New Milking Parlor

Running a dairy is hard work.  The animals need to be milked twice per day no matter what – extreme cold or heat, torrential downpours, hail, snow, you name it.  The upside is that you gain bragging rights around here for braving the elements.  The record low temperature last December during a 5am milking session was -14 degrees!  Thankfully, we don’t milk in January, February, or March. 

When Asgaard first began, there were only eight dairy goats.  We milked them two by two.  As the herd began to grow, our twice daily milking sessions were taking longer and longer.  On average, a dairy goat takes only 4 minutes to milk, but sanitizing all of the milk cans and tubing takes some time, followed by washing all the equipment at the end.  When all is said and done, about half the time spent milking is really spent cleaning – a similar story for cheese making.  Today we are milking 24 goats, so we’re spending on average 5 hours per day milking goats.  That is, until yesterday.

We’ve been working on installing a new pipeline milking parlor for a few months now.  This will enable us to milk 6 goats at a time (more in the future).  The milk is piped directly into the bulk tank, so the need for handling the milk is eliminated. Rhonda and Tali will be the only ones handling the milk (but they are always sparkling clean in the creamery).  The system automatically sanitizes and washes all the tubes, so time spent cleaning is drastically reduced.  And though we don’t appreciate it now, in the late fall, we will appreciate being able to turn on the heat.