Ag and Culture

With my recent shift back to Sacramento (after the end of my internship milking goats) I was on the look out for ways to continue my dairy and cheese making education. Lucky for me, the Sacramento valley is a food producing mecca, with a blossoming int...

Like a fleeting summer in Alaska, my six month internship at Toluma Farms goat dairy has quickly come to an end.Towards then end of my internship I felt ready to move back to my fiance in Sacramento, ready to drive less, ready to go...

Last week I was fortunate enough to squeeze into the packed Principles and Practices of Cheese Making course at the College of Mairn. Having dabbled in home cheese making with my friend Courtney, I knew the basics of the cheese making pr...

How about milking one of these...Female water buffalo ...with one of these...Portable bucket milker...in one of these...Custom, work in prograss, water buffalo milking stanchionTad bit insane???This is exactly what Craig Ramini of Ramini Mozz...

Though Toluma Farms, where I currently intern (for another 5 weeks!), is mostly a goat dairy, we do have twelve East Fresian ewes and a ram (ie dairy sheep). Before I arrived last fall, the ram was bred to the ewes so they would lamb this spring (a sh...

With so much going on in real life, it has been difficult to sit myself down and work up a blog in cyberspace. But is it time for an update...Here at Toluma Farms we can see the light at the end of the kidding season tunnel. As of this moment...

Toluma Farms has many layers to it besides just goats. They include enterprises like pasture management, growing oat hay, giving lots of public tours and raising beef cattle. One of the Farms most profitable layers quite literally lay a variety of beau...

Experimental sheep milk cheeseLast night I started the first of a four week class, A Full Introduction to Artisan Cheese and Its Histories at the College of Marin. It covers topics like classifications of cheese (hard, soft, washed rind, bloomy rind, b...

So the reality is, people eat goats. Just like people eat cows or chickens. And meat is the fate of many a male goat (and bull calf). We will raise about 40 meat goats this year and sell them mostly to restaurants in the San Francisco area (perhaps hav...

The playpenSince my last post 29 kids have been born to 13 does...it is definitely the year of the white goat! Dairy goats are very prolific animals; most of the does have at least two kids, many have had triplets and two have had singles.It's interest...