hear me without this we get you can hear me ok without this perfect i hate those i've got a little one on me so hopefully that will do the trick and i'm going to try to stick to the script that brought you here where i was going to talk about how it is that midnight goat farm got started what it is that we do what it is we use to do a little bit about what we're looking to do because we've melded a couple of things in the midnight goat farm far we use almost exclusively cheese making methods that go back thousands of years and now that we've been doing it for four or five years are going to stick with those methods that ha been tried and true for thousands of here so midnight goat farm is a place where you're not going to find robots you're not going to find machines milking animals or opening doors or stuffing packages or are gone gas or any of that you're going to find people you're going to find people you're going to find animals you're going to find happy animals that provide us with milk that is  quality that our product is different from most others find on the shelf because of the milk and what we've brought today is a little bit of a sample for people to try so we've got some of our show here which is basically go cheese you'll see it on store shelves we make three flavors we make sure which is just the milk and what makes a cheese we have an herb blend so it's got a complex mix of herbs and all talk about how that came to be a garlic which is just a hint so you can taste the cheese and then we have something new this year that i'll be slicing up as people potentially technology about thirty years ago i got convinced that if i wanted to make a lot of money in the big city computers were the way to go and they were fun i got  into technology because i wanted to write a better game i had played you know asteroid games and figured i could do better so i cobbled together a little system and i started writing games and friend of mine thought it would be a good idea if i could help him with an inventory system that became an accounting system which became a sales system and i spent twenty five years doing cool stuff learning all about different businesses as a consultant i basically learned all about your business and made you the software that you wanted with one i would make it for you but i had to make it sort of generically with a broad appeal so that i could sell it to other people and you would help to pay for it but i would make money from all of the other people that bought that software and i did that formula five or six times so one of the things that was in the paper was me learning how to run a business well run a bunch of businesses are never run a farm business so the paper's not one hundred percent accurate in that i knew about accounting i knew about business plans i knew about capital i can read a balance sheet nothing to do with what farming is like it's been amazing i read a little article i think there's a fourth grader in the hometown paper who had done some kind of a field trip to dairy and what he said was it's the most repetitive job that's never ever the same it couldn't it couldn't be more true people ask me to schedule something well if i do it this far in advance which was months maybe but if i weren't here today what i'd be doing would be  stairs inside of a barn that we're constructing at the end of huntington so there's always been sort of an entrepreneurial spark in everything that we do my wife's got a very similar background she's got she's still in technology she has the health care job but she's also the graphic artist she's the truffle maker right now she's probably the go theater she's really my partner and it's been a fabulous experience to be able to bring my kids to work to be able to do some of the chores you know before they set off to college how many people here have been parents or our parents so for i have to thank my kids because they taught me patience which really really really helped out with the goats because goats are super super smart they're they're sort of like teligent level of a four year old and they kind of communicate like a four year old but  i didn't expect that and that's actually been one of the coolest things about starting this goat enterprise has been learning about all the stuff i've no idea about i little bit of an inkling because thirteen years ago when i was still in the computer industry and working behind a desk and just getting fat but not happy i had a gentleman farmer had a couple of horses we had some pigs we had some chickens and i did up beef cattle thing one year so the farming part wasn't completely new i had a few years of experience in that so when i came home from a c v you class and said to my wife you know it might be really fun to have some animals and milk and cheese thing she wasn't as terrified because it wasn't the first time that either one of us had had sort of that experience so there's this collective background of business and analysis and science and accounting and business planning that went into making midnight goat farm we wanted to make sure that people knew that we had something to do with goats that they were our goats and that they were special so the second biggest question that i get asked is where were the name come from well it's where the magic happens the magic in cheese happens over night in the wee hours of the goat seemed to happen at about the same time and there are we've got this wonderful small collection of ladies that i never thought would be so important so many put things in perspective here a couple different ways may show you a couple pictures of our ladies which i'll pass around so that you can sort of see but something incredible happened to me that i didn't expect so i've got this business background and my wife and i did  business viability let's put together some spreadsheets and forecasts and