Our Milk

The Fresh Sweet Milk of Pumpkin Vine Goats: Where it all begins!

Did you know we also wholesale milk to other creameries?  Click here to find out more or just keep scrolling.

From our very first quart of milk, our farm has been recognized for the quality of our goat’s milk. As one judge described it, it is “fresh, clean and light like a cloud.” As we have grown, from hand milking for ourselves, to raw milk sales and cheesemaking, to machine milking and wholesale, we have maintained our focus on quality. 

Many people think goat’s milk has to taste like a goat smells. That is not true. Milk picks up odors very easily, so if it is not carefully harvested and quickly cooled, it can pick up that “goaty” smell. And while we don’t mind at all how our goats smell (we kiss them quite frequently), we certainly don’t want our milk and cheese to share that odor. 

So, what do we do to produce the best goat’s milk in Maine? 

We use all of our training in agricultural science to make sure it is properly handled, so you only smell the goat when you kiss it afterward to say “Yum, thank you!”

Sanitation

Our milk is tested frequently to make sure that it meets the high standards for raw milk sales, which means we can sell it to you with the original, natural probiotics it started with. Milk is a perfect food when it comes out of the udder, our job is to keep it that way. We are strict with our sanitation protocols to make sure our milk stays safe, nutritious and delicious.

Breeding

We have carefully bred for high production goats, who can comfortably manage the volume of milk that they produce. They need strong, tall legs and a wide elastic udder to support their twice daily hikes from the pasture to the milking parlor. We have also selected for goats with a high proportion of protein and fat, producing a higher cheese yield. Our latest endeavor is to introduce casein B into our herd, for which we hope to breed in 2022. 

Pasture

Our goats graze day and night in our hillside pastures. In fact, they often prefer to graze at night due to the cooler temperatures. To allow them to get the most benefit from our forage, we use solar charged electric fencing and a portable “pasture palace” which we move 2-3 times per week to keep them on fresh grass. Our Great Pyrenees guardian dogs ensure that our healthy coyote population stays on their side of the fence! We make all our own hay, which the goats eat through the winter in the barn, while they’re busy growing babies. 

Retail

We retail milk at all our market outlets, in quarts and half gallons. If you purchase it at the farm, you have the option of buying it in glass containers, for an additional cost. If you return the container, we will refund you the cost or trade you for a new full container. At all our other markets, we sell our milk in recyclable plastic. If you’re interested in trying some milk, you can sample it any Sunday at the Cheese Shop on the farm. 

Wholesale

 We wholesale our goats’ milk to two award-winning local creameries: in 2019 we began selling our milk to York Hill Creamery and in 2022 to Fuzzy Udder Creamery. We are proud to provide them with our delicious milk so that they can focus on their cheese-making!

We realize that there is a need for high quality goats’ milk for cheesemaking in Maine, and we are hoping to expand our milking parlor in the near future so that we can efficiently produce enough milk to serve other local creameries. 

If you are interested in the possibility of purchasing wholesale milk from us for your creamery, please reach out. We are also able to provide smaller batches of milk for soap-making on occasion.