I am currently reading a great book about goats. I love goats and have always wanted to raise some of my own and also have wanted to make goat cheese. When I was in high school I volunteered on a goat farm that was part of Heifer Project. It was one of the best experiences of my teenage years.
The book is Goat Song: A Seasonal Life of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese by Brad Kessler. I really enjoy reading books about people and their real life experiences.
From Publishers Weekly
Novelist (Birds in Fall; Lick Creek) Kessler's account of tending a small herd of milking goats in Vermont captures both the lush, poetic paradise of rural life and the raw, unrelenting drama of dairying. Kessler, a Saab-driving ex-Manhattanite, purchases two Nubian goats, breeds them and helps his wife, Dona, a trained doula, attend to the birth of four goat kids the following spring. The amusing zoomorphic and anthropomorphic descriptions, where goats forage as if they were at a sample sale and milk-fed kids stagger œlike street junkies, dissipate as Kessler endures a season of goat wrangling, haying and hunting coyotes. Kessler gives the legal aspects of unpasteurized cheese a cursory inspection; his devotion centers on a budding relationship with animals, the earth and goat cheese. He's a back-to-the-land naturalist, who supports his detailed personal observations with extensive research as he explores the cultural, historical and biological aspects of pastoralism. While the tome's lengthy poetic journal entries on animal husbandry and cheese making hardly qualify as a comprehensive manual, the observant, unsanctimonious read is bound to inspire hobby farmers and consummate cheese lovers.
Brad Kessler and one of his goats.
Here is a link to a nice interview with Brad Kessler in Gourmet magazine.
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