An Unusual Twist

Brad and Kevin Donnay are two goat-herding brothers who run one of only a handful of goat dairy operations in Minnesota. It started with Brad looking for a way to take over the family farm and make it profitable. Brother Kevin would be graduating from college soon and he, too, wanted to return to the farm. Both had majored in food science and dairy, so they wondered about making cheese. They enlisted the help of friend Dave Lenzmeier, who did some research and suggested an unusual twist. “He said ‘what do you think about milking goats?’ ” Brad recounts. “I said, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”

But after crunching the numbers and touring goat dairies, the daft idea seemed too good to pass up. At $11 to $12 per pound, goat cheese is profitable but the market is small enough that big companies dealing in high volume don’t get involved. Goat cheese, especially chevre with its smooth texture and tangy flavor, has long been favored by French chefs but is catching on with mainstream consumers as well. “Goat cheese is the fastest growing market in cheese … people are starting to try it,” Brad says.

On the Cheese Brink

The three formed a partnership and Stickney Hill Dairy was born. One on-farm cheese-making facility and 50 doe kids later, they’re on the brink of making 10 goat cheese varieties. Although Stickney Hill produces four kinds of cow’s milk cheese, specialty goat cheese is the featured product with varieties such as:

• feta
• Gouda
• peppercorn chevre
• garlic and herb chevre

Constructed with assistance from the Agricultural Utilization Research Institute, Stickney Hill Dairy’s cheese plant is complete with pasteurizer, walk-in cooler and a unique filtration system. “The ultra-filtration system takes lactose and water from the whey,” says Kevin, a licensed Wisconsin cheese maker. “That brings the solids up so when we add the rennet, it forms cheese almost instantly.”

A Goat Idea

Inside the barn, a milking platform holds 12 goats; six can be milked at once using modified cattle equipment. Unlike cows, goats have only two teats, but like cows, goats are milked for 300 days after they kid, then are dry for two months. Goats yield an average of one gallon of milk per day.

Kevin says it takes about 8 hours to make a batch of their specialty cheese, and they plan on making cheese every three days. They can process 300 gallons of milk at a time, which yields about 280 pounds of cheese.

It took some time to convince neighbors and friends they weren’t completely crazy. “A lot of people still think of goats as the ‘stinky’ animal that eats tin cans and climbs on barn roofs,” Brad says. “They’re not that way at all. They can be kind of finicky about what they eat. They’re very tame and are more hardy than cows.” For now, it will take the milk of the 50 goats and 90 cows to keep the cheese plant busy. Once their markets are established, Brad hopes to buy and process milk from other goat dairies. “They didn’t jump into this blindly — both Brad and Kevin really did their homework on this project,” says Jody Koubsky, AURI program specialist in Morris. “Their research is allowing them to progress at a steady rate.”