budgets and a plan for this and come up with what are we going to spend because you're not actually allowed to sell  now homeland security the a in our department of agriculture and a long list of acronyms it's a little bit daunting so we started our research and we figured ok well you better like doing what you're potentially going to do i never milk to go i had milk the cow is a kid so what i do or big research guy tech background all of that i went to visit every go dairy in the states up one and i met with herdsmen i met with cheese makers and this was all to determine is this something i really wanted to do did i want to have these fourteen to sixteen hour days seven days a week every week of the year and make products that are incredibly complicated to make and spend a whole bunch of money and time to make a product and get a license so that i could sell you one of these for five bucks so what do i do research guy bought some books i'm a big i'm a big reader so i bought this book and i made every cheese in it i still liked it i bought this book that had some of the same cheeses as this book and made every cheese and it took a year and a half to do it so the chatters never went there five years but i can do it and it's fun and it's science and it's art and it's cooking and just loads and loads of fun there's no two recipes there that are the same for the same type of cheese they're close but they're not exactly the same and then i buy this goat cheese book which is like the bible on go cheeses and all that stuff and it's different because lo and behold goat milk scott different butterfat didn't count milk and different kinds of sugars and i'm not a science guy and take biology in high school but i have brewed beer and i did that for a long time and there's a lot of concepts that are similar and i really enjoyed brewing beer and making cheeses cool and and i can share it with more than just the few people would have over to have a beer with me but what kind of milk did i want to use well cows are big i had owned cows they're good really really big and they're really really hard to move around and they give you a lot of milk and i really didn't need a lot of cows and it's very very risky from a business perspective to have like one cow and base your entire business on the milk of that one calicos what if it gets sick or you know goes this over until you get another cat so i was looking at animals i could handle and that that goat thing from that class given by that go lady in heinz burg goats i could handle there you know hundred pounds one hundred fifty pounds i can move them around i should be able to pull on the leash him and tug him and do all that sort of stuff i could probably manage those so i visited all these  and there's all sorts of machines and people that are running around with goats and and looking like they're having a genuine good time and i'll never forget i was down speaking with  they were still making and there were seventy goats in the pen and this young goat herders woman must have been in their mid twenty's was going to take the goats out for a walk in the woods and she goes into this pen opens this back door there must have been seventy goats she gives all ballots in runs off in the woods and seventy goats go running after her and she wasn't terrified and i said that's the cruelest thing what are they doing and you this said to me they really enjoy their time out in the woods i'll tell you they really enjoy their time out in the woods i try to balance and run out with the goats as often as i can because they're hilarious they eat trees they eat for news they eat brush they love to play i don't know any of that i was getting up goat milk because i needed goat milk because the business doesn't work if you have to buy doesn't work at all costs like twelve to eighteen dollars a gallon so that sort of leads me to the most asked question that i get how many goats to have the number one question and what's funny it is i used to answer with the number and this is milking those six i used to answer six and i get a sort of a funny response from people i get well that's nice and it took me probably the entire season at the richmond farmer's market to realize they're not really asking me how many goats i have they're asking me is this a hobby because you expect somebody that's in the dairy business to have dreams of animals because you can't make any money from milk everybody knows there's no money in milk there's all sorts of special considerations and subsidies for milk and all of that so i started answering it the other way around and i would ask the question how many goats to i have because i can make these little containers that you may have seen in stores and i can make eighteen thousand of these containers a year from six go my former friend next door just in rich it's hard to believe you can make that kind of money from six goes well i can't yet they can i'm still not using all of their milk but basically to walk you through how it works and i constantly have to do this and this is sort of that business planning piece you know why did you get into this business other than hey it would be fun so these six goats i much this is a five gallon milk tote this total i lovingly refer to as tanker one i have a license to move this milk tote across the street a tanker haul or license to get it across the street across the main road from the farm to the plants and i'm tested on this and recertified every year it's funny so those goats give me about a gallon a day give a tiny amount when she's a little and just starting out she might give you a court and change but my biggest go give them a gallon and a core a day milt only once a day when i started milking i thought i was in some kind of weird contest i milked twice a day i got to go twice a day because that's what i had read because not only did i buy all of