Goatpacking and American Pastoralism
Real deal Milk Trekking, taken to its logical conclusion
I am super excited to announce a final Sour Milk School event for this first US Tour. This one will be a bit different, testing the waters I speculate on in this piece. It will be a camp-out near Kalispell, Montana, involving short goat walks, hand milking, fireside cheesemaking. This will be a collaboration with Callie Russel aka Caprakhan, who is an amazing human. See the Link for details.
After this July happening I will be presenting my rennet research at the American Cheese Society, and taking flight again, to Norway, to meet cheesemakers there, and continue the Milk Trek!
During and in between Sour Milk School workshops I have been visiting farmers, ranchers, and cheesemakers while exploring forms of pastoralism in America. I am particularly interesting in a fringe subculture of goat pack people, who incorporate dairy animals into wildland living. This subculture has a lot of cross over with the primitive skills community, represented by skills gatherings that happen in many states. This is a direction I am considering taking my budding path as an educator in, to discuss milk and demonstrate it’s fermentation side by side with butchering and hides, carving and weaving. The dream is long walks with ruminants, making cheese in backcountry camps, over a fire, immersed in ecosystems, with other humans. I have gained so much enrichment, healing, insight, and strength from spending time in wildlands, mainly alone. Now I want to share that experience but in a group setting, and combine it with my passion for milk microbes, dairy livestock, and cheesemaking.
When I left the US for my 16 month Milk Trekker voyage, I heard about the work of a man named Jim Corbett who wrote a book called Goatwalking, which has recently been reissued. Jim is a hero of the goat packer subculture, and obviously inspired many with his blend of philosophy, political action, and practical info on rearing and walking with goats. He writes of mobile pastoralism as way to walk away from the ill effects of sedentary status quo life in the empire. Ideals such as radical simplicity and resisting the pressure to be constantly producing and achieving things resonate with a voice in my soul. As nation-state agrarian civilization is feeling increasingly unstable on its dessicating roots, some of us are thinking of other foundations for living. I am filled with hope, founded on a long history of voices in the wilderness like Corbett’s, who for centuries have been forseeing the glory of life beyond the walls. The goats can help us get there, most of them seem happy to walk away from Babylon and live in remote, seemingly inhospitable places.
The book inspired me with a vision of walking on public lands in America, foraging food and living with goats, on long walkabouts. I pondered these ideas while taking a herd of 80 dairy goats on daily walks on public land in the Italian Alps. A focus of mine was and is on working with cheesemakers who feed their herds on unfenced, mosaic landscapes, with a herder on foot. Why is this form of dairying absent in the US? What would it look like, and how can steps be made towards it? There is obviously a huge amount of grazing on public land in the US, mainly focused on dated models of beef ranching that are often degenerative. There are many ranchers who are shifting with the tide though, as the benefits of regenerative models become obvious.
While traveling abroad, I slowly realized that there is so much exciting, progressive stuff happening in North America around pastoralism and regenerative grazing. Now back in the states, I have gone on my first two goat pack trips, and connected with many folks in both the goat packing and primitive skills realms. Walking with Sespe of Sisquoc Pack Goats out of Santa Barbara, the vision manifested as we transformed udder warm milk from the goats into a fresh cheese, shaped in a willow basket. Later, on a 10 day walk with a multi species herd of friends in Arizona, I felt a serenity flowing from the goats as they munched on a diversity of desert plants.
Goats epitomize many aspects of human nature: they are wildness, sexuality, passion, and violence embodied. They act out with zero inhibition tropes familiar to humans, that we struggle with, deny, and cloak in layers of cultural baggage. We can learn so much, by spending time with these animals, and learning from their ability to be here now, smelling and tasting the world, running and playing, butting heads, or relaxing in the sun. Doing whatever seems right and true, in the moment, acting from their center without worry. Existing in the power of the moment, which is now. It always has been, and always will be.
Viva La Leche.
I get so much joy milking my goat and making things from her milk. It feels like prayer, meditation, communion. It has a timeless feel to it, as though I've done it for years and not just 3 months. Your cheese info has helped me immensely in my cheesemaking journey! You're awesome!
I have been spending a lot of time with my own goats recently, working with them on the land, observing and ruminating on that honest embodiedness of Goat that you describe, and how much we can learn from them. Your last paragraph encapsulates it perfectly.