Award winning food journalist and author, Clare Finney, pays a heartwarming visit to the North Downs farm, Ellie’s Dairy, and finds a place where goats are treated with an extraordinary level of care and respect.
“VISIT THESE BIG FARMS, WITH 5,000 GOATS GOING INTO THE MILKING PARLOUR, AND THEY ARE ALL CRAVING ATTENTION. THEY JUST WANT TO BE STROKED. WE ALL NEED FRIENDS, YOU KNOW”
“I was tricked into it. Conned.” David Shannon grins cheekily, recounting the tale of how one beer-fuelled bet led inexorably to the ownership of a goat herd. “I was into car racing at the time, and I promised one night in Holland that if I won this championship, I’d buy Debbie a goat.” He won it three times. “That’s Betty, Wilma and Ellie,” his partner, Dame Debbie Vernon teases. Twenty years and over 200 goats later and Ellie’s Dairy is one of the country’s finest suppliers of raw goat’s milk, cheese and kid goat meat.
For Debbie, it has been the fulfilment of a childhood ambition. “I’ve always wanted goats, ever since I was a kid and my aunty Flo taught me to sing Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” Being city born and bred, for years she had to content herself with goat paraphernalia each birthday. “There actually used to be a rather limited supply of goat toys,” she says, as we eye up her latest on-theme calendar. “It’s only recently gotten popular”—a rise which seems of a piece with a growing demand across the country for all things goat. Goat’s cheese is all the rage. Goat’s milk is following suit, and even the meat, once eyed with suspicion on these isles, is increasingly feted as a delicacy. Once Jamie Oliver has featured a product on TV series, you know it’s well on its way to the mainstream.
It’s not just the flavour but the ethics of it. Every year, thousands of kid goats are slaughtered for the simple fact of being male. “Most male kid goats are killed at birth: knocked on the head or gassed because they are too expensive to raise. The farmers just want the mother’s milk,” says Debbie. Rearing animals is expensive, as well as effortful; easier, if you’re after big profits, just to bin them. Yet from the moment David and Debbie decided to make their pet goats their business, they knew that binning baby animals was not a route they could in all conscience take. “I’m actually vegetarian,” says Debbie—who in an ideal world would, I suspect, have every single goat live out its life at her farm, regardless of its sex. Butchering the kids still upsets her, but at least they live “short, happy lives” while they’re here. “They are well looked after,” she continues. “The butcher is less than a mile away, and for at least six months they have space and company.” The result is some delicious, tender meat, demand for which far outstrips supply. “We have no problem selling it: everyone assumes it’s used in jerk and Caribbean-style curries but in fact, with exceptions, such places tend to use old goat meat.” While kid meat is tender and sweet, demanding minimal cooking time, mutton (as old female goats no longer producing milk are classified) is what’s given goat meat its tough, stringy reputation. In taste and texture, it could not be further removed from the kid meat promoted by such luminaries as Fergus Henderson at St John or Karam Sethi.
Some are drawn by the health benefits of goat’s milk —it’s less fatty, and for people with lactose allergies can be better digested—some by the fact that, like the cow’s milk from Hook and Son, it’s unpasteurised. “There are fewer than 20 licensed producers of raw goat’s milk in the UK. Of those, how many are still going?” She shrugs. At last count, they were the largest. “The majority are confined to supplying their own local area from the farm gate.”
Retailing raw milk has historically been made notoriously difficult by the Food Standards Agency and Environmental Health Officers. Hygiene inspections are exacting, Debbie continues, and tests rigorous—but “we always said we would do it. Pasteurised milk is not what milk should be.” Not only are there higher nutrient levels in raw milk, but the taste is a world away from the strong and, well, goaty flavour we’ve come to expect. I remember putting goat’s milk in my tea several years ago by mistake: mum had bought it as ‘an experiment’, and it tasted like one—funky and lingering. “Heating goat’s milk, as you do when you pasteurise it, brings out the goaty effect. What they are fed, in the herds which supply the big supermarkets, is largely soya nuts and silage,” explains David, “so that’s what you’re tasting.” In contrast, his goats’ pasture-based diet (topped up with a small amount of natural cereal as “they just can’t find enough protein in forage. We’ve tried repeatedly”) shines through in the sweet, floral freshness of my milky tea here.
The small parlour in which the goats are milked daily adheres religiously to FSA standards, while revolving around goat welfare. “We probably get half the amount of milk than that of the commercial dairies per year from our does, but they last many years longer.” The average goat on a commercial farm reaches the end of its productive life at five years, thanks to the intense, high-yield protein diet which “just burns them out. After that it’s the knacker’s yard for them,” David says meaningfully, “but one of our founding goats, Betty, was still milking at 12 years old.”