these cheese books and read them and all the internet books of course had to buy a bunch of goat books so we had a very common goat book a little eclectic book a very earthy goat book dr goat book none of them said the same thing about anything at all all get back to the goats so they demon agree on how much milk you get out of a go in a day so it's very hard to do a business plan we had to assume the minimum for everything ok we'll you know a small amount of milk but it turns out we get this five gallons and i spend a bunch of time experimenting making cheese i can get a lot of cheese out of a little bit of milk i can get about thirty percent cheese from milk which is generally a lot higher than the average but it took a long time to actually get that right so what that gives me is about twelve pounds of cheese per day every single day for three hundred days a year so if i sell the little container of cheese over there for an average of five dollars and twenty five cents that's probably a backwards dollar sign from these goats milking them once a day we can make seventy eight thousand dollars we were willing to invest in that like ok you don't get to keep it all because the go to the store once the government wants licensing fee once and we tell people that we're sort of building the business out a little bit and they're like well you're going to have to get more goats we don't need more goats we're not even using all the milk from our current goats i'm not quite at that number yet but what's it cost to raise goats they must be very expensive you have to feed them all that four thousand dollars for these six goats covers everything in a year multiple that all of their food all their head they all their supplements everything other why dip per year everything so we actually get to keep a lot the containers cost us something and we fortunately feel the need to buy american and local so we buy expensive  containers but everything is a little bit more expensive so we get to keep a little less because our products are all sourced locally but that that sort of part of the philosophy of the farm is sort of feeding the local economy that's helping to make us successful by buying our stuff so long time ago now three years and change  long time for this business i stopped answering we have six goats i also stopped after maybe two months looking at goat milk and i understood why this goat book said something different than this goat book and this one and internet books and papers they'll have personality they're all different how many people here have dogs or had dogs does your dog have a personality or can you communicate with your dog you know when your dog needs something you know what it is you know when it needs to go out come back in eat some food it's not happy it's got a stomachache something's wrong it's happy it's depressed i've had dogs almost my entire life go it's just a little bit more intelligent than dogs just a little bit more and they all have personalities and i have a bunch of girls and i'll tell you we have a lot in common we all know we have the same sorts of issues with being interested in boys with kidding with changing moods it's been amazing so let me introduce my ladies sort of in the order i didn't and that's the order that i'm going to introduce them and i got three that i bought from the lazy lady farm all bred and the funny thing is i didn't realize it i thought i was choosing them and this one this male very big very black very voluptuous go  clearly chose me i have no idea why or what the deal was but she was at the fans and it might have been got me going to hear these other go crazy or something i don't know but she definitely was let's go now turns out she's my number one milker and she's one of the three that i first got bred and her offspring credible milkers and these are all registered alpine french alpine dairy goats so part of our revenue stream is that we sell the kids every year as purebreds so maybe i've got my sort of voluptuous girl shawna who is by far the tallest i mean all these books the other females will get to you know on hundred fifty pounds and they'll you know if they stand up because they actually stand up and eat things on trees and it's amazing she's now about one hundred seventy five pounds today very very pregnant and standing about five ten she's well over two hundred pounds tremendous their kids from these goats and basically the same size as our kids  year had a really hard time they almost always have twins or more had a really hard time and had given up on her pregnancy she had a ten and a half pound kid and in the eleven pound she's one hundred sixty pounds so they're basically the same size as us well i hadn't expected that reading these books or personalities sean as the boss lady everybody listens to what she's got to say goats are very very political who knew this was just the milk animal they fight they wrestle for dominance there are clear leadership and roles and responsibilities it's a little bit funky but if sean is not happy there's a problem so i keep sean happy she gets a little extra banana peel every morning will little organic banana peel the last coat i got of the three original she's a crazy crazy crazy she's very needy she is a great milk or and she changes her mind about her diet all the time we're trying to go an organic route entirely and she won't be any organic feed which is a pain because it's a grain that turns into milk which is what i need won't touch it that's a problem so dawn is the mother of two of the two of these do this charming little ballerina she's light on her feet delicate her sister is a complete and total brute wants to beat everybody up and they milk almost about the same complete crazy personalities and then my craziest one who is just the sweetest goat you'd ever want to know my princess fiona is loud she yells all the time