overherd on the goat farm, iii

In response to a conversation about the movie Babies:

“Well, we think we have the reason that every culture has the same word for mama. [dramatic pause] Every culture domesticated goats!” — Jorja

Jorja’s right: baby goats DO make a loud, pleading noise, and it does certainly sound like “maaaaa! maaaa!” Furthermore, their crying is invariably followed by an urgent search and subsequent attack of the woman who’s given them everything. I can assure you of this from my firsthand experience; this farm is bursting with babies.

Baby goats really act like they’re full-time in a skate park. It’s as if they think they’re this little kid (watch the middle section, 0:53 or so, to get the idea), jumping and doing flips and giving each other high fives… or, at least, nose-bumps. They’re constantly hungry, harassing their moms and climbing atop them. When they really can’t wait any longer, they ram them, full speed. Sometimes the mamas’ hind legs kick up from the force. A male photographer from the local paper was here the other day, and he probably put it best: “Wow, they really smash their boobs, don’t they?” In my new-found effort to leave the emotions in the moment and avoid anthropomorphizing, I think I am allowed a “puppy clause” or something that says excuses can be made for cute and tiny little things.

A huge consequence of baby-mania is, of course, milking. At first it was only a few goats, and we only milked to make sure they emptied out during the day, but now we’ve gone in to full production mode.  We’re talking a 2+ hour operation of sterilization and goat wrangling and vacuum suction pumps.  It’s funny, because this is what we thought we were coming for: the kidding, the milking lessons, the pasteurization, and the cheese production.  In reality, the things we’ve learned practically could have happened on any farm, creamery or not.

Back when we were looking for farms, I’d really liked the sound of a blueberry farm only 45 minutes from Seattle, and Litoralis shot me down, saying, “What would we possibly do on a blueberry farm in January!?” I should have shot back with “what will we possibly do at a creamery in (the dead of winter) January!?” but we all know that there are no regrets in coming to this particular farm. The relationships we’ve created with Jorja and Penny are well worth any misconceptions we may have had, any change of plan in the cheese-making education. We have still eaten like royalty, learned a great deal, and benefited from the dairy herd in excellent — and unexpected — ways.

Jorja’s goal was to be in commercial production mode by March 1, but we all knew right away that was ambitious. Before any sellable cheese could be made, the milk and cheese rooms had to be refinished, sanitized, and put back together. We had to be sure that, in three days of milking (the largest window Penny lets her milk go before pasteurizing it), the goats and sheep would provide the minimum 10 gallons necessary to run the pasteurizer. We had to learn to milk.  And Penny and Jorja had business to attend to in Seattle, meaning we needed a crash-course in milking, so we could do it on our own.

Needless to say, like everything else in our time here, this, too worked out. Our first day of milking went surprisingly well. The worst thing that happened was Litoralis let loose all of the goats. Whoops. Fortunately, they are creatures of habit and we could fairly easily get all the goats back in the holding pen with the shameless lure of treats. Nothing like alfalfa pellets to snare them away from freedom.

As we tallied a few good mornings of milking on our belts, our sense of accomplishment soared. It is rewarding — and fitting? — that our last days are filled with the literally sweet successes of putting the creamery back in business.  Sheep milk lattes, cookies dipped in what looks like paint, silky thick yogurt, and the most creamy roux yet. Penny and Jorja never really aspire to year-round milking; it’s too hard on the animals and the humans, and the break is so welcome. Eventually, they’ll have hard cheeses that are aging all throughout the year, and the income stream will stay constant. But right now, it’s excitement and novelty, all the perks of farmfresh milk, along with unfreezing the pipes and resealing the floor and checking every day how many more ounces each goat is producing.

We couldn’t make the goal of March 1 cheese because of many factors, not the least of which being losing the experts to their weekend in Seattle.  Let’s not forget that Litoralis and I are actually total novices.  But Litoralis had a stroke of genius when we tried to think what to do with all the milk we were gathering. One entrance into Litoralis’ “personal hell” (aka Macy’s) later, we were in possession of our very own ice cream maker, and we were feverishly researching gelato recipes.

