goat dairy questions

[sandc]

We will be at the point this coming spring to be back on our property with money in the bank and ready to start setting up our cheese operation. I have been reading everything I can find as far as the legal end of it and I think I have this right but I wanted to bring it out here and see what the general consensus is.

The way I read it is that we can make and sell cheeses made from raw goat milk legally as long as the cheese is aged 6 months or longer. Am I understanding this correctly?

At this point we are looking at building a freestanding inspected commercial kitchen on the property. For doing the cheese work the plan has been to give it a seperate room and its own walk in.

I will be doing primarily baked goods out of the kitchen to sell locally and already have a couple of outlets in place. Time to make pastry school pay for itself. The cheese is somethign we have played with and would like to work with as a value added product.

Future plans would be to get the inspected dairy facility in place so we could sell milk and other products. For some reason I just have it in my head that raw milk cheese aged 6 months or more is legal to sell.

Should probably mention that the state is Arkansas

If you have any links or books that you think I need to help me out with this or just want to point me in the right direction, please feel free. Thanks

[Creamers]

I believe, depending on the state - you must have the milk come from a commercial grade, approved grade A dairy and then made in an inspected kitchen.

[LFRJ]

Not sure, but if you wanted to sell your product across state lines, that might be snafu as well. Be sure you look into it.

We ran into our breeder last week. One of her sons lives in another state, to whom she cannot even ship raw milk. It would be a felony. Amazing.

[motdaugrnds]

Have you spoken with your local authorities and health department? They should be able to answer all questions you might have as to legalities. (I know here in Virginia the rules are so stringent that we gave up on the idea of selling raw milk years ago. It is legal, however, to get a "donation" for the care of the goats. Still, the ramnifications of that going into a courtroom are tremendous giving the times.)

[Alice In TX/MO]

In general the answer to your question is yes, but everything must be built to state code FIRST, and you must have inspections.

If you haven't followed the government persecution of MorningLand Dairy and their cheese, you might want to spend some google time on that.

Find out who your local state dairy facility inspector is and spend time with him/her designing your milk house and cheese making facility BEFORE you start building.

[sandc]

The local inspector is even more clueless than I am. He is very helpful, but at this point all he is giving me is that as long as the kitchen passes all the health code inspections I will be good to go. The design we are going to be utilizing for the cheesemaking room is based off of another facility that we toured. I bought a copy of the design from their builder and have only made a few changes. Mainly the changes were due to us planning on installing 2 dishwashers, one of these is specifically a bottle washing set up from a microbrewery.

Our milking building is going to be a completely seperate facility about 300yds away.
It will be getting the pasteurizer as well as the chiller and bottler when we get to that point.
We will be working with Microdairy on that end of it all. The cheesemaking room will be for that only. We will also be making cajetas in the main kitchen in the future to sell, but that will be after everything is done.

It is amazing how fast the money we have been killing ourselves for this year is going to go away, but we will have the things built we are making the sacrifices for.

[hiddensprings]

Go straight to the State Inspector. The local inspectors are only familiar with what they have to inspect. And, get EVERYTHING they tell you in writing. I swear, they change their mind so quickly that if you don't have it in writting you will have to spend money making changes that they said weren't needed a month ago.

[Creamers]

I know in WV this was my response when asking the question:

"Thank you for your interest in cheese and dairy production in W Va.



The part of the W Va code you refer to is primarily focused on and intended for the cheese production in areas that had a local heritage of cheese production which in some cases was well over 100 years and does require commercial pasteurization equipment. This can be very expensive to do.



However, in recent years, the W Va Dept of Health, has approved making cheese from raw milk, providing it is aged at least 60 days. Your milking facility still needs to meet Grade A standards, which are very similar to our “Manufactured Grade” standards. You would still have to do the same lab. So basically, if you want to sell cheese for the farm, it is possible and you would be better of going the Health Dept route.
"