Return To Spring 1996 Index
This was reported by the Financial Times of 9 Feb.1996 to be the response from customers when served extended life milk on flights by some leading British airlines. A first class product which stays fresh for up to 28 days in refrigeration and which tastes superior to UHT milk or non-dairy creamers, must appeal to caterers seeking to serve discriminating consumers and fully deserves its success.
We read this news with interest and then we wondered: how many people have tasted really fresh real milk? By this we mean raw, unpasteurised milk, simply filtered and cooled, and then consumed within a day. All natural foods: milk, eggs, fruit, and vegetables taste better when really fresh.
For more than twenty years our smallholding activities have centered on fresh milk (and its by-products) and we have become more and more convinced that the only way to get it truly fresh is to produce it yourself.
In 1975 we read Street and Singers excellent publication The Backyard Dairy Book and learnt of the alarming figures concerning adulteration of milk from commercial herds with antibiotics used to treat mastitis and other udder troubles. Knowing that one of us is allergic to penicillin, we took the plunge into goat keeping. At that time, shortage of land precluded our keeping a house cow, and although we have since had sufficient land to enable us to keep a very fine Jersey cow we found that the milk from her never really equalled good goats milk in either flavour, or overall usefulness.
In addition, we found that the yield from a good Jersey at its peak was far more than our small family of four could comfortably manage . Yet, because of the need to mate the cow every year there was a period when there was no milk available at all. On the other hand, two goats each with a lactation period of nearly two years gave us a continuous and reasonably consistent flow of very high quality milk.
The supplier of our first goats was emphatic that we read David Mackenzie's Goat Husbandry and this, the goatkeepers bible, has influenced us greatly. We have fed as much natural food as possible and have been particularly careful to ensure an adequate daily supply of fibrous material such as brambles, ivy, ash, oak and hawthorn in addition of course to constantly available high quality hay. As a result, our goats have been remarkably healthy, the kiddings have been easy, and the vet's bills astonishingly low.
For some years we have grown all our own fruit and vegetables, the surplus of which is fed to the goats. This, after all is only fair because goats manure is a large part of the compost in which the plants are grown. This is a very tidy and elegant arrangement and one which gives us great satisfaction.
All this comes at a price: someone has to be available at least twice a day for 365 days a year for the milking alone, and then ideally there are two more feeds a day plus regular cleaning out. In these days of increasing mechanisation a certain amount of hard physical work can only be of benefit, and is justified by the joy of bringing in twice a day a good supply of real milk with real flavour.
As with our fruit and vegetables and eggs, all our milk is for home consumption either by the family or our other livestock. In 1995 the total milk from three goats was 2363 kg : this fed four kids, made 22.8 kg soft cheese, 8 kg yoghurt, and 83 kg cream.
The cream in its turn made 25 kg butter, buckets of ice cream and enhanced much of our cooking. The skimmed milk was set with rennet and fed to chickens as an important protein feed and they in their turn supplied us with high quality well flavoured eggs.
Increasingly tough UK legislation concerning adulteration with antibiotics has removed much of the risk we originally sought to avoid, but we still remain more than ever convinced that nothing can better the satisfaction, AND the taste of producing your own milk.