The difference between gelato and ice cream is that ice cream, true to its name, has cream in it; gelato comes from pure milk. But sheep milk — boasting almost double the milkfat content of cow milk, and chemically different such that the fat won’t separate without a centrifuge — seemed a sneaky trick to gelato; it’s almost like using cream but it carries the much richer flavor. Genius. We almost shouldn’t publish the recipe, because it was that good.  I think this gelato is the best example of how a window always opens when another door shuts — a useful lesson to keep in mind as we prepare to leave here and enter the job search with both feet. I hardly even care about the chevre anymore. (Well, okay, maybe I care a little bit…)

It’s not even worth trying to recreate the recpie here; I will direct you straight to this step-by-step direction guide for Unreasonably Good Gelato. Thanks to Frank Fariello of Memorie di Angelina for the recipe.

I was there in the room

blogger’s note: If you make it all the way to the end of this (either by reading or with that trusty scrolling feature), you will be rewarded by an adorable photograph.  Photo credits from this post go to Litoralis’ many-talented mama, Blou.

A long time ago (well, a few months), when I was explaining to my mom what I most wanted to experience on the goat farm, I had too much enthusiasm about being present for the birth of babies. She and my little sister told me to tone it down when describing what I thought it would be like, to be more gentle with the hand gestures I threw about. I think I was equal parts unprepared, idealistic, and ready for a change of scenery.

I remember clearly the palpable, electric anticipation of midnight, when I would wake for lamb duty, back in high school when I spent a semester on an organic farm. Every time I dragged myself out of bed (and I signed up a few more times than the average kid), I thought for sure it would be the night I’d see one of the sheep in all of her distressed glory. But I was never there at the right times. When we finally heard a baby lamb was coming, I leapt out of my chair (along with the rest of my peers) and ran down to the farm. As a sixteen-year-old, I had so much to say about my new experience of the miracle of life, after I stood in the barn, tightly gripping the wooden posts, wide-eyed and in total awe of what women can do. Not that I really have any more personal experience with birthing these days, but I’d like to believe my worldview has broadened. Perhaps that was the beginning of my fascination (obsession?) with pregnancies.

With the memory of my first lamb standing in sharp contrast, my experiences here with the lambing and kidding have been at the ends of the spectrum, either far more or far less dramatic. They’ve mostly been less dramatic. I was so eager to don my own pair of rubber gloves and reach up in there, spin a baby’s head and reposition her into the right place, let her slip out of the birth canal and into my arms. That hasn’t happened. Some of the imagined romance was lost when my first encounter with brand-new babies here happened simultaneously with the loss of our number one patient. I was unprepared for the sliminess, and there was no time for any emotions, romantic or otherwise. (You’ll recall Gemma saying, “Beat it! Like you mean it!”) Since then, babies have been popping out mostly unaided, and they’ve been often popped out during the rare moments when Litoralis and I are not around. I’ve decided, albeit begrudgingly, that this is pretty cool; obviously, nature designed both goats and sheep to be self-sufficient. It’s better all around — for this farm, for the mamas, for the babies, for the herd — if the mamas do their job right. But old dreams die hard, and I still wanted to see the whole shebang.

The first time I encountered a goat in labor was last week, when Jorja had sent me to farm chores while she finished sowing some seeds. I found a boer goat — of course, it would be our old friend Chloe’s sister, Chloris — laying on her side, panting. I dropped the bale of hay in my hands and rushed over to watch, not unlike my father’s dash to the television when he has just gotten home from church to gawk at the football score. My first thought was, “Wow! How wonderful! The head is coming out!” But then I thought, “Wow… hmm… only the head is coming out!” It became quickly apparent that something was wrong: the head was huge, and had a purple tinge, and was staying where it was.

I ran back to Jorja, yelling, “Chloris is having her babies!” Jorja didn’t stop the tractor, she just looked amused and nodded. I said, “It looks kind of weird!” She said, “It usually looks kind of weird,” and smiled knowingly (she’s seen a lot of babies — human and otherwise — come into the world). I said, “No, I think it’s a different weird,” and ran back to Chloris. When I turned around, Jorja was turning off the tractor to come investigate.

