this sort of thing? Where I should begin to make enquiries?’
‘No.’
I hung up and phoned the Grants from the goat club. Ian gave us the name of his dairy inspector. I phoned this person, and he gave me the name of our local inspector. I phoned that person, and asked him to come round.
Turns out he was a very nice young bloke named Mike.
‘Mike,’ I said, refilling his mug with tea. ‘Why was it so hard for me to find you?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘they’d like to ban raw milk altogether. But as they can’t, they just make it as difficult as possible.’
Unfortunately for the powers that be, opposition just hardens my resolve. If I wasn’t determined before, I certainly was now! I pressed on.
Eventually the facts began to emerge from the confusing red-tape muddle. We needed two different kinds of inspectors: one to inspect the process from animal to tank and another from tank to gate. I found and contacted the second inspector, asking the advice of both as we set up the dairy and milking system. We got a lot of good advice from them, and because we involved the inspectors in the process, we were able to set things up properly from the beginning. I phoned them and phoned them, until they begged me to stop contacting them. Rather too much inspection than too little, I figured!
And finally, we were there. We were done. TB-tested, brucellosis-free, barns inspected, HACCP (Hazard Analysis And Critical Control Points) in place. Milk micro-checked, paperwork in order. Licensed, registered and legal to sell raw goat’s milk! I’ve done a lot of difficult things in my life, but I truly think that whipping the paperwork involved in this project was the most difficult. But very, very satisfying.
We invited some friends around, cracked open a bottle of wine, and after a long and hilarious evening, we came up with a name for the business. Not Laughing Goat – too much like Laughing Cow. Smiling Goat – too milky, Giggling Goat – too silly. But how about chuckling? Babies chuckle, brooks chuckle, wise men chuckle. So be it: Chuckling Goat was born.
25 May 2011
Things have been spinning so fast that I haven’t had a chance to write my diary! We’ve actually sold our first few pints of milk – I was so proud as I looked at them lined up like little soldiers. They got loaded into Taid’s old orange cool box and away we went – five to the farm shop in Sarnau, five to the health food shop in Newcastle Emlyn. They seem to be selling pretty well – we now have some more in the Carrot Cruncher store in Newcastle Emlyn, and got word that another shop in Aberporth wants them as well.
It’s such tiny money – four and five pounds at a time – but I carefully keep track of it in the envelope where our weekly takings are recorded. Small acorns, small acorns, I chant under my breath. Keep the mighty oak in the mind’s eye, and don’t get discouraged.
In the meantime, we’ve finalized the packaging for the soap. It’s lovely – unbleached cotton bags with a drawstring and the logo, inspired by an old Celtic symbol, on the front. The bags cost a huge whack of money – so I’m holding my breath that it’ll all work, and we’ll earn the money back. I want to find some new silicon moulds for the soap that have our symbol on them.
And I need to make some soap to sell! And the labels keep coming back with typos and errors!
In the meantime (the other meantime?), I’ve spent two days at Food Centre Wales at Horeb, with the fantastic team there, trying to develop our probiotic kefir smoothies. We spend two and a half hours slowly and tortuously bringing the goat’s milk up to a boil, stirring it the whole time. The result was a nasty mess that tasted like goat sick, and all the flavourings I’d brought with me didn’t disguise the horrible goaty flavour.
When I asked Margaret Grant what I’d done wrong, she laughed. ‘I always just whack it up on high heat, boil it as fast as possible, then simmer for 15 minutes. Heating it slowly like that just gives the bacteria time to develop, and will make it taste horrible. Stirring it the whole time batters it – just boil it quick and leave it alone!’ So much for data sheets. I’ll stick with Mrs Grant’s advice from now on.
Good news is that I contacted Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride, the wonderful doctor who wrote the book about the GAPS diet that seems to have worked so well for Rich. She said that she was eager to try our goat’s milk kefir, and asked if we’d like to contribute our story to her book of success stories, which of course we would!
And
our proudest moment, when she actually wrote us an endorsement. It’s on our website, and the way I feel at the moment, I may actually have it tattooed onto my bicep!
