On Sunday April 3, we visited organic cheese market in Vilnius and met Audrius, former law student and member of the pro-test lab project that we were running in 2005. Nowadays Audrius immersed into secrets of cheese making. He rents a farm in Darguziai village and together with his girlfriend Jovita keeps 20 sheep. Audrius produces different kinds of milk products: spreads, hard cheeses, yogurts.
We made an appointment to visit Audrius and his sheep farm on Tuesday, April 5.
We got inspired my milking architecture. It is a specially constructed closed cage, lifted up from the ground that conveniently allows to milk 3-4 sheep at one time.
Audrius sheep are of East Friesian breed. They are milking sheep and give 1-1,5 l of milk every day. Audrius also contucted an experiment – he mixed East Friesian sheep with Lithuanian, so called, wild sheep. The result stands in the middle in the picture below:
Audrius keeps two male sheep.
Audrius and Jovita feeds baby-lambs that are just taken away from their mothers.
Audrius recently came back from the research trip in Ukraine, where he gave a workshop on cheese making in the farm of 10 000 sheep. He brought home dry sheep stomach, that is used for cheese fermenting process. 1 stomach is enough for cheese production for the whole year.
We left to Darguziai early in order to reach the farm at 6:30 and participate in the morning milking session. It was foggy and we could not see the road. Actually there is no road leading to Audrius farm. We had to cross a meadow. We nearly reached the destination…
