Thaddeus and I have been traveling pretty much solid since our goatwalking experiment in June. We have had the experience of trying to explain the ideas behind the goatwalking trip to many people. My reasons for this trip were connected to what I feel is my life’s work: exploring the mutually beneficial relationship human culture can have with the land.
Initially I heard about using milk goats to produce trail food and as hiking partmers from a book by Jim Corbett, who was one of the founders of the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s, but who was also a rancher and philosopher. Using goats in backpacking seemed a good way to get out into wild areas for longer without needing to haul a huge heavy pack, or go back to town. The folks I know who hike the long trails usually go out for two weeks at the most before hitting a town for resupply. But I wondered if milk was an okay food to rely on for so long, as Jim Corbett claimed. I also was concerned about the impact goats could have on the ecosystem. Could goats transport weed seeds in their poo like horses and cows do? I did extensive research and found that goats exceeded my expectations as a tool to get humans out in the wilderness. Not only are goats one of the most efficient browsers, and one of the most water efficient animals, not only can they convert poison oak and evergreen branches to food that we can eat as our only calorie source, but they can benefit the western woods as long as they’re kept moving.
We were both fairly inexperienced goat people before we acquired our small herd of saanens. Pippin was a pack goat who was primarily meant to lighten the load so Thaddeus could take camera equipment along to document the journey with his great talent. He was adopted from a family who had trained him but he had developed bad habits that made them worry about him being around their little kids. The does and their kids were basically rescues from local dairies. They both were being culled out of their herds because of low milk production. They had many traits that were undesirable for a dairy animal but were a boon in the forest. Thaddeus picked all the goats up in the trailer barn he built and took them to graze in clear cuts adjacent to a friend’s land while I was still working full time in construction, living in my tiny house right in the middle of the city. It was a coincidence that they were all saanens, and there are some trade-ofs of the breed for this use, more on that later.
I was vaguely aware of the fact that there were cultures that used milk as a staple in many areas of the world, including Africa, the Eurasian Steppe, and the Middle East. I learned that those nomadic pastoralist ways of living are considered one of the most "sustainable" "modern" ways in which people can also be part of the economic system in the places where they live, trading milk and other forest products for things settled people can create, like grains or money or solar panels. My teacher Martin Prechtel says that nomads and settled people have needed each other in this way for a long time, and that there aren't enough nomads nowadays. After trying it out for a couple months, I agree. There are also some things I'd want to change about our trip to do it for longer.
One challenge for Thaddeus and me is that we only had two milkers with us. We did bring some grain, enough for about a hundred calories per day, as well as some other extra foodstuffs for sanity more than substance, but at most we got just over a gallon a day for the both of us.
one gallon of milk per day= two thousand calories for two people
Especially for the first couple weeks, especially for me, this was way too little food. I had been doing really physical work and my metabolism was spinning really fast. I did eventually adjust, but a couple afternoons in between the buttermilk meal and dinner of a bit of grains and wild plants I felt like a hunger striker. I slept a lot more than normal, and felt even more sluggish than usual. In the end the lean time felt really good. Maybe partly my body adjusted to the milk diet, my bacteria figuring out how to absorb goat milk better. If I had it to do over I would bring two milkers per person, the surplus going to cheese or to feed the dogs, who did the work of protecting us from bears and keeping the goats out of our stuff.
We used the milk in several ways. In the mornings we would warm it and cook in a couple spoonfuls of farina as a hot malty cereal beverage. We used some commercial buttermilk culture, started from store bought buttermilk, and cultured a quart of buttermilk overnight. We had to keep it warm in our sleeping bags for the first couple weeks, when it was probably in the 40s and 50s at night, but by the end of the trip it would curdle before lunchtime if we insulated it. It was a balance. The under-cultured buttermilk was kinda bad tasting to me, and I would opt to stay hungry for a couple hours til it was done. We did make cheese very successfully out on the move, with me reading and tending the fire to keep the milk at the right temp, and Thaddeus figuring out how to press it. He used a tree lever contraption. There's a picture of it. One discovery we made as the weather began to warm was that the walking motion churned a nice pat of butter out of our lunch buttermilk. Sometimes we saved the butter to top dinner with for a bit of extra richness. The buttermilk was in nalgenes, and we swapped two lunches between three jugs, so we always had one empty for milking time. We found that the threads and lid got really funky, and would contaminate the culture unless we kept them clean. This was a big chore, my favorite method was to use usnea lichen to wipe them off with as I drank the buttermilk. It is a widespread lichen in the areas we were in, known for it's antimicrobial properties. I had very little experience with milk cultures before we got the goats, but we both learned some cheesemaking as we prepared to go walking. Buttermilk culture generally works good at room temperature, whereas yogurt needs it warmer. It made me wonder how nomads culture yogurt, by the fire?
Every moment we were out there I was aware of the fact that we were reinventing the wheel. I would still love to learn about the practices and beliefs of nomadic pastoralists, who probably would laugh at our childlike solutions to some of the problems that came up. In a way the whole trip was like playing. I hope to be able to try this again for longer some time soon. I will try next to get some of our journal entries on here, and more photos from Thaddeus too, who is back down there on a farm in Trinity Co. with the goats, the lucky dog.