Jorja confirmed what I had feared, and she hastened to collect rubber gloves and warm water. While she was gone, I ripped the amniotic sac so the baby wouldn’t suffocate; it was clearly struggling to breathe (and had likely already broken the umbilical cord supplying its oxygen — did you know, unlike humans, most other mammals have thin umbilical cords that simply break during birth and heal on their own? Good one, Mother Nature. That knot-tying would have been a real pain without opposable thumbs.). Neither Jorja nor I had been near this part of the farm all day, so we had no idea how long Chloris had been in labor, with this baby stuck partially out. We speculated reasons for the difficult labor, and our primary hypothesis formed by extrapolating the baby’s size based on his gigantic head. It looked like Chloris was trying to deliver a buffalo.

Jorja’s attempts to reach inside kept falling short, because she couldn’t reach past his oversize neck. He smacked his lips every so often, but she wondered if he was dead, given the blue tinge and the tongue hanging limply from his little mouth. Jorja knew Chloris would die if the baby didn’t come out the rest of the way, and she figured if he was already gone she might as well pull on his neck (which would otherwise kill him) and get him out. She decided to try to reach a leg (deemed safe to pull) one more time. The whole thing was a display of varying types of excruciating pain: Chloris kept trying to stand up and walk around, and she was clearly experiencing the same scream-worthy sensations of other mammals, not aided by my straddling her and trying to keep her in place. The little baby looked near to death but kept fighting to stay alive. Jorja’s fingers kept getting crushed between the baby and Chloris’ pelvis at every contraction.

Once again, farm life reminded me that over-sentimentality has no place here. Jorja gasped with thankfulness that she found a leg, and the struggling baby practically pulled himself out once his shoulders were free. Baby goats are supposed to slip out with their noses and front hooves first, sort of football shaped, pretty quickly. This little dude had his arms by his side and his broad shoulders were no match for a normal birth canal. However, the rest of him was tiny. Once on the hay, his buffalo-like head was too big for the rest of him to hold up. Jorja and I wondered if he had some sort of birth defect. Lo and behold, while we were pondering, Chloris’ second baby started to appear, a nose with no hooves in sight. Jorja sighed and rolled her eyes, but put on a clean pair of gloves and (much more simply this time, since the head was much smaller) helped a second, totally-normal-looking boy slide into the world. Chloris looked kind of exhausted and kind of relieved, ate some treats but scoffed at the water, and started licking the birthing fluids off her two new babies.

Part of the challenge for me is to avoid anthropomorphizing the actions of these characters in my farm life drama. Where this story (or Dee Dee’s, the sheep who gave birth to triplets on Litoralis’ birthday but left two to die from hypothermia, or Chloe’s, or any others) would be heart-wrenching if the mothers were human, it is instead one of many tales illustrating the amazing feats and constant moving-on of nature. I was surprisingly (or not surprisingly?) unfazed once the babies were in reach of Chloris’ caring tongue. We wiped our hands on our pants and hustled to finish the farm chores in the fading light.

Jorja, imperterturbable, ready with rubber gloves (though this is Rheba, not Chloris)

The rest of this notwithstanding, I must admit I stationed myself in a front-row seat a few days later when Rheba was in real labor. Litoralis’ mom and I oohed and ahhed watching this goat go through all the stages she knows and I’ve heard about in human births.  There was the initial discomfort that led to the great discomfort, moving around that conceded to laying down, gigantic expansion and tremendous pushes, and a brand new slimy thing that burst, clambered, and stumbed into the bright and cold air.

I may have learned a thing or two since I was sixteen, but I am still in total awe of the shape-changing, the expanding, the aching, and the stretching mothers do — from the very first minute and from then onward — to bring their babies up. I think it’s something worth admiring. I know the Vagina Monologues are fraught with inadequacy but I think Eve Ensler wrote some of her best lines in the show’s finale, “I was there in the room.” We went to see the production last weekend at the local community college; the acting wasn’t that great, but I don’t think that’s the point. The show reminded me how good it is when people (not just women!) get together and give credit where credit is due, put value on valuable things (like women, and consent), and celebrate camaraderie. But anyway, enough from that soapbox.

You’ll be happy to know that Buffalo Bill had already lost his huge chops by his second day of breathing oxygen, and by now you can hardly tell which of the two came out with an oversized head. Jorja and I chalk it up to swelling, and nothing more, and now he and his brother are gigantuan baby goats, hopping around like all of these babies, making funny noises and causing trouble and climbing on their aunties.