i just asked for something she's got a yell for something so getting into this business lots of surprises you're to learn to be a health care worker and to help with births regularly potentially to save them you're go looking at hind every day to make sure everybody's healthy and happy and from time to time you're going to deal with a very stinky is a guy on the face of the earth moose is my stud he lives with two other guys is huge he's well over two hundred pounds he stands six four and for four months out of the  year he's just stinks i mean the kind of stink you can't get off of your clothes that i have to change when i feed him change again when i do something else and hope that the clothes come clean this time but it's an interesting kind of a smell it's of the smell that when people say goat cheese tastes barney or it's very strong it's the dude it's the mosque from the cheese people here drink milk are used to drink milk everything goes in milk milk picks up absolutely every order absolutely everything and it is more than happy to pick up  mosque and your cheese will taste bock musty so go go here lives half a mile away from all my ladies he is only brought a lady when she is ready and has expressed to me i'm really ready to date right now they get a couple of hours together potentially because i want to make sure there are lots of love going on and then she gets back because she stinks it's an interesting experience because i've now gotten used to the smell i probably smell like a goat most of the time that wasn't in any business plan and they can they also spend a lot of time talking about and none of them say the same thing about what's a few to go and everybody's heard sort of you know in kansas they don't eat in cans but they taste absolutely everything they'll taste your coat they'll take a taste of any food you offer them but they're very very picky they don't necessarily eat the same stuff and what they do  isn't really well written about how to grow what they eat they don't really eat grasses and stuff that cows do when clover and that sort of succulent stuff the goldenrod and bush's and large leaf firms and bark off of pine trees christmas trees that's a big treat for the ones that aren't milking will give us a we'll give them our christmas tree every year and they will completely devour it but you can't do it when they're milking because it goes right in the milk and you get the nastiest tasting stuff you can imagine nobody want that kind of weird cheese just so these are some of the things that you learn you learn to avoid garlic scapes and a bunch of wild onions because you're making a batch one day and you're been watching a lot you haven't been doing a lot of smelling until you get to the story point and you're stirring in your salt and you're in that and you try to figure out who's been eating what three or four days ago where were they which is hard for us to tell because we move them every single day or goats don't get out because they have new food every single day we move their paddocks and that's important because if they're there for longer than a day they kill all the bush's and they eat all the weeds and they don't go back so one of the things that wasn't in any of these books was you're going to learn how to grow we and bush's sumac they will eat i discourage them eating red flowery head but they absolutely will strip off all of the leaves but they won't do it all year long they'll only do it as it's flowering weirdest things like golden rod they love a golden rod twice a year they love it when it's really really young and they love it right after it's past when it's actually golden they're not interested so i grow big patches goldenrod which is hilarious and lots and lots of different kinds of bushes and you know there isn't a lot of agricultural education on how to grow junk we see so that's been a huge learning thing which is really been  something i completely didn't expect but now i have a much better feel for how i can not manipulate their diet but keep them in a nutritional balance that provides a very very high butterfat content milk which is just unbelievably rich and sweet one of our raw milk clients excuse me described our milk as what she has for dessert thick and delicious and as i've discovered very low in lactose so my wife can drink it and i can drink it and we don't cough and feel uncomfortable also something that i had read about but hadn't really experienced people that are lactose intolerant can eat our cheese there's none in there it's all gone where to go well i farm a couple of different things and i knew i was going to farm a couple of different things i was going to farm goats didn't know about farming weeds and i f bacteria it's an interesting mix of art and science because absolutely every environmental thing matters humidity matters barometric pressure matters temperature really really matters wild in the environment matter time matters it's sort of like bread there really aren't that many greedy ends right you can make bread from a handful of things and come up with completely different breads cheeses very very similar there's not that many greedy insist on an endless list and the ingredient from one place is very different from an ingredient in another place and you really only get to know how all of that works in your environment and what you're going to get as a product by trying it and trying it and trying it and trying it so from the day i came home from the c v you class to the point i could sell my very first cheese i spent a year and a half trying it because i had a lot of milk but i couldn't do anything with for eight months i didn't have the license there's a big catch twenty two you have to have the great so you need to have the milk to have the license oh so we had a lot of milk and we spent about a year and we weren't allowed to sell it gallons a