Island views

In our quest for self suffiency, dairy production has been an important stumbling block.
When we started looking at what food we buy, dairy came up as one of our major import. This is even more of a problem on the island, because organic milk is not always available, even in Westport. And we buy large amount of yogurt, butter and cheese, as well as fresh milk.
Being very partial to goat milk, my first idea was to get goats. But Ciara, who doesn’t like goat’s milk and had goats before, vetoed it on the ground that goats would be very difficult to keep out of the garden and woodland, and would do enormous damage there.
So we looked at cows, and ended up buying 2 kerry cows. Kerry cows are an small, indigenous dairy breed, and it looked like a good idea at the time. But unfortunately, because they are a rare breed, many Kerry cows are kept solely for breeding, and are rarely handled. Suffice to say that ours only stayed on Clare island for 6 month, before being sold on to a rare breed enthusiast in Wexford. We didn’t even go as far as getting them in calf! We then toyed with the idea of getting a heifer from our friend Bernie, the only man on the island who is still milking his cows. But neither of us have much experience handling cows, and not much interest in them either and in the end, it didn’t happen, and 3 years later, we were stil no closer to being self sufficiency in milk.
Then, last year, I found out about milking sheep at Tim and Sandra’s place in West Cork (see my earlier postings on woofing in West Cork). I got to taste sheep milk for the first time in my life and realised that of all the milking animals, sheep are probably the easiest to keep. They are they are much smaller than cows, and therefore easier to handle, house and feed and a lot cheaper. More importantly, Ciara is well used to handling sheep, having kept some continuously for over 20 years . And besides, who need 10 liters of cows milk every day? In retrospect, how could we even have been stupid enough to buy two kerry cows? A good milking sheep gives over 2 liters of milk per day, enough to cover all our needs. The only questions was how they would survive on Clare Island.
I got the job of sourcing milking sheep, which turned out easy enough, just ring all the sheep cheese manufacturers in Ireland and find one who is willing to sell you a few ewes. We eventually got three Texel / Friesland cross ewes from Cratloe farm last October. We felt that pure Friesland wouldn’t survive on Clare Island, and that, although their milk yields might be a bit lower, a Texel cross would be a better bet. And although one of them died shortly after her arrival on Clare Island, the other two settled well. We put them to a local Texel ram and in March, we got our first lamb from them. It was time for me to build a milking stand for the ewes.
I had milked goats in Canon Frome Court last Autumn, and had a good idea of what it should look like, and Tim emailed me the essential dimensions: width,50 cm and distance between the yoke bars, 15 cm. With a few pieces of scrap timber and a sheet of plywood, I got the milking stand built in an afternoon. It turned out to be just as well, as the other ewes lost one of her lamb at birth and the other one a few days later, and we had to start milking right away.
Two month later, we are getting over 3 liters of milk every day from our two ewes, which is plenty: we have stopped buying fresh milk and yogurt and are even making a bit of cheese. In fact, we have so much milk that we milk one of the ewes only in the morning, and let her lamb (who will be kept as a ram) is left to suck during the day.
Sheep milk is richer than cows milk, but has a pleasant, mild taste, and most importantly, makes lovely yogurt.

Tess, one of our two milking ewes

During my most recent trip to England, I ended up by a lucky accident staying in Canon From Court, a housing association and farming community in Herefordshire. The community aims to be as self sufficient in food as possible, and keeps goats, who are milked by members of the community in rotation. Not being a man to let such a prime opportunity to learn a practical skill pass by, I promptly volunteered to help with the milking of the goats, and over the week I stayed there, became sufficiently proficient at it to be left doing it on my own.
Back home, I found out that Ciara still didn’t share my new enthousiasm for goats (may be it has something to do with the fact that she did have some early on in her island life), and, since the 2 milking ewes we got in September are currently dry (and will not lamb before March), it looked like my newly aquired milking skills weren’t going to be of much immediate use.
Unless….
Yes, two of our Connemara mares have foals at foot, and therefore are currently in milk. Surely, if they milk mares in Central Asia, why not on Clare Island?
I separated Freya (a four year old mare born on the farm), from her foal for the day, putting both of them in separate sections of the sheep pen, so that they could still talk to one another over the fence, but the foal wouldn’t be able to suck, and in the evening, came along with a bucket to give it a try.
To my delight, Freya (who in fairness is an exceptionnaly quiet mare, and, being a first time foaler, doesn’t know what the “normal” procedure is), just threw a mildly suprised glance at me and stood there while I fumbled with her udder. I came back to the house with a cup of mare’s milk, and I have been milking her every day since.
As it turned out, I was lucky.
Milking mares can be a dangerous business. Their udder is between their powerful back legs, and most mares are not too happy with anyone other than their foal fumbling with their udder, kicking out at the offender. When I (half heartedly) tried with Daisy, our older mare, she made it clear to me that if I insisted, she would have to kick this stupid idea out of my head, and Bella (who isn’t in milk anyway) also objected (although in her case I had the feeling that, because we are such good friends, there could be room for negociation). But in any case Freya didn’t flinch. It probably helped that I had gotten her use to having her udder touched earlier in the year, before she foaled (this is common practice with first time foalers, as it helps to prevent the mare kicking at the newborn foal trying to suck).
Also, as it turned out, a mare will only allow herself to be milked if her foal is present (this is why, on all the photos of mares being milked, that you will find on the Internet, the foal is always near the mare), so I had accidentaly set things up right. Indeed, on a couple of occasions since, when her foal accidentaly got out of sight while I was milking her, Freya immediatly started to object.  She is not aggressive and won’t kick, but she twitches her tail and moves away from me. But as long as her foal is nearby, she stands perfectly quiet, munching at her hay. I don’t even have to tie her (I don’t like tying up horses, anyway).
For the first few days, I just brought the two of them to the sheep pen in the morning, put them in separate sections of it, and fed them both. Then, in the evenings, I would come up with my bucket, milk her, and then let the 2 of them together for the night. After a few days, I decided I would try and wean the foal completely, and separated the two for the night, but as it turned out, this was a bad idea.
Beside the usual whinnying with the 2 of them calling at one another, as soon as I took the foal away from her, Freya started drying out. I was getting less milk in two milking sessions, morning and evening, with no foal sucking, than I had with just the one evening milking and the foal sucking during the night. So I promptly went back to having the two of them together during the night, separating them (and feeding them separately) during the day, and milking the mare only once, in the evening. With this method, I am getting about a litre of milk every day, which is perfect for our needs. The whole operation takes about 20 minutes of my time every day (including the time it takes to separate the 2 in the morning).
What’s mare’s milk like, you may ask?
Well, it’s thinner than cows milk, having a lower fat and protein content, and it is noticeably sweeter, being much higher in lactose (that’s why it can be fermented). It has a mild taste, and apparently, it’s easier to digest than cows milk. I haven’t tried to make kumys yet, but that could well be my next fermentation experiment
I’d love to hear from anyone else who has experience milking mares.

