Ditching the corporate grind to farm goats and make cheese

Seven years ago Sarah Ajzner decided to make a substitute.

She became working as a lawyer and dwelling in Melbourne alongside with her accomplice, Daniel, when the corporate hamster wheel lost its appeal.

The pair married and decided to gain their honeymoon a bit of differently, by volunteering on a goat farm in Israel.

They fell in fancy with the pronounce, and its cheese — and an conception for their future became born.

“We spent the leisure of the 365 days furiously taking a explore up and going to as many goat dairies in the center of japanese Europe [as we could],” Ms Ajzner talked about.

“We ended up spending the entire 365 days volunteering and studying as noteworthy as we might possibly, [before we] came lend a hand and wished to open our possess goat dairy alternate.”

Ditching the city life

The pair quit their corporate lives and purchased a property at Monegeetta, north of Melbourne.

“After we would set up up our fences … we obtained Kira and Blueberry, who’re the matriarchs of our [goat] herd,” she talked about.

Snappy ahead five years, Ms Ajzner has now made her first forms of goat’s cheese, including feta, contemporary curd, labneh and halloumi, and purchased them at farmers markets round the pronounce.

Buck impregnates half of the herd

The past season has thrown up some challenges.

“So now we enjoy had a gigantic and drawn-out kidding season.

“He is without a doubt had his fun, and now we enjoy had to style out rather a good deal of diminutive one teenagers!”

Fortunately, it is far a job she loves.

“I enjoy ought to you mustn’t enjoy an real passion for it, then you is never any longer going to be ready to withhold that day after day, rain, hail or shine, form of momentum,” Ms Ajzner talked about.

“Replacement the farmers that we labored with in another country did warn us, because or no longer it is a extraordinarily lengthy, dreary work life, nonetheless I fancy it.”

How to make halloumi

One amongst Ms Ajzner’s favourite products, halloumi, takes two days to make, and is a drawn-out assignment.

“It begins off as milk in the vat that gets pasteurised, then we do the curd and or no longer it is a few hours of various levels of stirring and decreasing and salting the curd,” she talked about.

“It then gets hooped, that contrivance the curd gets taken out of the vat and into materials-lined trays, and they prove as two tall rectangles of curd that gain pressed in a single day.

“The next day we cut them up into blocks, set up them into a brine, which is a saltwater resolution, and boil it up, and that affords it that halloumi, squeaky-cheese texture.”

Milking a goat

Ms Ajzner talked about milking a goat became rather a comely assignment and one which she had had to be taught to master.

“It be identical, nonetheless rather a good deal of to a cow,” she talked about.

“It be extra mute, with the squeezing motion, and you enjoy to be very careful with the girls’ teats because we don’t cull them after they’ve reached height production.