day because i only had three milkers the first year and about two gallons a day so that's a huge huge amount of milk so our spreadsheets when we got started we needed a business plan it wasn't just you know hey this sounds like something fun that throws of money and there's some real money you can't just make it in your kitchen so part of the process was well how do you do this how do you actually go about and do it who regulates this who allows you or punishes you more research they want to i thought i knew something about goats i thought i knew something about  i got a couple of books about people that had made cheese plants and i started looking up you know the prices for stuff and everything was twelve thousand dollars every item was twelve thousand dollars i went back and talked to judith it tattoed she's like well it's easy when we decided to go from this little thing to a bigger thing first you'll find two hundred thousand dollars oh well how can we do it for less than that my budget is like you know five percent of  and that's it how can we if she's like you can really do it unless you're willing to make everything or find things that will fit that purpose well how did you find out about this oh i call that the people of the partment agriculture when i first got started and met with these guys like that's the people soul let me call them up they're the people that are responsible so i called the department of agriculture who surprisingly oh sure will come right out meet with you all k sound like a scary regulatory agency me so the nicest possible guy who i deal with still today came and sat down in our kitchen table and he brought a book one four hundred page book and he said rooms into something that i could actually make and he wasn't happy about some of the things that i substituted he wanted to see dairy panel up everywhere that's six months of stuff it's like forty five dollars for a four by sheet and i would have needed a roman on the ceilings i'm like how about just paint is like well if you go dairy panel up four feet you can do paint the rest of the way it's the only time in my life when i've had five coats of paint on something and i couldn't see it getting any glossy or a wider and somebody said you know you're going to need more paint on that so two more cups so i have this very very small well i did have a bigger plan t room with many many many many coats of paint i mean so thick that when we went to remove the window that was going into our new plant in the facility that we're building at the end the funding to that i wanted to reuse the paint held the window in place this is the big window this is a seventy two inch window that two and a half feet tall and weighs probably two hundred pounds this is one of those books that cites another text where you can do this so long as it conforms to regulation blah blah blah and you go and get other text and it's another one of these books there's books on sanitation there's books on testing there's a little section at the end of that that says something about and of course it has to conform to appendix and antibiotic residue testing so i learned about that very nice other person from the state came and said we're going to train you how to be a lab technician you're to need an incubator lab space you're going to need to sample your milk and really terrifying so scary that my very first batch of cheese that i could have been allowed to sell i didn't because i didn't times certified as an antibiotic testing facility one of fifty in the state and it cost me five dollars a batch because i've got to buy supplies for that i don't feed my goats and i don't treat them with antibiotics it's a closed herd with no contact with anybody else there's really no way other biologics are getting into these goats but every single batch i get to prove i get to document it and i get tested every year in blind tests that i can still tell the difference between blue and yellow for which i pay a fee but i understand that it could be a problem it's very serious for people that have allergies to antibiotics like my son who is allergic to penicillin so i get it  but that with a book like this great guy i had them involved in the planning a drought load diagrams in my cab programme i could do all that sort of stuff on my computer and here's where i want to put this  all put out it's over here in lights over there and so they said ok and they certify you know what i was doing would work and then they wanted to see it under construction with the walls open to make sure that i had done what i said i was going to do so i'm now building my secondary and my second plants which are quite a bit bigger than our first plants but i can only hold twelve that's the max and the reason for that is these hands i milked by hand were the only grade a dairy in this state that milks by hand it might sound crazy but now that i've done it for years wouldn't do it any other way i didn't know when i was running around to all these go and they thought i was c the teaching place and shelburne said ok and i'd spend you know like thirty seconds ok i could do this now you've done it for years i can tell if there's a bug can tell if there's a cut i can tell if there's  sunburn i can tell if there's a sensitivity we have zero case of mastitis never had to deal with any chafing problems or chapping problems or any scary stuff like that because i can feel and have gotten to know each animal individually and it takes no time that was one of our spreadsheet calculations because one of the things that was money and not twelve thousand dollars was milking machine you know where we going to buy a milking machine and have to clean the milking machine so we had to calculate how much time it would take us to clean and sanitize milking machine before and after of use ok let's see how long it actually takes by hand i can milk now