Hi Everyone,

I've been working mostly on dairy farms in Italy for the past nine months so I thought I'd add my two cents. 

Sheep produce significantly less milk than do goats or cows.  Nobody that I know on a sheep farm sells the milk; they use all the milk for cheese and, maybe, yogurt.  (For that matter, not much selling of milk goes on on the other farms either; at most the occasion neighbor drops by once in a while with bottles and fills them. 

The last farm I worked on was a goat and cow farm in the high Alps.  The animals ate (this was summer of course) nothing but fresh pasture filled with wildflowers, and of course the milk was delicious, especially of the goats.  It really did not have the quality that many people object to in goat milk.  Now I am at a sheep farm in much lower mountains; the sheep ate grass (but nothing like the fields of flowers I was used to in the Alps) until it got too cold to be outside, recently; now they eat hay, but they also always eat "feed"--mixture of pellets, flakes, carob.  They also have disinfectant rubbed on their udders before they are milked and some type of "medicine" afterwards.  And this is an organic farm. 

Sheep's milk is still sweeter and more delicious than any other milk I've ever had.  But I haven't been doing very well since I came here: my nose is always stuffed, I've been asthmatic.  I remember in my very asthmatic childhood doctors used to say that milk was mucous-forming and should be avoided.  I'm wondering if I should take that advice now, but on the rare occasion that I have the opportunity to have sheep milk on a daily basis it's hard not to take advantage! 

Even