And, through all this anthropomorphizing or not, and over-sentimentality or not, I do have to say that Buffalo Bill, his brother, and Chloe/Tanya’s two babies have special spots in my new animal-loving heart.  All those other babies who’ve been springing up around here, even Rheba’s who I watched during the entire process, are either going to get bred and milked one day, or are just 8 months away from being meat. I mean, they’re cute (well, they’re really cute) and stuff, but still. I’m trying to leave my emotions in the moment and move on. But I can’t help but love, just a little bit more, the babies I really helped out. Even though they’re probably going to be meat.

Look how good these kids (we're holding Chloe/Tanya's babies) are growing up

Lots to love

It feels like all of the sudden our farm life speed has ratcheted up, but in truth the acceleration has been ever since Jorja and Penny came back from Mexico. On the other hand, Litoralis’ mom was here this weekend while we (finally!) raised the barn, which made very apparent the contrast between non-stop action of the past few days and our “normal” routine. I am backlogging stories I want to tell about these animals (to whom I am admittedly attached), and the view, and my perspectives, and the Washington desert, and several other things. It’s so typical of me that I would start out with lots of energy and enthusiasm about sharing, but as I get more deeply invested, I put my time into the here and now, and the occasional allusion, instead of telling stories about it.

this accompanied a plate of smoked black cod and homemade mead (treats from Lit's home) as appetizers for our "fancy dinner" with Penny and Jorja in the garage

Today, Valentine’s Day, has always been a cause for celebration in my family. In my mom’s view, why pass up an opportunity for telling people you love them AND eating chocolate? That seems like a no-brainer.  Because we drove Litoralis’ mom back to the airport yesterday, we got to walk back into the pastures this morning with fresh eyeballs, revealing a fully-structured barn, puffy clouds on the horizon, and this place bursting with babies.  Even the mamas who were having a difficult time at first are all being really good mothers now, so at every turn we see lots of riotous kids bounding and exploring together, and receiving good, affectionate love.  A nice way to celebrate what, in Mexico, is “the day of love and friendship.”

Just in the last few hours we’ve gathered several story-worthy moments, and I owe you a recounting of the vet coming this morning, a slapstick wrestling match with three sheep named Mary, Shirley, and Jo, and baby goats all around.  These stories include giving every animal a TB test and drawing blood this morning, and somehow we managed to get the vet landing on her bottom in a pile of goat poop, race after Jorja as she dragged across the field gripping the wool of a runaway sheep, yank a goat back from a suicidal lunge through the fence, plus I did a face-plant on the ramp to the milk stand. We have some excellent photo documentation to share from Litoralis’ mom. It is Valentine’s day, though, as well as farmer bedtime; those will come at another entry.

I discovered this other blooger (typo — I’m leaving it) writing about the controversial holiday, and found the post to be a good reminder of things we mostly already know.  Click here for a list of suggestions on adding another dimension of thought to your celebration of Valentine’s day (or any number of holidays — or no holiday at all, but just a good day).

I wish you, too, had something fulfilling for dinner tonight, like a deep bowl of beef soup with orzo, followed by Mexican chocolate and Haagen-Daas. I hope you feel well loved and not too amazed that February (the shortest month of the year!) is already half-full. I love this farm, blemishes and all, and it’s unfathomable that we may be inside the two-week countdown to moving on.

A Résumé Builder

The past few days have been full of farm chores, of course, but also rich with applications, phone calls, and conversations about our post-farming paths. Here (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) are several ways we have been contemplating selling ourselves and this experience…

A. Facile ability to present complex lessons with both humor and sincerity.

In a theoretical artificial insemination lesson, Jorja rides the sow-in-heat while Jayne pantomimes where the turkey baster would go

B. Savvy project management skills; patient guide with resistant participants, committed to finding satisfying outcomes

Litoralis manages to contain the pigs’ excitement — and their imminent escape.

 

C. Invested in meeting students where they are; experience connecting in rural and urban settings.

(We think this was a shameless marketing ploy, in hopes of making the blog so we could link to the admissions website; we heard we have a big TSS following (shout out!) and so we’re taking the bait)

See also http://www.tetonscience.org, especially if you feel compelled to be an AmeriCorps volunteer or a graduate student…

 

D. Demonstrated success using joyful education to inspire life-long learners.

It’s not every day you learn to ride a pig

 

E. Acute attention to detail, track record of delivering high-quality results

An inside project: Jayne's new sewing machine made its big debut with these iron-on patches for her Voyageur campers

 

F. Eager to teach and learn in non-traditional classrooms, passionately invested in the well-being of kids.

This little kid just showed up yesterday morning (a drama-free birth by first-time mama Birdie), discovered at morning farm chores!