She said: ‘I have tried the raw goat’s milk and the goat’s milk kefir probiotic from the Chuckling Goat, and they are wonderful! The taste and flavour are clean and pleasant, and I’m sure that any child or adult will like it. Many people can’t tolerate cow’s milk, so this is a perfect alternative. Goat’s milk has a different protein profile, which makes it more compatible with human physiology and easier to digest. That’s why in clinical practice children and adults generally tolerate goat’s milk much better than cow’s.’
Very proud moment, when we read that.
Rich and I have been pole-axed by the amount of work involved in running a business. What were we thinking??!
At the moment we have 16 goats, we’re milking six, and feeding nine goat kids three times a day. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, like today, Rich goes off to work at the harps and I’m here on my own. (They’ve asked him to come back for more days, but so far he’s resolutely resisted. It’s scary, because we’re not making enough yet to replace his salary – but if we don’t have his time and energy behind it all, we never will.)
That means I drop Joli and Benji at school at 8.30 a.m., then come back, feed all the goats, turn on the milking machine, wipe and milk the milkers, put fresh straw and hay out for all the goats, put extra milk into the bottles, feed the nine kids, who are now old enough to jump out of their pens, put their hooves up on my chest and fight each other – and me – for the milk!
Then the milk churn has to be hauled into the house (because the dairy’s not finished yet), where the milk is filtered and bottled. Only one bright spot – because we’ve found a cheap source of milk bottles, we don’t have to rinse, wash and disinfect recycled bottles. But the nine kid bottles still have to be washed three times a day.
And then any deliveries have to be made. And then maybe I sit down and have some breakfast. There’re maybe two hours in the middle of the day to do computer chores, things like editing the final proofs of the book I’m co-writing with my boss, Peter Meyers, at Stand & Deliver. Or doing the soap labels. Or writing copy for the website. Or meeting with the computer guy to buy a reconditioned laptop that will actually run my business accounting software, since the bank neglected to tell me that it wouldn’t work on my Apple Mac. And this after I’d already spent that whole day learning how to work with this particular software….
Then there’s shopping, dinner prep, picking up the kids from school. And the whole two-hour milking-feeding routine has to happen again at night, after supper, before we fall into bed.
Goats, we say sometimes, looking at each other. Who’d have them?
It’ll all get easier, we tell each other. It must. Little acorns. Little acorns…
26 May 2011
… and tonight, like every night, I emerge from the busy warmth and work and worry of the barn to my own private revelation stretched out over the hills down to the ocean, like the best bit of Narnia. Involuntarily, I put the buckets down, lean over the gate and stare, the wind from the Irish Sea fresh into my face.
Last night, smoky clouds, a silver sky over a silver sea. The night before, a bronzed mirror smeared with peach and turquoise. Tonight, a spill of liquid gold sideways onto all the backlit trees, marking each leaf with unbearable significance. In view of such a sight, I can forgive my enemies and bless everyone… well, nearly everyone.
No, then again, maybe not.
Not yet, anyway.
27 May 2011
A grey, tired morning. Deliveries to make today. Glenda still has a scabby udder, so her milk can’t go into the bucket. And last night Buddug looked okay to begin with, but at the end her milk came out pink. It had already gone into the communal bucket, so the whole thing had to be tipped.
I have a magic back-fixer man and he tells me I shouldn’t be lifting such heavy milk pails. I just laugh – what am I meant to do? Who’s going to lift them if I don’t? Rich woke up this morning with a stiff back as well – he cancelled his appointment yesterday because we ran out of time; I was finalizing the copy edits to the book, which had to go back to New York by that very afternoon, and then my boss Peter e-mailed at the last minute asking for help for a client of his, an American governor who needed assistance with writing the end of a speech. I thought the speech was terrific, very moving, and sat down to try to write the governor a proper conclusion, in the midst of everything else.
Rich came in to say that I should have told him in advance that I had work to do, so he could have got up earlier. I shouted at him that of course I always had bloody work to do, what did he think? So he went away and cancelled his physio appointment; they took him off the books, and now his back is out.
And on top of everything else, now I want harness goats… Margaret Shackles has two lovely identical little castrated males who’d look absolutely superb in harness, pulling Joli and Benji down the road on Barley Saturday. (This is the wonderful annual event in Cardigan, when they shut down the whole town, and run stallions down the high street.) Another fantasy, probably, that has nothing to do with the realities of feeding the little things for two years, getting them into harness, training them, trying to get them to cooperate.
