GOAT FARM

The farm. I LOVE saying those words. Valle di Mezzo, valley in the middle. The peace and tranquility and steepness of the little valley makes me feel far far away when in realty we are only three miles to the active community of Anghiari in its castle setting. The 75 acres comprising the farm are divided between little cleared fields, chestnut forest, olive grooves, woods and tiny river valley. The house and barns are situated at an elevation of 1,400 feet above sea level, with the valley floor at 1,200 and the surrounding mountain peaks on our little valley at 3,300 feet.

Our main farming focus is the raising of dairy goats and the production of artisanal cheeses. We raise Camosciate delle Alpi goats, known as Oberhasli in the anglo speaking world. Medium sized, dark red color, great mothers, wonderful foragers, friendly animals who give a sweet, non-goaty tasting milk. Right now in the barn we have 75 females and two males. The males are rotated out after doing two breeding seasons with us. 75 goats going thru the milking parlor takes about 1.5 hours to milk them all and get the milk room cleaned up. We milk twelve goats at a time with usually two of us doing the milking so it does get done quickly but it is a busy time. I usually have the music blasting while I milk...and I sing...

ONLY if I am milking alone. The goats are milked at 5:30 am and 5:30 pm everyday from when they have babies in February until we stop milking at the end of October/begining of November. We have some real champions in the milk line-up, giving over 9 liters per day, well over 2 gallons. We also have lots of first time milkers (first time mothers recently added to the milking group) who usually don't give so much their first year but come into full production on their 2nd year milking. Our herd average is about 3 liters per animal per day.

As I write this (January 5, 2010) the goats are all pregnant and lounging in the barn getting larger by the day. It's covered in snow and a bit wet outside and my goats do not do wet! First scheduled births are on or about January 25 this year and then the babies will come in waves (with the moon rising and falling) until about the end of March. They usually have twins but triplets are common and first time mothers hopefully will have just one. We are hoping for about 130 new kids born this year. We usually take the kids at birth and bottle feed mothers milk to them.

The kids turn out much friendlier, the separation from mother is less traumatic and we can start cheese production sooner. We make cheese almost daily (with an odd day off) from March to October transforming all milk into cheese. To insure a healthy happy animal and therefore great tasting milk for cheesemaking, animal welfare is number one on my priority list. The barn where they sleep is extremely roomy so no overcrowding stress. The same for the feeders, everyone has place to eat peacefully without threats from a neighbor.

The goats are fed organic grains and feed while on the milk stanchion so they are happy to come in twice a day for stressfree milking. After morning chores are finished the entire herd, boys, girls, babies goes on a 3-4 hour walk thru the fields, woods, hills to browse for their favorite foods. We do not have fenced pastures here at Valle di Mezzo so the goats have the great luck of roaming where they will. Our neighbors are extrememly supportive and invite us to take our animals to their lands to "clean up". They spend the mid day in the barn loofing about and chewing cud and then out again for another 3-4 hour afternoon excursion. Of course the goats are supervised when they go outside in the mornings by our wonderful helper Valerio and in the afternoons by me. Always of course in company of the dog Bo Bo. Living stress free in the big barn, plenty of exercise and sunshine outside while eating twigs and leaves and brambles makes for a happy, productive, long living goat. We have over 400 olive trees for great tasting oil.

The olives are picked and pressed in November. Oil is available for purchase. There is a large vegetable garden along with a henhouse which supplies our meat and eggs. We raise pigeons for meat, pigs for drinking all the whey from the milk room, and occasional rabbits, turkeys, and geese. There are also 40 bee boxes in our front pasture. They are not our bees as we have a great relationship with Lorenzo who puts his bee houses on our land, he does all the work and we get the pollination of hundreds of thousands of bees and LOTS of honey. We also have grape vines. Really really out of control grapevines BUT they do produce grapes and we do make wine with our neighbor Leonardo and a good time is had by all. I think our wine could best be described as "awful and a bit chewey" but we have fun and absoloutely NO time to focus on the winemaking. We also have plenty of woods for cutting. We usually arrange with a neighbor to do the cutting and give them half the wood in exchange. Works out best for us as we have no time for cutting what with my 3-4 hour leisurely goat hikes every afternoon.

I try to make as much hay as possilbe but not having all of the equipment and haying happening the exact time as full milk/cheese production, farmers markets, tourist season and a helper who doesn't drive the big tractor....I end up buying a lot of our hay.