how to milk a goat–by emmeline

In May we drove our truck up north and bought two mama milking goats and 4 more babies.  Before we got them we had to build a red neck camper on the back of the truck.  And we had to build milking stands.  Hazel and Dad built them.  Then we came home and we figured out how to milk them and we milked them.  It was kind of hard the first time.  But now I can do it all by myself with a sibling.

There are two different ways to milk a goat.  One is to milk it with a machine.  and two is to milk it by hand.  First I’m going to tell you how to do the machine.  First you have to make sure the goats have something yummy to eat otherwise they kick while you’re milking them.  What you do is you put hot water on a paper towel and soap and clean the udders.  They are very dirty and you don’t want that in your milk.  And then you put the suction cuppy things on their teats and you let it pump for about like 5 minutes until there udders are wrinkly and there is no more milk pumping out.  Then you take the things off the teats and you get the goats off of the milking stand and put them outside.  Before you put them outside you spray their teats with a special spray so that they don’t get sick. 

Then you have to clean the machine.  That is the hard part.  So what you do is you fill two buckets with clean water and you put the suction cup things in one of the buckets and you let it pump until it pumps out half of the water.  Then you put in boiling water and a little bit of soap. You let that pump up all the rest of the water.  And then you put the suctions in the other bucket of water and you let them pump out all of the water.  This rinses out all the soap out of the tubes.  Then you let everything dry.

Now for the fun part. I wish I could show you but I’m going to try to explain it.  To hand milk what you do is you get the goats on the stand and clean them and make sure they have a LOT of food.  Then you sit by them and you put your thumb and your pointer finger around the top of the teat to trap the milk in there.  Then you squeeze the milk out finger by finger until you get to your pinky.  And then you let go to let it fill up again.  And then you do it all over again until the teat is wrinkly and no more milk will come out.  The teat feels kind of like skin, like cold skin, but it is warm.  Sometimes the goats step in the bucket so you have to feed that milk to the animals.  To avoid that you have to hold onto the bucket and whenever they kick you pull it away.  Another trick is to lean your head or your shoulder into the goats side and that lets them know that you’re there and you’re in charge.

After we milk the goats we make cheese out of the milk or we just drink it.  Peter likes to drink it straight from the goat’s teat.  That seems gross to me.  But Peter thinks it’s yummy.

I am the only person that likes goat cheese except for my mom and my dad. And Peter is the only one besides my mom who likes the milk.  And Hazel and Charlie don’t like anything with goat milk in it.  They say say it tastes too barney.

So if you ever want goat milk, come here.  We have too much!