WHY KEEP Goats?

My love affair with goats began because of one simple thing: goat cheese. It was love at first bite when I first tried the creamy, tangy spread in college. For almost two decades, it was an infrequent treat because of the high  price tag of a dollar an ounce. (That was back in the 1990s!) When my family decided to move to the country to grow our own food organically in 2002, I knew I had to have a couple of goats so that goat cheese could become part of my regular diet.

- DEBORAH NIEMANN

DAIRY

The cheese that most of us refer to as  “goat cheese” is more correctly called chévre (pronounced like shev), and although you can use goat milk to make yogurt and a lot of cheeses traditionally made with cow milk, there is no other milk that makes cheese that tastes like chévre.

One reason many people choose goats over cows as their personal family milkers is because of goats’ smaller size — especially if they have no experience handling livestock. The smallest cows weigh 700 pounds, which means they outweigh any human. This makes them challenging and sometimes dangerous for a novice to handle.

“My husband and I chose to have goats on our farm mainly for their milk and the products that are made from it: milk for drinking and cooking, cheese and soap,” says Kellie Pavlov of Eatonville, Washington. “We just started our very first goat herd and farm a little over six months ago, after never having grown up on one and moving from the desert of Las Vegas [Nevada] to the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

“Other reasons why we chose goats — after much research — especially the Nigerian Dwarf and Kinder breeds, are their smaller size along with the high butterfat content of their milk. We didn’t want to deal with larger livestock animals like dairy cows.”