Animals Learning

Goats

We arrived at our third farm stay on Sunday, about midway between Santa Cruz and Monterey. We were greeted by Lorraine, our host, and her boyfriend, Ben. Lorraine gave us a quick orientation of her setup, then we unloaded the truck and settled into our bedroom. We’re in an actual house this time so the temperature is much easier to regulate than the yurt we were in at our last stop. The rooster, however, is not. He crows at about 4:30 every morning. Note to self: no roosters.

Lorraine is a Shamanic practitioner which means she’s all about energies and manifestation. It’s a very different approach to life than we have, but it’s fairly interesting to hear her talk about. She’s a pretty good teacher! She knows we want to learn about goats so, on Monday morning she had us join her during milking time to watch her technique–there’s a surprising amount of technique that goes into squeezing an udder. She warned us that, in her experience with other Workaway volunteers, men usually catch on pretty quick while women have a harder time because they overthink it. So, of course, I immediately started overthinking it. AC got hands-on experience during that evening’s milking! I watched AC struggle to coordinate her fingers so that they squeezed from the top down, instead of bottom up. Then it clicked and she got into a rhythm.

Tuesday morning was my turn. I’d spent the previous night practicing the motion and trying to get out of my own head. I really wanted to prove Lorraine wrong and be a woman who “got it.” We got the goat on the milking stand, knelt down beside her, and Lorraine provided a bit more how-to before handing it over to me. The first few squeezes were a bit tricky, but I figured it out! I learned that I do better with just two fingers and my thumb, than trying to use all four fingers–this might be a good thing if we get smaller goats with smaller udders. Of course, I’m much slower than Lorraine (so is AC) so the goat usually gets restless before we finish and Lorraine has to step in to speed-milk the rest. I’m interested to see if we speed up before we leave this place.

In our first week, we’ve learned how to milk goats, make lavender essential oil, hunt/trap ground squirrels, make cheese, dehydrate apples, plug holes in a tin roof with a hot glue gun, and make sugar skulls.

Looking forward to learning even more in our remaining two weeks here!

Until next time,

Charli