"A Plenteous Store of Milk"

Book III of Vergil's Georgics is devoted to animal husbandry. I have to admit that only a few short weeks ago I didn't have a real good idea of what the term "animal husbandry" even means. In Book II, H. Rushton Fairclough translates the vocative agricolae to "husbandmen." When I teach agricola as a basic vocabulary word in the first week of Latin 1, the meaning given is much more straightforward: "farmer." So then, husbandry = farming, right? Not exactly.

I asked Anderson ("This may be a dumb question, but...") and he answered that "husbandry" generally refers to the care and maintenance of farm animals. Etymonline tells me that the second syllable of the word comes from the Old Norse bondi, which, among other things, means "peasant" or "peasant farmer." But I digress...

The whole point of this entry is to share the following passage from Georgics III and tell how it relates to our most recent "husbanding" (?!) experience here in Ohio:

From [goats] is a larger progeny, from them a plenteous
store of milk; the more the milk pail has foamed from
the drained udder, the more richly will flow the streams,
when again the teats are pressed...
(III.308-310)

After several weeks of making cheese with goats' milk, we finally had the chance to try our hands at milking them! Last Monday at the creamery, we were fortunate enough to meet Gwen Volkert, a KSU professor who owns a farm just outside of Kent in Franklin Township. She has a small herd of Nubian goats, four Icelandic Sheep (pictured below), two pigs, and quite a few chickens.

At the moment, Lucky Penny isn't milking its own goats, so we were more than happy to accept Gwen's invitation for a few lessons. She's currently milking four of the nannies. Here's me giving it a go:

Vergil's correct: goats really do yield "a plenteous store of milk"! But no passage in the Georgics prepared me for the trickiness of expressing the milk. In short, I'm bad at it. The kids are much better:

I suppose if I keep practicing, I'll get better...

Shelly, too, is much better at it. According to Gwen, it may be something mothers are naturally better at. But if all goes according to plan, we will both be milking and taking care of Gwen's animals while she's out of town a few weeks from now. If we're lucky, we may even get some practice with one of the sheep, which she plans on milking later in the season after it's weaned its twin ewe lambs!

And speaking of the "plenteous store of milk" that goats produce, a few days ago Shelly brought home a gallon+ of raw goats' milk from the creamery and made some fresh, tasty ricotta. Last night my mom layered the ricotta between homemade pasta and local heirloom tomato sauce to make a fantastic lasagna. It was delicious. Summer is good.