The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Goats => Topic started by: susanrich93 on May 06, 2019, 10:54:36 pm
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I am after some advice, our girls are 18 mths old and one seems to have developed a udder. They are from high yealding milk lines, we did want to put them in kid some time so we had could milk them. However now looks like one is a maiden milker, this is a bonus. I need advice as to weather i can start milking her. We dont need large amounts of milk but enough to make cheese would be great.
My questions are, can i milk her?
What equipment do i need?
Any other advice would be great.
Thanks in advance.
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Thank you this is helpful,
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I always milked into a stainless steel bucket but a plastic one will do so long as it can be thoroughly cleaned; wipes or cloths (butter muslin works well) as SD has said; either purpose made filters or, as I did, a piece of butter muslin laid over a plastic sieve for straining any hairs or bits of straw, etc; containers to store the milk in. As my OH won't drink goats' milk, we had plastic milk bottles which I soaked by filling them with very hot water and a squirt of washing up liquid,( added afterwards or you end up with a bottle of foam) and left overnight. I found I could use the same bottle over and over again. A lot of equipment can be obtained from https://gnltd.co.uk/ (https://gnltd.co.uk/) and other places.
I chose not to pasteurise because (a) it destroys a lot of good bacteria as well as bad (b) if you are careful with cleaning the equipment you won't have problems anyway (c) it tastes better raw (d) it's a lot of faff that I didn't 'need' to do.
Of course, if you decide to start making cheese, you will need other equipment as well.