what would be the equivalent of about ten goes faster than i could clean sanitize milk clean using machine and i know when to stop i know so i'm little things my goats one of the reasons that we have really really really rich really good milk is my ladies are stress free when they're being milt they're eating they're getting some grain they're getting one on one time with me relief milker and now i have a couple of those but it's a it's a good experience they get the same sort of oxytocin i'm terrible with downs letdown that humans get so it's like oh i can do this for a while so you can see them relax and let down and when when they're done they're like ok ready to go you know tails wagon all over the place i can imagine that from a machine so we're not going to be going machine and my milk qualities incredibly high and our numbers we get our milk sampled once a month we've got nothing going on bacteria wise we've got the lowest somatic cell counts that you can have they're not recordable most of the year except for when they're pregnant and a lot of it is we pay close attention to sanitation them and we do things that you moisten and soften their skin that i never paid attention to and turns out that when i'm milking my hands are just really soft and silky  nice to be around so there's a benefit there so there is a path to doing this on a really really small scale  you're willing to do everything yourself because nothing exists at this time scale became my tanker one which i can actually lift when it is an ice cream cooler i have a bunch of them because when i do batches i have a bunch of those that are going are that you know were designed for the purpose of their use are draining racks were different purpose actually got permission this year building the new plant that we can turn the water temperatures down because by regulation the water temperatures have to be one hundred sixty five degrees you get scalded in seconds at  hundred twenty five degrees so it was a thrill to be able to turn them down on the water heaters so they weren't constantly boiling and our electrical costs would go down but that's only because i promised to continue doing everything the way that we've been doing it and do it by hand so now we're allowed to go down to one hundred twenty in one hundred twenty five respectively really hot  huge huge huge energy savings which is which is great so that's gone into the design of the new facility and yes the plans for the new facility were reviewed with the department of agriculture the appropriate you know farmers division or the food market dairy division so they're part of the process and that was a big surprise to me just how good of a resource the partment of agriculture has been they have been hugely helpful they helped to provide a grant for us to pay for our second septic system so that we can do something really cool this year we'll be able to sell our truffles in stores our truffles are a dairy product i don't know how many of you have had a chance to taste it but their cheese their main ingredient is cheese to which we blend in chocolate for flavor interesting only chocolate also acts as a preservative so the shelf life on those and the margins are higher our entire business plan was based upon me making cheese this cheese this was the filler cheese this was the cheese that i was going to make for six months to get something out to market so that we could actually start to generate some revenue all of the cheeses that i made from th these out of the books there's one cheese that i really really really really love and then i think we make pretty well and i'm really looking forward to introducing the people and that came in there it's a goat milk camel bear which is phenomenal however in order to make him a bear in greater quantities than we can make today in my little sort of our indie you know cave i cave something that can actually hold thousands of units of product the way we can hold thousands of units a product it's day seven refrigerators of our chef so we have to wait because we were going to put one more dime into our current facility which as some of you have seen is this tiny little space in my garage with a bathroom because you have to have a bathroom as a matter of fact it's the world's least used probably most expensive bathroom that was all paperwork there's an incinerating toilet that was permanent by the way in our after licensed water designer provided the appropriate plan and changed the flows of our house so the water usage would be different for an instant a rating electric toilet and when we go to sell the house which we'll do to do soon i hope we're going to remove the toilet put the closet door back on my wife's office and have the permit use of our house be back to just purely residential the paperwork for that to get that done two thousand dollars the toilet almost two thousand dollars it's been certified and it's only ever been used to burn one thing one time so i could sell it is mainly a new piece of paper towel so i could prove it a regulation and i'll tell you it was a huge pain in the neck for the past three or four years not having a toilet in the facility especially at the bar which is further than comfortable walking distance right now it's like three eights of a mile and you're waiting for kids to be born in january and it's negative ten and you're in a sleeping bag in a chair and she's imminent and you have to go and your wife's nowhere in sight the cars at the house and you forgot the walkie talkie so this year there's a toilet in the bar with heat and cam so that's what we're using a little bit of technology we were we were thrilled to discover that there's that there was fiber optic service  the order of things was heat fiber optic service water so now we can spy on the goats and see what they're doing hopefully we'll be able to see when it's time for them