Goat Facility Work Leads Erika Scharfen to Study in France
One student’s adventure in international agriculture

Erika Scharfen's affection for goats, learned while working at the UC davis Goat Facility, led to a year's study of cheese-making in france.

 I definitely didn’t grow up thinking I’d want to spend my life working with goats, having been exposed only to the occasional pygmy goats and sway-backed Nubians found in petting zoos. Yet I certainly want to do that now, and have been hard at it for the past five years… so what changed?

I first began working at the Goat Facility as a freshman in Animal Science with less than a quarter of study under my belt. The animals themselves quickly won me over; it was here that I first made the acquaintance of the angular and stylish dairy goat. It was the people, however, who sold me on the idea of working with goats. The then newly arrived facility manager Jan Carlson encouraged my emerging interest. In addition to working as a student milker and getting in up to my elbows (literally) during kidding season, I found myself among the students on the UC Davis Goat Show team, tagging along on visits to local breeders and volunteering during industry training sessions in animal evaluation and judging. Thus developed my appreciation for both the animals and the industry, and I found myself envisioning ways of raising dairy goats as a career.

After four years of working almost daily at the Goat Barn, and having taken all available Animal Science and Food Science courses in dairy processing and milk chemistry, I decided to pursue cheese making. With that as my goal, I chose to study the art of cheese-making in   France. With the encouragement and assistance of some of the most successful goat cheese makers in California, I contacted the international work exchange program Agriventure, which put me in touch with its French equivalent, SESAME, which found me a host site with a farmstead goat cheese maker and helped me through the process of applying for a work visa.

I spent one year living in the rural village of La Peyratte in western France. The farm’s primary source of income is its goat cheese, winner of multiple medals, including gold, in national competitions. Behind the success of this cheese are the skill and craftsmanship of Maryline Guilloteau and the rich milk of her herd of Poitevine goats. I became integrated into farm life and the community surprisingly fast, and the daily routine of twice a day milking and cheesemaking was labor intensive but fulfilling. While visiting several neighboring goat dairies, I saw a spectrum from hand-milked animals kept on pasture to vast barns filled with goats with automated rotating parlors. The farm in La Peyratte fell in the middle, with animals pastured during the day but housed inside overnight. Surprisingly, it uses the same milking system I’d learned at Davis, which made me feel at home almost immediately. As my comfort with the language and culture increased, I found myself exploring farther afield, talking to cheesemakers wherever I traveled and always tasting new and more complex cheeses, searching for inspiration. I even had the opportunity to attend the International Cheese and Dairy Products Exposition held in Paris where I was introduced to some of the top producers and sellers in the nation.

Ten months into my stay, I took the reins of the entire cheese making operation for three weeks while Maryline left the country to visit friends in Quebec. The responsibility was daunting, especially after having spent the last ten months learning how complex and delicate cheese-making can be. After three weeks without customers being able to detect that the head cheese-maker was out, I felt the relief and satisfaction of knowing that I had truly found my calling.

I have now returned from France and am now enrolled in the Master’s degree program in Animal Biology (the new name for the Animal Science Master’s program) at UC Davis, where I am studying dietary manipulation of milk fat in goats and the effects on cheese quality. The next step will be to start my own goat dairy and cheese plant!