cover image The Small Scale Dairy: The Complete Guide to Milk Production for the Home and Market

The Small Scale Dairy: The Complete Guide to Milk Production for the Home and Market

Gianaclis Caldwell. Chelsea Green, $34.95 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-60358-500-2

Whether you’re considering opening a small commercial dairy, daydreaming about adding a couple of miniature milking goats to your urban homestead, or just curious about the hoopla over raw milk, Caldwell (Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking) has the lowdown. She can’t repress her own lifelong passion for dairy animals and milk—she was raised from birth on raw milk from a neighbor’s cow and kept her own 4H cow before her current ownership of a goat’s milk dairy farm—but her hardheaded, gritty descriptions of the realities of keeping dairy livestock will filter out all aspirants but those most suited to what Caldwell calls a “‘lifestyle business’ rather than a growth or investment business.” She offers comprehensive advice about business plans and licensing; choosing and caring for animals; building and managing a dairy; and maintaining impeccable dairy hygiene. She also profiles a variety of appealing small dairies; but perhaps most fascinating to prospective milkmaids, artisanal cheese eaters, and quotidian milk-drinkers are her chronicles of the checkered history of small dairies and extensive coverage of the biology and chemistry of that precious, astoundingly complex white liquid called milk. (Apr.)