If you want to see how to milk a sheep or you're curious about why we picked sheep milk for our dairy needs, watch this video!
Before deciding on our milking animals, we compared sheep milk vs goat milk, and cow milk vs sheep milk. We knew that goat vs sheep milk was the most similar, but since we didn't know anyone who had milking sheep we had never tried sheep's milk before we got our sheep.
Having your own grass fed homestead sheep means you get one or more of these three things: wool, meat, and milk. Depending on which sheep breeds you decide on, you might get all three!
You can can get sheep milk by hand or using a milking machine to get the milk out. We've done it both ways, and the first year we were raising sheep homestead and milking by hand. The next year we invested in a milk machine.
Watch me milk sheep and see what it's like during our daily milking routine, from getting our sheep out of the pasture and into the barn on the milking stand, to cleaning our milking machine, and then getting the sheep milk to the fridge.
Here's what you can expect from this sheep milk video:
0:00 What you'll learn in today's video
0:30 Why we decided to get dairy animals on the homestead
1:15 First we considered dairy cows
1:50 Then we considered dairy goats
2:40 Silvopasture systems combine grazing animals and trees
2:55 Comparing the milk of cows vs. goats vs. sheep milk
3:30 Benefits of grazing sheep on pasture for milk
4:48 Our sheep milking routine
5:55 Pouring the sheep milk
6:07 Cleaning the milk machine
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