Story Photos
 Photo by Greg Ebersole 14-year-old Ali Rider of Blue Rose Dairy in Winlock is expert at milking her family's goats and knows the 160 animals by name, using coloring and markings to tell them apart. |
Goat milk? Winlock family's kids (2- and 4-legged) fill growing niche for artisan cheese
Wednesday, July 18, 2007 8:22 AM PDT
By Suzanne Martinson for the Daily News
Printable version
E-mail this articleHer teats are as soft as a baby's bottom. Locked in a stanchion in the milking parlor, the little Alpine goat named Trinket isn't going anywhere. Sensing a stranger, she stages a sit-down strike. Her demands are clear-cut: Only an expert goatherd squirts milk into her bucket.
Here at Blue Rose Dairy in Winlock, this reporter's experience decades ago milking a champion Guernsey 4-H cow means nothing.
"Milking a goat is not like milking a cow," says cheese maker Rhonda Rider. A female goat, called a doe, has two teats; dairy cows have four. "You pull and squeeze a cow's teats, but not a goat's," Rider says.
The Riders are part of a growing niche business for Washington dairy farmers -- "farmstead," or artisan, cheeses. They observed the trend at a recent cheesemakers meeting with chefs in Seattle. "Last year, there were five of us," says Rhonda's husband, John Rider. "There are 23 of us now."
The family moved to the farm Dec. 21, 2002. They received their Grade A dairy license in late 2004, and soon after, their cheese processing plant was licensed.
To create farmstead cheese, the Riders invested $50,000 in equipment, including DeLaval milking machines and sophisticated, stainless steel, temperature-controlled tanks.
Although they sell most of their goat milk to a Chehalis cheese plant, they started making their own, they say, because they make more for a "value-added" product like cheese.
They're banking on it. When Longview RV closes, John will lose his full-time job. So the family fortunes rest with this flock of 160 or so goats, including kids and five bucks for breeding.
A working family farm
When I try my hand at the dairy, I get an expert lesson in milking a goat.
Gently compress the udder to push the milk into the teats, I'm told, then wrap a hand around the teat and -- withouth moving it -- apply pressure, one finger at a time, from the top down.
A raw novitiate, I eke out an ounce or so before the true power behind Blue Rose Dairy, 14-year-old Ali, finishes the job in mere minutes.
Rhonda and her daughters are up by 6 a.m., calling the goats from the barn or out in fields where they're allowed to graze and sleep. The flock grazes a 10-acre pasture and eats oats and barley from local farms, as well as alfalfa pellets, a mineral supplement and soybean meal.
The goats are easy to herd into the milking barn, the girls say, because they know they're going to be fed when they are hooked up to the milking machines.
Milking the farm's 69 female goats takes 1 1/2 hours, once in the morning and once in the evening. When days are hot, the late shift might end at 9 p.m.
A typical doe produces 3/4 gallon per milking. One at Blue Rose is nicknamed "double dipper," because no sooner does the machine empty her udder than she fills it up again.
If the power goes out, Rhonda, Ali and older sister Danyel, 15, can milk by hand as fast as the machines. Not that they aren't tuckered out when they're done.
The goats' milk will be made into two kinds of cheese: fresh soft chevre, which the Riders will pasteurize (a heat process that kills bacteria), and harder aged cheese, in which the bacteria is allowed to grow and form a rind.
Before the rind can form, Rhonda spreads charcoal, olive oil and other substances on the rounds to give the cheese rounds their distinctive flavors.
Finished rounds of aged cheese are sliced into wedges and packaged; the soft chevre is left plain or flavored with herbs and packaged in tubs.
All the cheeses are stored in a "cave," a cooled building with a set humidity. In the next two years, the Riders plan to have an on-site cave, but for now, Blue Rose's cheese rounds reside in the Black Sheep Creamery's cave in Adna. Sharing is the country way.
Rhonda estimates that she makes about 140 pounds of cheese each week -- from 40 gallons of goat milk, she produces 60 pounds of fresh chevre; 80 gallons of milk turns into 80 pounds of aged cheese.
Rhonda, admittedly a bit of a "rogue," wondered about selling $20-a-pound cheese -- until she saw how labor-intensive it is to bring handcrafted cheese to market.
She's never kept track of her hours, she says. "It would probably scare me. There's a romance about farming, but people don’t realize how much work it is."
To market, to market
Producing a quality product is just the beginning. Marketing is the second half of the equation, and that’s where her husband comes in, says Rhonda. "It will be tight for a while, but David and I are entrepreneurs."
She makes cheese three days a week. He's in charge of selling it in Longview, Des Moines, Tumwater, St. Helens, Ore. and at the farmers market in Portland's Moreland neighborhood.
The Riders hope to increase their sales to chefs, and dream of restaurant menus with cheese trays that include their soft and aged varieties.
When it comes to customers, taste tests are pivotal.
Saturdays at the Cowlitz Community Farmers Market, David and daughters are a familiar sight.
On their best day at the local market, they grossed $500, they say.
Although the cheese is a their high profile product, the family also sells some goat meat and it's part of their diet, too.
Though goat meat is popular abroad, when it comes to serving it here, "we don’t tell what it is," says Ali. "It’s delicious."
It’s especially tasty in sausages, because "goat is not greasy," Rhonda adds.
The girls don't have the same fondness for goat milk. Rhonda blames it on her early inexperience feeding goats.
The Riders milked their first goat --- an antidote to the uncertainty of Y2K --- when they lived in Oregon.
"The milk tasted goat-y," Rhonda admits with a sigh. The girls wouldn't drink it. Still won't. With 360 gallons of goat milk each week, "we have to buy cow’s milk."
Lots of kids to go around
Together, the couple have nine children -- "his, hers, ours and theirs" she says, referring to previous marriages and one adopted child. Three daughters are still at home, though Tonya, almost 18, works off the farm at Lake Mayfield Resort.
The daughters, who belong to Dances with Goats 4-H Club, are homeschooled, and Rhonda’s teaching extends to cheesemaking classes that have drawn 26 women from Astoria to Tacoma.
Another important family member is a guardian dog named Bernie, an Anatolian shepherd who's so fast he's been clocked at 40 mph. A second shepherd, Chloe, is in training, so one dog is always with the goats in pasture or barn.
Goats typically give birth to twins. Male offspring are wethered, or castrated, to raise for meat.
One year, a goat did birth four, Rhonda recalls: "Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop!"
It’s not always so easy, and she has spent many hours with her arm inside a doe, turning a kid's head or body so it can be born. A nose and two feet signal a natural birth. If the feet face up, the butt will come first, a breach birth.
At one time, Rhonda, who trained as a veterinary assistant, thought she'd like to be a midwife. "It was a funny joke God played on me, delivering all these kids."
The girls name every goat, but Rhonda, who "never sees their faces," only the business end, knows them by number.
This family business continues to surprise. One night four white goats each gave birth to twins, all white. One goat mom cleaned up all eight kids -- and claimed them all.
"We didn’t know which kids belonged to which mother!" the girls say.
Bernie can create problems, too. "He loves his babies," enough to clean them up himself, Rhonda says. "Then mom disowns them and they have to be bottle-fed."
Danyel and Ali may not like goat milk, but they’re happy to feed it to kids who do.
E-mail Lexington freelance writer Suzanne Martinson at acesmartinson@comcast.net.
To view a slideshow of the goats, Click Here!
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