Not only does Debbie know each goat by sight, but they’ll respond when called. “To me this is like a roomful of people: they all sound different. They all look different.” Indeed, the more I look, the more I notice the variation. I’m no goat whisperer, but there is a significant difference between, say, Gloria Gaynor and the ginger goat currently cuddling up to Debbie. “We used to name them after cartoon characters or soul singers. We’re sort of running out,” she says. Though often found out in the pastures, grazing on grass and bushes, today’s inclement weather has forced every one of the goats to take shelter inside. “They hate rain. They absolutely hate it,” says Debbie feelingly —she too, is fed up with this winter’s “hideous wetness”. “If it’s wet underfoot, they will not go out for anyone,” she continues. Who would, when the alternative is a warm, spacious, hay-strewn barn? Not these goats—nor indeed Debbie, it transpires.
Come kidding season, David will often wake up to find his partner “has gone off to the camp bed in the barn”. He’s only half-exaggerating. While the majority of the period Debbie can stick to the caravan next to the barn, if a mother-to- be seems in trouble, she’ll think nothing of spending the night inside. “We’re there for each one of them. If there is a problem we have to sort it,” he continues—and that isn’t easy. “Goats are harder than cows and sheep—there’s less room for manoeuvring the unborn kid.” Though he grew up on a cattle farm (their current farm was in fact his father’s, before EU milk quotas crippled him), many subsequent years in engineering made his first kidding season “rather a baptism of fire”. Still, they managed it—and with arguably more success than the bigger goat breeders, where human contact is necessarily kept to a minimum. David is not one to knock his peers—“they do what they do well”—but it’s during kidding time that David and Debbie’s hands-on approach to farming comes into its own. “If a doe is in trouble, one of the older goats will come and look for us, to tell us. The herd is really important to them and they help each other.”
A labouring doe in a separate pen will often fare worse than if she labours with the herd around her. “I visit these big farms, with 5,000 goats going into the milking parlour, and they are all craving attention. They just want to be stroked.” For all their reputed bad- tempers, goats are highly intelligent, social creatures: “They need company. We would never sell one of our goats to be reared singly. Cows neither.” His twinkling eyes look suddenly serious. “We all need friends, you know.” A few yards away Hugo, a mottled male goat, proves David’s point. He arrived stressed, having been kept on his own for years. “The daughter of the elderly man who was keeping him approached us,” says Debbie. “He was quite a handful when he arrived.” “He didn’t sire a single kid at first,” her co-worker, Joe, reminds her. “He was that stressed out.” He had Debbie into the gate twice, almost cracking her rib in the process. “Any other farmer would have bopped you on the head, Hugs. Lucky you were here, eh?” she smiles fondly. Now he’s man of the match, having bedded some 198 of the wives who are kept within sight and smell of his large pen. He has human contact daily, with both Debbie and Joe happy to leap the gate and play with him inside. He looks like Jar Jar Binks, and for now at least has a similar persona, poking his large, curious head through the gate with a grin that makes my heart melt—until Debbie mentions the hormones. “Once they kick in, they’re hideous—waving their willies, weeing all over the place, shouting. It’s like a Friday night in the wrong part of town.”
We move swiftly on to the ‘cheese fairy’, as Debbie calls Julie, the cheesemaker behind the company’s cheeses: Ellie, Fremlin’s Kentish Log and the camembert- style Shaggy’s Beard. Named after three of the goats, these are handmade weekly at a tiny dairy just up the road from the farm. They are fresh, light and semi-soft, their texture requiring a lightness of touch from the cheesemaker born of care and technique. “Goat’s milk is fragile. It flakes very easily, and if it’s not made in small batches it can end up rubbery”—a feature, you’ll notice, of many a shop- bought feta. Rolled in herbs or chilli, left natural or in the case of Fremlin’s and Shaggy’s, matured a little longer, it’s testimony to the quality of the cheese that they are as at home on a cheeseboard as they are a traditional hot goat’s cheese salad or tart. Julie lifts the lid on a vat to show us the golden- hued milk for a batch of Ellie, gently curding with the vegetarian rennet she added moments ago. In an hour or so the curds will be cut, poured into moulds and left to drain. They’ll be turned and salted several times over the course of the following days, before hitting market —their popularity a fitting tribute to the four-legged namesake who has outdone even Paddy McGinty’s pet when it comes to goat promotion. He might have been conned, but David isn’t kidding when he tells me: “I wouldn’t want to do anything but this.”
Dame Debbie Vernon, Filleted
Coffee or tea?
Tea. Preferably earl grey or delicious masala chai.
Favourite cheese?
Waterloo. Scrummy, yummy, buttery loveliness.
Favourite London restaurant?
Brindisa Tapas. I love that social way of eating, and trying out lots of lovely dishes all at the same time!
Desert island meal?
Chips, peas and gravy. Sorry—that’s the northern girl in me!
Guilty pleasure?
Fermented Polish salad. Stand in the kitchen and eat it with a large spoon, straight from the tub. Doesn’t even make it onto a plate.
Signature dish?
Has to involve goat’s cheese! Roasted baby beetroot with balsamic and sherry vinegar, wedged and topped with fresh goat’s curd, a little rocket and fresh mint.