On a farm in France...

Tammy and I are working at a goat cheese farm in France for two and a half weeks. It is literally on top of a mountain overlooking Cannes, Nice, Antibes, and the ocean. You can also see Corsica on a clear day.

Here is a rundown of our daily schedule. First we have to call the goats from their grazing pasture by yelling "li li li li li!!" and they come a-running. Of course the goats speak French so we have to coo them on by saying "allez, allez." When that doesn't work, some spankings come into play.

Next we make the formula for the baby goats and put it into a pot with a lot of little rubber nipples. They freak out and start sucking away. Two of the babies were born in April, so they are still tiny and cute. Today, one of the bigger babies jumped up on me and shmeared goat poop on my shirt...nice.

Then it's time to milk the mamas. There is a machine that we hook up to their utters, so we thankfully dont have to milk them all by hand. But the key is getting them into the area with the machines (goats aren't the brightest of animals). We let twelve in at a time through a wooden gate that lifts up and down. Sometimes more come in and we have to scare them back with a hose. We even closed the gate down on one of their necks and didn't notice for a good two minutes that she was wiggling around on the floor.

Once we successfully get a row of them inside, they start eating from little containers, which lock their necks into a gate. Then it's time for the milking. All the milk automatically goes into a big basin and is then transferred through pipes to the fromagerie (cheese making house).

Once we go through about 70 goats, we mop the floors, refil the containers for later, and head down to make cheese.

In the fromagerie, we change into white rubber boots and aprons...very sanitary. Then we take our cue from Franscois, the employee at the farm. She explains in French how many of each size cheese to make (I will go into more depth about the actual production of the cheese in another post).

Then we clean and go to lunch, which consists of mainly...you guessed it....CHEESE!!

The feeding/milking process happens again in the evening. We clean, send the goats out to graze, and have some more cheese for dinner.

So that is the gist of my life for the next few weeks. It's a good thing I like cheese.