to give birth in a month who is where who's because you can really tell you can i can tell now twelve hours out but you can really tell like five minutes out so it'll be nice to not be in the barn waiting ok are you getting up and down because i just walked into the room after waking you up or you getting up and down because you're ready that'll be a huge difference not a lot of that in the books a lot of discussion about mortality rates well you know if you're not there things can happen and die we don't have that problem because we're there and if somebody is in trouble you can actually do something about if somebody had told me i was going to be like a goat obstetrician ten years ago you must be kidding me i'm going to do what turn things around and untangle on the inside and make sure everybody comes out breathing and happy no way i grew up in manhattan i have friends there so you know when you said farm we thought you meant a server farm no no and i got to go it's nine o'clock and it's past my bedtime so it's been an interesting trip and i invite any questions or thoughts  that people have and please have you tried archie's help yoursel that's a good question ten years is fifteen years it's thirteen years and i have a bunch of five year olds and get back to me  that's a very good question you don't have to they will continue to give milk for a period of several years but their milk production drops dramatically i do breed them for a couple reasons one is their milk production then shoots way back after their bread to really great levels plus i give them a break i give them a sixty day break from prior to their kidding so that their others are different amounts based upon what you're trying to achieve as an organic farm we would need more potentially then in organic farming if depending on what the land gives you for food or what you're able to create for food you may have to move them more or less which requires space by philosophy at this point has been geared towards preserving the land and the food and providing them a happy comfortable environment so i put six goats into a thousand square feet every day and i move it every day so theoretically with six goats i should be able to be fine indefinitely on three acres we would be leasing eleven acres and change for the past five  years and from a technical perspective i could have had four hundred goats there which would be nuts because they would be devastated i mean i might actually joke from time to time used to be a forest before they added the go they decimate everything absolutely everything which is which is fascinating actually i think we've got a pic here of my lady fiona who's chewing on a tree very last choice pine tree first choice amazing hemlock not so interesting spruce all over it is pretty wild you know just the things that you learn and they get them as treats and now i understand a lot more about why they like them never occurred to me that pine trees which make sense would be a great source of vitamin  yes and no they always have access to the outdoors they're not in a heated facility they're in a place where they can get out of the wind and drafts and snow and sleet and  rain but they always have access to the outdoors and their indoor space is pretty much the same temperature in the non windy outdoor space but they grow very very thick coat and one of the things that people make those mistakes with in layers so that air gets trapped between it and they're able to keep themselves very warm the other thing which is very interesting that my wife and i discovered almost immediately is that  puff up literally they'll be like a chia pet all of a sudden with all of their hair sticking out when it right before it's going to be super super super cold and then the tones down but we can now tell if it's to be ten below by looking to you know the goats to see who's puffy and it's funny because all puffed up another will pop up in they'll go back down and puff up and it's hilarious because they get to look much much bigger than they are because all of their hair standing on end doing farmer's markets and developing a little bit of name recognition and getting people to taste what it is that we're making last year we did some experiments in with hiring people on a commission basis to do the farmer's markets which was ok the performance level was a little bit lower than if my wife own or i or my son were selling it would roughly came out financially to the same amount as retail stores with delivery and spoilage so we're probably going to do more wholesaling and try to do much more work with the restaurants because restaurants there's no credits there's no returns no issues with shelf life it's all used they're smaller orders  but they're typically much more reliable so this year we're going to be looking into ways of distributing because that's really been the bottleneck for me thursdays has been ok let me tool around and you know deliver to this store that store this outlet and check to see what's on the shelves and even though i've called the day before to say well what do you have they might have that and it may or may not be in the best possible shape or they may have you know their coolers might have broken and well since you called you should know that our coolers away and there's really nothing or we don't trust what's there so there's a lot of hands on in the retail environment to see that your products where you expect it to be and that it's in the shape you expected to be  online and i have to provide a lot of information the u s d a for the most part is on the phone or they have a representative at the vermont department of ag and the department of ag folks are really they're wonderful resources i really expected them to be a huge hassle but really they're wonderful resources those are state people in their state people that i see with a lot of regularity