 

References available upon request.

The week in review

After a week of mostly ignoring the blog, Litoralis and I figured the most efficient way to catch up our “blogging public” would be to use the old thousand-word substitute. But pour a cup of coffee because it’s still a long update (are you surprised?). Each photograph (and Jayne-length caption) offers a glimpse of the continual saga unfolding here in Pleasantville. Perhaps the biggest lesson of this week is that farm life waits for no one. The drama is all relative, and nature keeps running her own course.

1. All the news that’s fit to text.

While on our two-day “holiday” in Seattle, Litoralis and I did little else than walk around with Indi and look for delicious things to eat. We made few plans and kept to ourselves, mostly. We did receive a few updates on how things were going back on the ranch, as Jorja sent a series of text messages to keep us informed. We’d been expecting a lamb or two, but nothing was happening on that front. However, one of the nubians, a beautiful cloud-colored goat named Tanya, started kidding a month early, which means something was wrong with the pregnancy and she was terminating it.

Jorja’s text message, pictured above, said, “So sad to watch her lick her dead babies. But there is a big plus side.”

We could only think of two possible benefits to Tanya’s sad end to her pregnancy, and we were hoping it meant immediate access to goat milk. However, it was the other (ultimately better) plus side: Tanya became a mother to Chloe’s three triplets! It required Jorja to rub the triplets in all of the birthing fluid, the placenta, and even drape the bodies of Tanya’s kids over the Chloe triplets so they would smell “right.” Jorja told us that Tanya sniffed all three of the triplets, looked once up at Jorja as if to say, “I thought mine were different…?” and then she started licking them and — poof! — the three miracle triplets gained a nurturing force of the right breed and all the right instincts. I won’t make a comment here about how those triplets, previously, had four (human) mommies.

2. It Takes A Village

As we already reported, Litoralis began her 25th year with a little goat to warm up. We actually spent most of Litoralis’ birthday trying to nurse the “big sister” of the triplets (not the runt) back up to warmth.  Unofficially, I’d named her Thalia, a synonym of “Chloe” still keeping with the Greek mythology theme. At first, Thalia was in the RV with us, taking a bottle. She’d been stuck outside of the cave and had clothes-lined herself in the electric fence (fortuitously not connected to the charge) so had missed a few feedings and was acting very confused. Our friends from Portland had come up for a surprise birthday visit. They were good for a voice of reason, reminding us that maybe having a goat in the bed is more bizarre than beneficial. They were also very useful in telling Indi not to investigate (or wrestle, or pounce, or lick) too closely.

3. On The Day You Were Born

Litoralis was delighted to learn that amidst Thalia’s tough evening, a baby lamb had arrived in the night! She decided this one was the cutest ever and therefore bestowed upon her the name “Jedita.” The birthday girl was excused from farm chores so she could field phone calls from the American Red Cross and others, but little Jedita came over to the RV for a visit.

4. Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch

Unfortunately, Jedita the lamb was supposed to have two sisters. Jorja and Jayne discovered, during farm chores, two frozen baby lambs who had either not made it in through the cold night or hadn’t succeeded in the womb. Jorja was stricken, and dismayed at the success rate of babies this year — far lower than their average (which has pretty much been perfect up to this point, in the seven years she and Penny have had farm animals). They have a much bigger herd this year than ever before, but Jorja is concerned about the moldy hay, or the low selenium in the soil on this side of the mountains, or something else she hasn’t discovered yet.

What impressed me was Jorja’s deep, thoughtful concern paired with an almost nonchalant gait, as I watched her carrying the dead lambs over to the compost pile. I guess this gets at some of my thoughts from all of the events of last week: I am learning that there is hardly time for emotion on a working farm. I am struggling with this, because it’s practically against my nature to acknowledge something and then just move on, but I am coming to see that — particularly if your business is running a profitable farm — sometimes it is necessary to take the next steps, and it would be crippling (for the business, and your own sanity) to get bogged down in feeling sad.  I haven’t decided yet if the same is true for joyous emotions, but my working hypothesis is that it is. Because while Litoralis held sweet little Jedita for a few minutes, it was soon time to return her to her mommy, cut open another bale of hay, fill up the water troughs, and build a barn.

