Dairy Goats

After class, Jason called and asked me how I felt about goats. I told him I didn’t, except in my belly after I eat them. I smacked my lips and rubbed my belly, though he couldn’t see through the phone. He continued, ignoring my very funny humor, and told me the family he lives with has a bit of land outside their fence full of sticker bushes and nasty roots. He just cleared a part of it in the last few hours and wants to turn it a little project.

“It’s a pretty nice sized lot right, too. And when I get it cleared up, we could have a goat or a chicken. Or both, if you want to.”

“And why do you want a goat?”

“For cheese and milk. Duh!”

Last month Jason and I made baked brie with goat cheese. Presenting, said cheese:

It was under baked and not very good. The taste was sharp with a strong “goaty” bite, and I was tickled with the sensation to bleat.

Unless we killed it for its meat, I was not excited to have dairy goat anything. But before I knocked his enthusiasm for a hairy addition to our family, I realized goats had another use that didn’t involve being eaten or milked. Their fibers, like sheep and alpacas, are used for spinning all the time. As a six-month-old knitter, this was great news for me. I’ve always been interested in knowing how to spin and dye wool. Maybe one day I could stop relying on yarn stores to feed my yarn addiction because I would be producing yarn myself, for myself. With a hairy addition I could learn how to spin. This equals lots of wool. Wool equals yarn. Goat’s cheese or milk, I wanted some yarn.

“If we have the goat for milk,” I asked, “could we use it for wool, too?”

“I don’t think there is a breed of goat for both wool and dairy. If we get a dairy goat, it’d be lousy for wool. And the other way around.”

That wasn’t the answer I was looking for. I didn’t trust his word, maybe because I really wanted something to feed my yarn addiction. The large pink basket full of brightly colored balls of wool in my closet would say the same thing. I became optimistic and wondered if someone has bred a wool-dairy goat hybrid.

“If I research and look at the breeds of goat and do find one good for dairy and fiber, then could I use it for wool?” I smiled, big, forgetting again my girlish charms didn’t really work over the phone.

“We’ll see what you find out.”

“Deal.”