Milk Trekker : Staying with Yak herders in Zavkhan, Mongolia

Who I am and what my mission is.

I spent ten years making cheese in the US before beginning to travel globally volunteering with cheesemakers and herders in 2019. I wish to document the intersection of traditional and modern techniques, and portray the global diversity of dairying, cheesemaking, and grazing practices. In doing this I want to show how the final cheese is the end product of a complex series of relationships and decisions made by humans, that are embedded in a a cultural, geographic, and climatic setting. I advocate for raw milk, a natural starter cultures, heritage breeds, regenerative or ecologically responsible grazing, and the right of all humans to ferment milk in their own homes, selling in local markets. In order to further my mission I am writing a book, and hope to build an online archive, a global database of cheese, dairy, and grazing knowledge. I would love to talk with anyone interested in hosting me anywhere in the world and hearing about how you do things.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Staying with Yak herders in Zavkhan, Mongolia

In July I was graced with the opportunity to spend 11 days with a Yak herding family at their summer camp along the Zavkhan River in western Mongolia. I stayed in the Ger, helped with milkings, rounding up the animals, herding on horseback, and milk processing.

Dairying is done here without fences, the animals roaming up side valleys to graze all day then being rounded up at night and brought to a space near the Gers. The babies are tethered, and the moms hobbled and milked out by hand after the babies have suckled to stimulate milk let down. The mothers are released but they bed down close to the young and can be milked again in the morning.

The spotted brown and white animal here is a cow/ yak hybrid, and there are many grades of these here and in the Himalaya. Yaks are bos grunniens and can interbreed with other members of the yak genus such as cattle, water Buffalo, and bison. The 1st generation hybrids produce sterile male offspring and fertile female, allowing the half/half to be further breed into a 75% yak or 75% cattle. Some of these were important in the past as draft animals. Yaks milk is high in fat and protein, and has a high amount of minerals with a eggy taste.