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River’s Edge Chevre

When Pat Morford bends over to move the hay feeder in the pen of young goats, three of them rear up to put their front hooves onto her back and shoulders as though they are about to climb atop her. She finishes cutting free the feeder and shakes off the climbers, laughing “Get off of me, you beasties! You’re monsters, all of you!” The kids back away for the moment, but it’s clear that they’re just waiting for her to turn around so they can do it again. They think of her like their mother, Pat explains. “They treat their mothers like trampolines. If she lies down, her kids will start jumping on top of her and sliding down her sides.” When Pat climbs into each of the other pens to fix the hay feeders, there’s another little gang of goats waiting to play.

Pat has Three Ring Dairy Goat Herd in Logsden and makes River’s Edge Chevre. Through long experience, careful attention to husbandry, and lots of patience, she has developed prized breeding lines of bucks that she sells internationally and does that consistently produce excellent milk for cheese. The farm is in a beautiful spot, up against the rolling Coast Range. The house and barn sit side by side just off the winding Logsden Road, and the pasture opens up behind them and then trails off into the wooded hills. Pat’s dogs Bobo (a stately but goofy standard poodle) and Fang (a scrappy little fellow about the size of a shoebox) race to the driveway to greet visitors and then trot off for a long, lazy game of tug-a-war with someone’s sock.

There are about sixty Alpine goats in her herd, including this season’s kids, a handful of bucks, and nearly forty does. Each goat is tagged with a number, but Pat calls them all by name: Tutu, Schnoodles, Ariel, Dragonfly, etc. One tiny kid – only a few days old – is called Ice Cream because her light brown coat with dark, chocolaty accents looks a little like Fudge Swirl ice cream. When she opens the gate, the goats head out of the barn into the sunny pasture, many stopping to nibble her and have their head scratched.

Pat has almost always had goats. She got her first one when she was about eight years old: her dad traded some rabbits for a kid when the family was living on Vashon Island. From that time, she’s always had at least a couple – except for the few years when she lived on a boat with her fisherman husband George. Once they moved ashore in 1984, the goats returned. They bought the farm in Logsden in 1986, and that winter George bought twenty-seven goats. He had the idea that Pat could make some money by using the goats to raise calves for dairy farmers. It is a fairly common practice for a dairy farmer to contract with a facility to board and raise the calves from when they are five days old until they are young adults; the calves are raised on milk replacer until about 6 - 8 weeks of age then a high protein grain ration to make up for the absence of milk in their diet. This practice leaves all the cows’ milk available to the dairy to sell. George’s idea was unusual in that the calves would be raised on goats’ milk. They tried it for a while, though Pat says it was mostly just shuffling resources in a circle – buy feed for the goats, the goats’ milk feeds the calves, the calves bring in money to buy feed for the goats – and there wasn’t much money leftover for her family. But now she had a substantial herd of hungry goats, so she started thinking of ways to make them pay for themselves.

She’d been making cheese for her family since the Seventies. She laughs when she describes the first cheese she ever made. “I made it with buttermilk and Junket, and it tasted just like sour milk. It was awful!” She kept experimenting with it and got a little better over time, but when Ricki Carroll started the New England Cheese Making Supply Company in the early Eighties, it was a revolution for home cheese makers – suddenly one could buy rennet and different starter cultures and molds. With better supplies, Pat’s cheese became not just edible, but really good. So when she was looking for a way to support the goats, the idea of making cheese to sell seemed a logical choice. In the mid-Nineties, she began collecting equipment and buying any used stainless steel vats she came across. It could easily cost $25,000 just to buy one small new pasteurizer, but by keeping her eye out for used equipment Pat was able to get most everything she needed for about $8,000. A Farm Service Loan last year enabled Pat and George to build the creamery on the ground floor of their house, and Pat started offering her first cheese for sale in September 2005.

The creamery is small and scrupulously clean. The first room is the milking parlor. ‘The Girls’ are brought in six at a time and climb up onto a low platform; the milking cups are attached to their udders while they munch contentedly on grain and feed. It takes about three hours, twice each day, to milk the herd and then swab out the parlor floor. The milk is collected in the holding tank in the next room, where it is kept until there’s enough for making a batch of cheese, and then it’s gently pumped into the pasteurizer in the cheese making room. It’s important that the milk be gently moved from one container to the next, because if it’s treated roughly the milk can start to break down and develop ‘goaty’ flavors. Then it is slowly warmed to 145 degrees and kept there for thirty minutes to be pasteurized. After that, Pat moves it two gallons at a time into her 56-gallon cheese making vat, adds the starter culture, and a bit later the rennet that causes the curds to form. Once the curds have formed, the cheese begins different journeys depending on the type of chevre it will be.

Pat makes fresh chevre, several bloomy rind cheeses, an array of chevre torts (basil pesto, sundried tomatoes, olive tapenade, and hazelnut), and a delicately smoked chevre that is wrapped in maple leaves. Her cheeses are distinctively fresh tasting, with the clean taste of good milk leading the way to the delicate tang that marks it as chevre. She’d like to get into making some wheels of harder, aged cheese, but it’s hard to find the time. She has some help with the milking and her daughter Astraea helps with the cheese making, but still there aren’t enough hours in the day

In addition to milking and feeding, there’s a long list of chores to do to keep the herd healthy and content: trimming hooves, summer haircuts, mucking out the barn, tending to any injuries or illnesses, etc. It can be round the clock work, as one night this spring when Pat was up all night helping Schnoodles through a difficult labor. The kid was too big and didn’t survive the birth. The next day, Pat tended to the exhausted and bereft nanny, as did Schnoodles’ mother who gently rubbed her head against Schnoodles’ face and neck. “Goats are very aware of their family groups. They care about each other.”

Making sure the goats are eating well is big part of Pat’s work. She has a special dairy mix made up that contains several grains plus pumpkin seeds and pulp, and vitamins. Each goat eats about four pounds of the grain and hay each day, which costs about $2.50 per day per goat – or about $150 a day for the herd. It’s expensive to feed the goats so well, but Pat believes it’s worth it, not only because they’re healthy and happy, but also because the pumpkin makes their milk taste great. Whatever goats eat and breathe shows up in their milk: If their barn isn’t clean and fresh, their milk will have a stale, barny flavor. If they’re eating poor quality food, that shows up too. Recently, Pat had to throw out a whole vat of milk because the goats had gotten into the skunk cabbage. “Now that’s terroir for you!” Pat laughs ruefully. If the goats eat a lot of tussock grass in the pasture, it doesn’t affect the flavor of the milk, but it does change the composition: there will be less solids (fat and protein) in the milk, rendering less cheese. There are a lot of variables in artisanal cheese making, and staying on top of them keeps Pat busy. Very, very busy.

Out in the pasture, the goats are playing King of the Hill atop a huge boulder. The rock wasn’t always there: Pat and George bought it and put it there. “That damn rock cost a fortune, but they like to have something to jump around on,” she says, shaking her head as though she can’t believe the things she’ll do to make sure the goats are content. Bobo the poodle runs great looping circles around the herd, which pulls into a loose group with Pat at the center. She leans over to check on a little kid, and a couple of others try their luck scrambling up her back. Soon more kids are piling on. Surrounded by clamoring kids that want to use her like a jungle gym, she says, “I’m really living the dream here, aren’t I?” She’s being ironic, but it’s clear she also means it.

This article was originally published in the August/September 2006 issue of Edible Portland. www.edibleportland.com