5. Giving Back The Gift Of Life

Litoralis’ cousin had asked her if she was returning the favor on her birthday, and, as it turned out, she tried pretty hard. After a full day of checking in on Thalia, the chilly goat, we felt less and less certain that she was healthy. I had noticed that she was acting like she was drunk. She’d wobble around, couldn’t find Tanya’s teats, would bump into a corner instead of finding her brother and sister to cuddle with, only could lift herself to her elbows instead of all the way, and was making bizarre decisions. Jorja and I tried to milk Jedita’s mother DeeDee, so Thalia could have some good sheep milk, and while doing that Thalia managed to clothesline herself again, this time in some wire fencing. I found her, nose to the ground, twitching.

When Jorja called over the RV, I had just put all the pieces together myself. Obviously, Thalia wasn’t drunk — but she did look like she had ataxia (taught to me by my wilderness medicine teachers as “when you need a taxi, yeah?“), a classic symptom of hypothermia. Jorja asked if we could come over and help her, because she realized the baby wasn’t necessarily developmentally delayed but she was very cool to the touch. Even her tongue was cold. A rectal thermometer revealed a core temperature of 91 degrees; normal goat temperatures range from 101-104.

We’ve learned some alternate definitions to the phrase “hot-tubbing” in our rugby days, but this one might be the most obscure. During Litoralis’ birthday dinner, we all rotated through our turns, holding Thalia’s head above water and the rest of her body below, taking care not to let any water inside the plastic bag she was in. Putting a baby anything in a plastic bag goes against our best instincts. The whole thing was rather strange, to say the least, but we did get her up to 100.

It's all fun and games until someone loses a few core temperature degrees

6. All’s Well that Ends Well?

Of course, in the midst of everything, we still managed to get some work done.  And that’s not even taking into account the rest of the world: Jayne’s grandmother turning a healthy 96 or the turmoil in Egypt and Jayne’s aunt getting out of Cairo, or any number of things.  It’s almost too easy to put all our focus on these 20 acres. Photos below of our first kidding pen, ready now in hopes that no more babies go hypothermic, 21 hoops ready to be raised into a new “barn” (really a hoop house), and Cliff the builder as our birthday cake model, making Litoralis’ cake look almost as good as it tasted.

State Fair quality, bring in the 4H judges.

The smaller barn in the background is a mini-version of this hoop-house-to-be

The background gives away that we celebrated in the garage

Only on a goat farm

Litotalis never suspected she could begin her second quarter-century by cuddling with a baby goat. But last night (low of 19 degrees), this little baby got stuck outside her little cave in the (unplugged! thank goodness!) electric fence, and got very, very cold. Jorja woke us up by suggesting the birthday girl would like to snuggle.  We made her a hot water bottle and “forced” Litoralis to stay in bed a little longer, while smells of bacon and black tea wafted from (6 feet away) the kitchen. On the agenda still today: some animal feeding, hay stacking, a hike through the canyon, and Mediterranean lamb stew for dinner.

Happy 25th Birthday, Litoralis!

the first photograph taken at age 25 (for the human) and Day 7 (for the goat — who is trying to nurse from Lit’s fingers).

This Could Be Ewe

A few days away from the farm helped put in perspective several things, and provided a welcome break from, well, enemas and stuff. You know the old saying about absence and fond hearts, and our reunion dinner with Jorja and Penny last night lasted far past farmer bedtime and reverberated with laughter. In sum, this place is humble and simply full of happiness. The farm hums with animals living the way domesticated animals ought, people working in ways that make them happy and satisfied by day’s end, and enlivening breezes out of the north.

THIS COULD BE EWE! (or, YOU!!) In lieu of a longer post, Penny and Jorja are earnestly hoping for some more interns after we leave (starting as soon as March, and well into the summer). In particular, they really need milkers and feeders and animal lovers. I’ll post again — about this and about other stuff — but if you’re reading this and could imagine yourself or someone you know in the Cascades, living in an RV, eating unlimited farm-fresh eggs for breakfast and learning to make artisan goat cheese, let me know, because I have some new farmer friends who might like to meet you.