I told Margaret Grant that I wanted them, and she laughed at me. ‘Get your money coming in first,’ she said. Rich said the same. But I still want them.
Made some of my Pecka Pickled Peppers this evening. Delicious. At least one thing went right today.
30 June 2011
The end of an absolutely horrendous week. We’re back working at the Food Centre Wales again, trying to develop our kefir smoothies. The first time, of course, it went horribly wrong – 40 litres (70 pints) of milk down the drain.
Only slightly daunted, I returned, armed with 100 litres (175 pints) of milk this time. That’s an awful lot of milk. Ten really big buckets full. We planned to run it through the high-tech pasteurizer that zips through 100 litres in 15 seconds, at a lower temperature. Hoping that the goaty flavour wouldn’t be such a problem, if we did it like this.
The first day I went in, the pasteurizer popped a plate and started spraying green chemicals all over the floor. The pretty blonde technician clapped her hands to her cheeks in horror – not reassuring. So we siphoned all 100 litres out of the huge vat, back into the buckets I’d brought it in.
Shann’s Pecka Pickled Peppers
900g (2lb) sweet (bell) peppers
450g (1lb) apples
½ tsp salt
2 medium onions
1 tbsp lemon juice
¼ tsp fresh root ginger
115g (4oz) sultanas
225g (8oz) brown sugar
600ml (1 pint) white vinegar
Peel the onions and apples, and chop them up finely.
Place in a pan with the sugar, salt, vinegar, ginger and lemon juice and boil for 30 minutes.
Deseed the peppers and cut them into small cubes.
Add the peppers and the sultanas to the pan and simmer for 15 minutes.
Transfer the pickle to jars while it’s still warm.
The buckets went back into the fridge, and I went home.
The next day I went in there was another problem with the machine. I went home again.
By then, the milk was on the verge of going off – and we were very close to losing all of it, plus the fees for the facility. Luckily, yesterday, the pasteurizer decided to bless us by working, and zipped through all 100 litres like a dream. A good thing, because I really wasn’t looking forward to coming home and telling Rich that it had all been a waste. Two unsuccessful tries would shake his faith in the Food Centre – and I really can’t see any other way for us to get approval to make our products.
So today, I went back to experiment with flavourings. There’s a camel-choking amount of paperwork to do. One of the very kind and helpful employees at the Food Centre sat down with me at a long table,
and went through the whole process for several hours. I dutifully took notes, but could feel my eyes glazing over with tiredness and disappointment that it was all going so badly.
Rich is back at the harps again, so I’m on my own with all the barn chores. And on Saturday it’s the massive barn dance/ barbecue that we have every year for our joint birthdays – Benji’s and mine.
Benji’s birthday is on Christmas Day, so we celebrate his half birthday in the summer, with a bouncy castle and an assault course. We set the bouncy castle up for the kids in the afternoon, and keep it up after dark for the adults, who play drinking games and have a whale of a time. This year we’ll have Shetland pony rides as well, because my birthday present from Rich was a matching pair of Shetland ponies! But I’m just dreading the event this year, and wishing that the whole thing was over, and that I’d never agreed to do it in the first place.
When Rich asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I really couldn’t think of anything. Clothes? Shoes? Handbags? Jewellery? It all seemed ridiculous, in my constant mud-and-goat-poo-stained state. My favourite place to shop is the army surplus store, where I can get cheap, warm and fleecy things to pull on before I go to the barn.
But then we went to visit some friends, Lou and Rob, and Lou had just got a Shetland pony. The tiny chestnut-coloured horse was adorable, with a quiff of blond mane between his ears. I felt a pang of acquisitive lust. Lou told me that her friend had two matched little Shetland stallions going spare, needing a good home. I immediately had visions of them pulling a cart, ribbons in their manes and tails; Benji in a cowboy outfit driving them down Cardigan high street. And suddenly, I knew exactly what I wanted for my birthday – Shetland ponies!
I got those harness goats, as well. They are gorgeous, with their shiny white and chestnut patterning, and worried wrinkled foreheads. Benji promptly dubbed them Roy and Trigger, as he’s going through a Roy Rogers phase. We love them. But they’re only tiny, and they won’t be able to pull a cart for two years.
Secrets from Chuckling Goat Page 10