because the plant gets its milk sampled you know once a month it gets its water samples quarterly i get a major inspection one c a year to mine their inspections on six month intervals so i see them alive but i'm a meticulously clean type of person this is not a job for somebody who is afraid to wash their hands four hundred times a day i mean i'm i showered you know three times a day probably during the peak season because i'm dealing with animals i'm dealing with food i'm dealing with animals i'm dealing with food you know we've got sort of airlocks between where people can pass and where food is so i'd say they keep you honest some things seem just a little silly homeland security you know the emergency management plan i could do without that you know i can see if you're moving thousands of pounds of milk a day that that might make a lot of sense some things don't make as much sense especially at my scale the way the byproduct of cheese is a hazardous material  there's only a few ways you're allowed to get rid of it so i make sure to always know somebody with pigs because i just assume it go into an animal then into the soil but it's scary stuff it's not digestible by or septic systems which is why i now have two septic systems there's no house on the lot that's at the end of huntington that now has a good sized barn and two septic systems one that's got you know a grease trap and capacity for a few thousand gallons so that we can make the truffles because it has slightly different handling and then there's another full septic system like we have for houses for the john bathroom when we started when we came up with the budget for our current facility yeah we knew that we knew what we were getting into before we started to get into it but what's really important is judith wasn't so crazy wrong when she said to me first find two hundred thousand dollars because i'll tell you the amount of labor that my family and i put into this is very significant we're working seven days a week you know fourteen hour days at least i have been since october and won't stop until the middle of march so it's a lot a lot a lot of man hours because we want to get it right and that's what we can afford to do and lo and behold we've actually built a great a dairy and cheese plan before so we know how to do it we know what and we've learned a lot of lessons a huge amount of lessons from the past five years which was really sort of our incubator phase for lack of a better term was to try and make all the mistakes before or not all but a lot of mistakes before we really had more product out there so we knew sort of what the what the dangers were so we this year this past year we hired a number of different people to help us with cheese packing taking cheese out of aging containers and putting it into the shrink banning them we learned a lot about different personality types and what it means to shelf life and who potentially would have to do that work again because in this business there is no such thing as too clean and if you're packing cheese you better be ok in a room that's fifty degrees because if it's sixty it's too h so there's a lot of things that we've learned about ventilation systems and that wonderful guy that helped me with the first plan he gave me one piece of advice i didn't take because i thought oh you know i've got  and ventilation dealt with with this method and he's like well you're going to want this other extra air exfiltration thing that we didn't put in now there's one in every room in every room because we have to be to control the humidity in every room better than we were able to before light to the percentage point and we can get pretty close now but it requires a lot of energy to do that so we've found ways to reduce that so you know there are a great resource some things are a bit of a pain in the neck i could do without being scared from time to time when the farm inspectors all these inspections  also ok well i was doing this i still have to do this and i almost always scream when the farm inspector comes because the door relative to the sink that that i usually working at when she shows up six well we will do this year with the new plants as we will for the first time ever use all our milk we have not been using all our milk we've been using milk from four out of seven days and the rest is been sold as raw milk which we're not allowed to do anymore because our plants and the farm are in the same space and the plants is only allowed to sell raw milk to another plant not to consumers so we will be selling raw milk anymore so we better do something with it but that was the yeah the sort of a funky regulation and i had to fight for that the a you want me to give it a different name and d b a that well you might have to get back to you ok you can do it but not if it's a plant and not from the plant ok so legislation i used to buy a lot of goats milk before i had goats that would provide milk because i was making a lot of cheese to see if it's something that i wanted to do before committing to this big thing big difference in quality of milk from farms to farm and milk will grow anything so that that quality difference is huge and we do something different and because of our scale is we chill our milk faster and to a lower temperature then you have to even for human consumption so the law says i can chill the  milk to forty five degrees within two hours of the last animal being built it's kind of funky law because for six animals it's different than ten thousand animals but it's the same law ok so my milk is chilled to thirty five degrees five minutes after the last animal is milt because i'm chilling it all the time so that last animal's gallon of milk is going into super chilled milk so i'm there now what that means is that i've stopped everything from growing before it before i can can take control of it and that