Milking

Milking is very rewarding. We milk some of our girls and then we can drink their milk, or make soaps, butters, creams etc.

Milking schedules can be very different and you will need to work out what works best for you. We choose to separate our babies over night into a pen beside their mom, then we milk the mom in the morning and then they all go out to the paddock together all day. Once we have weaned the babies from mom we will milk the does twice a day.

Our girls are brought up onto the milk stand a fed their grain mixed with chaff and speedibeet. Whilst eating, we clean their udder with warm cloth. Once the udder is clean we dry the udder with paper towel.  The first squirt of milk from each teat goes on the ground, the rest is milked into a stainless steel disinfected bucket. Once the doe is milked out we use a teat dip of iodine solution to keep their udders clean and wipe off excess solution. After this we apply an udder balm to them to keep their udders nice and healthy

After this they are turned out to the paddock for the day.

We have a milking machine that we use on some of our does, and others prefer to be hand milked. Either option works well. We chose to get the milker machine as some of our mini does have quite small teats. We are working on improving teat size on the does. Our does with larger teats are very easy to hand milk.