The Food and Farming page have been catching up with some of the latest products at the Isle of Man Goat Farm and watching a session of goat yoga.

Clare Lewis, who owns and runs Isle of Man Goat Farm with her partner, Mike Walker, has just arrived back from a busy Saturday morning at the Farmers’ Market in Ramsey.

She also sells her goat dairy products from their farm shop and she has some new items on display there.

Her sausage rolls, made with sausage meat from Teare’s butchers in Ramsey, with a special mix of spices and her own pastry, won a Two Star award at this year’s UK Great Taste Awards.

’I made them one Christmas and everyone kept asking me for them afterwards,’ she says.

It’s a similar story with her range of goat’s cheese tarts: ’I started making them when I had too much soft cheese and they have gone from strength to strength.’

You can choose from goats’ cheese with either beetroot, spinach or caramelised onion.

Clare loves to experiment with her goats’ cheese and as well as the feta and Brie styles she sells in the shop, she also has some very interesting flavours coming along in the dairy next door.

One is a Cabro al Vino, a large wheel of goat’s cheese which has been soaked, several times, in Rioja and has now acquired a deep wine-coloured rind.

Clare is letting that one mature now, to be ready for Christmas. She is also making versions rubbing the rind with oil and paprika, and oil, black pepper and cacao powder. Last year she made a very successful goat parmesan.

’My creativity goes into the cheeses,’ she says.

Then there is a range of yogurts, natural or flavoured, and of course, bottles of goat milk. Goats’ milk is well known for being tolerated by people with allergies who cannot drink cows’ milk and Clare has regular customers driving from all over the island to buy her products.

’One of the beauties of our goat milk,’ she explains, ’is that we use the Low Temperature Long Time method of pasteurisation, it’s the lowest legal temperature you can use and it doesn’t destroy any of the goodness, but it is then cooled very quickly so it doesn’t have any of that "goaty" taste.

’Also, it’s not homogenised so you still get that lovely plug of cream at the top.’

She’s right about the taste: I had some in my tea and I couldn’t tell it was goats’ milk rather than cows’.

She and Mike are true artisan producers. Everything they sell is made with a lot of thought and care. They even milk the goats by hand and the breed they use was specifically chosen for the quality, rather than the quantity, of the milk they produce.

Clare says: ’Most farmers wanting to go into goat dairy would have gone for the breed with the highest yield. We consciously chose Anglo Nubian goats, the ones with the highest quality and our goats’ milk does things it isn’t even meant to be able to do.

’We were always told we couldn’t make thick goats’ yogurt without adding milk powder and gelatine but our milk does it with just the milk and the yogurt culture.’

When it comes to producing milk there is one major difference between goats and dairy cows. Once a goat has had one kid it will continue to lactate, often for years, without kidding again.

One of Clare’s goats is still lactating even though her only kid is about to give birth herself later this summer, and she is, apparently, still one of the first to jump onto the milking square, ready to be milked.

As well as all the dairy products, we have come to see a goat yoga session which is now back after the lockdowns and as popular as ever.

It can only be described as a slightly bonkers mix of giggles and goat cuddles with a little bit of yoga thrown in.

Yoga instructor Suzanne Young is very well qualified and can cater to advanced yoga students but the fact is, it is still hard to concentrate on your poses when a very cute kid goat with lop ears is chewing your hair.

’It’s yoga but with organised chaos,’ is how Clare describes it.

All the kids they use in the sessions are those which have been hand reared and bottle fed so they are very confident around people and very inquisitive.

Clare says: ’They love people and they really take part. I don’t think we’ve ever had anybody leaving a session without a smile on their face.’

l Now that the lockdowns are over Clare is starting to do farm tours again in which you can walk around the farm, milk, feed and groom the goats, collect eggs and finish with a cheese tasting.

The annual Kidding Chaos will also be underway later this summer with the main kidding taking place from the end of July this year.

For information on this, the farm tours and the goat yoga, visit Isle of Man Goats Facebook page.