Every raw-milk cheese is an artefact of the land. It carries the imprint of the earth from which it came. It’s a living piece of geography. A sense of place. So says Brad Kessler in this meditation on the origins of pastoralism and the joy of making a living from livestock.

After tiring of Manhattan, Mr Kessler, a novelist, moves with his photographer wife to a 75-acre (30-hectare) goat farm in Vermont. As they throw off the shackles of the city the couple learn how to rear, breed and milk their goats and how to make cheese: salty, piquant mozzarella, floral chèvre and, ultimately, an aged, hard tomme, its inside the colour of old piano keys, its taste redolent of a freshly scythed meadow. As he hones his skills as goat farmer and cheesemaker - the grittiness of the former and the serenity of the latter providing a measured contrast-Mr Kessler explores how pastoralism underpins many aspects of human culture and how alphabets, art, diet and economy often grew out of a pastoralist setting. The letter “A” comes from the Hebrew aleph, meaning ox. Turn an “A” upside down and you have the head of an ox, its horns pointing up to the heavens. Paintings from the Paleolithic era, mankind’s earliest art, portray herbivorous animals. The word pecuniary, relating to money, comes from pecus, the word for cattle in ancient Rome.

Mr Kessler’s new life and learning would not have been possible without his goats; leggy, long-eared, characterful Nubians which caper (root, capra, the Latin for goat) throughout the pages of this book. The author provides a fascinating account of their needs and antics: their days of foraging, ruminating, sleeping and playing; the messy urine and semen soaked ritual of mating; the magical birth of twin kids who instinctively search for their mother’s milk only to be removed from her immediately to be bottle fed. The milk is for cheesemaking and this human trickery gave English the word kidnapping. Making a living from animals is certainly rewarding but no one ever said it was kind.

... contd.