New Arrivals

Check out the newest addition to Solace Farm - sheep!  They are Tunis sheep, known for being good mothers with vigorous lambs, hardy, gentle, and good in poor conditions.  They also have good fleece, and are decent milkers.  Altogether, these qualities seemed made for us here, so we decided to get 4 to see how well they work in reality.  So, welcome to the new girls Maple, Chestnut, Hickory, and Ginger!

I've been thinking more about dairying, and am planning to get a "real" milk goat soon - until now I've been milking 2 brush goats that come from dairy parentage (their grandmother).  It works for us, I get 1/2 to a full quart between the two daily, which covers our needs with some extra for a little cheese.  It's just not efficient, though - for the same effort on my part, I could be getting 2-3 quarts from 2 goats, or at least 1 quart from a single goat.  Also, my best milking season, this current one, is probably not even going to last 6 months, and "real" dairy animals would milk longer than that.  

Then one day, while I was milking, I remembered that my midwife has milk sheep, and she said the milk is so much better than goat milk.  I did some research, and sure enough, sheep milk is fantastic, especially for cheese.  It apparently makes about twice the cheese for the volume of milk - it has more fat and milk solids in it.  In fact, it is so rich that some people don't like drinking it, they say it's like drinking cream or half and half!  (Of course, others love it, on one blog I found, every family member rated it "awesome" except for the mother, who said "perfect").  I'd love to have more cheese, something other than the small amounts of soft goat cheese I've made this summer, and this seemed like just what I'm looking for.  

The Tunis produces a surprising amount of milk for a technically meat breed - this is part of why they are known for vigorous lambs, they get tons of super-rich milk!  As a starter milk sheep, these seemed like the best choice for us.  The best-known milking sheep is the East Friesian, the Holstein of sheep, producing an astonishing amount of milk - but several websites said they are not a hardy breed, in fact I think the word "delicate" may have been used.  Not what we're looking for!

The Tunis also has a good fleece for a meat breed, every website I found used the word "lustrous", and also said it is considered a down wool, so while it's micron count is fairly high (the diameter measurement, 27-30 as compared to the high teens for most alpaca) it is soft and bouncy.  Apparently Thomas Jefferson preferred his Tunis to his Merino!  While I really like alpaca fleece, it would be fun to have some sheep wool as well, and I think it would sell well on Etsy as raw fleece if altogether I had too much to spin myself.  

So, my plan is to have a milk goat for drinking, and a sheep for cheese - or, if we get help by spring, maybe 2 of either or both, for production beyond our own household consumption.  Tennessee passed a herdshare law a couple of years ago, that allows owners or partial owners to consume the milk and other products from their animal.  This explicitly means people can buy shares in a dairy animal and board it with a farmer, requesting that their share of the animal be given to them in the form of raw milk  - or cheese, butter, etc.  Both of those highlighted phrases are important in a legal bill like this - many states allow raw milk consumption by the full owners only, or share-owners can get milk - but nothing else.  This legislation means I can sell shares in our goats and sheep, and get compensated for both boarding and caring for the animals, and milking them and making various cheese products!  The cheese clause is vital to our setup - we do not have the space or energy supply to store large amounts of fresh milk, but the volume reduction by turning it into cheese or butter is tremendous.  

Of course, none of this will happen until spring, but I'm looking forward to a new facet of the farm, and seeing if we can provide at least one other family with quality, fresh dairy products.