Christophe

Those of you who have read this blog regularly know that I am very concerned about a probable food crisis and about food security (see my previous posts about population and agriculture, and about GM food and the upcoming food crisis).
Being a practical man, I look for practical solutions and in this case, this means working toward self sufficiency in food. This is one of the reasons why we produce most of our vegetables and are looking into grain production (see the post about Growing grain).
One key area of food self sufficiency is the ability to store food for longer periods of time, so summer surpluses are available in the winter, when the gardens and orchards do not produce much.
Over the past year, we have tried various methods of preserving food. Freezing is the easiest option, but it is not entirely satisfactory because to store any serious amount of food this way requires an initial investment and a lot of energy, but mostly because power cuts (which are likely to become more frequent) make it unreliable. Canning and bottling (which we will look at in further posts) are better options and we have successfully bottled some of our tomatoes and courgette surpluses this year, and have made vast amount of apple chutney and pasteurised apple juice last year, but the process requires large amount of energy, as the food has to be pasteurised, and in most cases, cooked, before storage.
You will also know from our previous post that we have also tried successfully lactic fermentation of vegetable, a traditional method of preserving food (think of sauerkraut, but also of Kim chi, the Korean national dish). Lactic fermentation gives excellent results and we will certainly keep using it, but today’s post is about our latest experiment in food preservation, the solar dehydrator.
We have been drying herbs from the garden for a few years, but hadn’t really found a satisfactory way to do this, in the sense that we had to use a dehumidifier for days in the attic before the herbs were dry enough for long term storage. So this year I decided to try something different. For 106 euros, I got an electric dehydrator, which works fine but still uses at least 250 w of electricity.
The idea of a solar dehydrator came up almost by accident. I had seen a very large solar dehydrator used for commercial dried herb production in a farm in the South of France, but hadn’t really thought of doing a scaled down version until I looked on the Internet and found out that it had already been done.
As we had a woofer with good carpentry skills here at the time, it ended up being one of his project. It took him a day to build the box, and another day to build the solar heater. This is what the result looks like:

On top is a drying box with drawers make of Insect screen (stretched on a wooden frame). The drying box has a large rectangular hole at the bottom in which the top of the solar heater fits neatly, held in place with 6 bolts. On top of the box is another hole for the solar powered fan (you can see the little solar panel on top of the roof of the box).

The solar heater is a wooden box containing a sheet of corrugated iron, painted black, with a sheet of clear plastic to cover it.

The air circulates through the solar heater, which has a series of large round holes at the bottom (not clearly visible on the photograph), and comes out at the top into the drying box (through another series of large round holes), pretty hot. The small solar powered fan on top of the box sucks the hot air from the solar heater through the drying box.

We used:

2 sheets of 1/2 exterior ply (for the box, and also for the bottom of the solar heater)
2 lengths of 7×1 larch (for the solar heater) you could also use red deal / pine or even just treated timber)
1 sheet of clear plastic (recycled from an old roof)
1 sheet of corrugated (roofing) iron, 3 m long. Cut what you need for the roof of the box and use the rest for the solar heater
1/2 tube of silicone mastic (to make the solar heater airtight)
1 length 2×2 (framing for the box)
1 length of 2×1 (for the drawers inside the box)
3 meter of Insect screen, 600 mm wide (for the inside drawers)
1 small solar powered fan (a Google search will get you one for less that 50 euros, although if I was to do it again, I’d probably spend a bit more and get a slightly more powerful one)
1 roll of draught proofing strip (to make the door airtight)

Total cost around 100 euros, same as the electric dryier, but surely more eco-friendly!

Ciara didn’t believe that the thing would work, but after we dried a kilo of fresh mint in less than two (sunny) days in September, she had to admit that this is a lot more efficient than a dehumidifier in the attic. Later on, we also used it to dry chilli peppers, as, thanks to Frank and Christina diligence, we have a bumper crop of those this year.
The monster is now put away in a shed for the winter, but Theo is looking forward to selling loads of dried herbs in his farm shop next summer

Christophe