Diary of a retired goat milker.

My days as a goat milker are coming to an end. I will honestly say I won't miss it. I think it's an interesting task to complete in life but I have no desire to ever milk anything again. Dym has done wonderfully teaching me the ins and outs of milking. She's put up with my inexperience in the beginning. My total lack of knowledge that almost resulted in a bad case of mastitis, but luckily it didn't. We were in a nice routine there of milking twice a day. Her kids were growing like weeds, the milk was flowing. I got her down to once a day milking about a month and a half ago. My life got easier. Now we are nearing the four month mark and I'm ready to move on from this gig. The kids are now ginormous, she's done a wonderful job raising them. Dym is a very good mother and I'm thrilled I didn't have to bottle feed them....from what I hear that's a miserable job.

Two weeks ago I started the daunting job of drying up a dairy goat. I went from milking her once every evening, to milking her once every other evening. It was like I was alive again! For one solid day I didn't have to haul the milking machine out to the shop, lead her in, make her jump up on the milking stand, hook her up and hold the machine under her teats for 10 minutes while my knees screamed out in agony. I didn't have to bring in the equipment and sanitize it. I was free! That first time I milked her after skipping a day I got two gallons of milk out of her. Two gallons. Can you imagine carrying two gallons of milk between your legs? She's a 150 pound goat, so that would be like me with two gallon jugs of milk hanging there. To say she's a good milk goat would be an understatement.

So I did the every other day milking for two weeks. Today I'm changing it to taking two days off between milkings. We'll do this for a week or two. I thought everything was going to go smoothly and she'd be dried up by the end of May. That is until I looked out the window this weekend and saw that sneaky little baby boy goat nursing away. He's got to be nearing the 90 pound mark and there he was crouched under her nursing. Guess I'm going to have to separate the kids from Dym. I hope the neighbors like a whole lot of screaming goat babies. Lord help me.