DIY Goat Milking Stand on our Farmhouse “Milking” Porch

After building our DIY goat milking stand, we needed a functional place to put it. It also didn’t hurt to make it pretty!

The prettiest little place you ever did milk a goat

Did you ever think you’d read a sentence eluding to a pretty place to milk a goat? I’d like to say I haven’t, but that would be a darn lie now wouldn’t it?

I spend a lot of time thinking about this farm of ours. Making it function, what animals to have, what to grow, but most of all, how to make it beautiful. Not only do I want production of good, healthy food. But I want the place to be like stepping into a scene from a Hallmark movie. I want whimsy, I want old country, a little rustic, a little cottage and a whole lot dreamy farm one could mosy around on for hours.

So what is a gal to do when she has no old milk barn to milk her dairy goats in? Why she just puts that stand on the back porch and makes it pretty!

Besides, this is so convenient. Raw milk needs immediate refrigeration to keep that wonderful flavor, and this is just feet from my milk fridge inside my home. I also have little ones that are sometimes asleep or even happily playing and we all know that you don’t wake the bear… or interupt calm, happy playing. I can see them from my milk stand. Last, it’s covered. That’s important. Well, to me anyway.

Now sure, livestock on the porch isn’t ideal. And one day I hope to have our barn set up for milk. It was originally a shed with horse stalls on the back built by my dad, so he didn’t exactly expect to have his daughter milk goats in it eventually. I’m afraid by now he has learned to expect anything and everything though. Anyway, having goats on the porch isn’t terrible though. Goat droppings aren’t even as messy as chickens and at this point, I haven’t had any even reach the porch. The goats are up on the stand and porch for a very short time and they take more interest in free ranging the orchard and those pesky weeds I can’t seem to keep control of around the porch.

Building the DIY Goat Milking Stand

I’ve seen a million and one beautiful milking stands, for goats and cows alike. Some painted a nice butter yellow, some with scallops or engraving, some metal, some wood. But like most things here on our farm, we leaned into the rustic, rough cut wood look. While I love to pretty things up, I love a good old fashioned, country looking barn and farm equipment (if that’s even the right term for a milk stand?). I love simple, wood and rustic with touches of cottage whimsy or “frill”. And seeing we already had some wood lying around, a girl with some inspiration and a father with all the building knowledge in the world, here we are.

I wish I had documented more of building this DIY goat milking stand. I did film parts, so I will leave that video below for your viewing but roughly here’s what we did, as told by the man who built it himself!

We did this whole project with just scrap wood that we already had. We first just built out a frame. We made it 3 feet by 4 feet using 2×6’s. Then we added 16 inch legs on the back and 64 inch legs on the front using 2×4’s.

We added some supports to hold in the actual neck corral, the stansion part that holds that clasps around their neck so that they can’t get out. We shaped out those pieces for the neck hole by hand, cutting with a jigsaw and used a lag bolt to secure where one side moves and the other does not. We added some rough cut planks on the top for the actual stand where the goat will be and added a little latch to hold the pieces together. We also added a piece of the rough cut planks on the front of the stand to add structure but also to carve something decorative into.

After milking for the first time and realizing these girls would take a bit to get used to the stand and being milked, we added a support out of 2×4’s to the top of the platform to keep them from stepping or jumping off the other side, especially while latched. We also built out a rectangle trough and attached at head height.

Finding a Place to Milk

Much to my poor husband and fathers dismay, this milk stand has visited more places on the farm than the goats themselves. It has been in the pasture, in two different barns and now on my back porch. Much of this due to moving goats in different pastures based on bucks, breeding concerns, or ease of milking.

But this milking porch is my favorite so far. So storybook sounding. Unfortunately, the act of milking on the porch is not quite so lovely. I like to make those watercolor illustrations with ChatGPT (I know I know, believe me, I know the controversy) but the last one I made was of the milking porch and it changed a sign from “goat crossing” to “goat chasing”. I chuckle. It is so, so true.

Aside from that, it is covered (important to me for cleanliness of goats and milk, my sanity of not fighting goats in the rain or getting soaked in the mornings if it’s raining, etc.), close to the fridge/jars/filters, close to the kids if they are still sleeping or happily playing indoors during the cold or hot and close to the barn.

Like I said, is it ideal to have livestock on your porch? No, but with just a few goats at a time, it’s not bad. I’d rather goats than chickens, which we also have on our back porch (durn free ranging birds). They mostly go up on the stand and straight back down pretty quickly. Maybe one day I’ll have a milk barn but for now, I am enjoying this. This porch is mostly for function anyway. We have a front porch meant to be “pretty”.

I added a green “farmhouse” sign I painted a while back, a “goat crossing” sign and a green old style mailbox that holds seeds sometimes, and sometimes milk filters. I hung all of these with vinyl siding hooks. I also hung a planter box right under the kitchen window, above the stand for herbs, also hung with several vinyl siding hooks. Oh, and I also added a wind chime made from vintage silverware right above. I love the sound but it also kind of reminds me of a chandelier. Always said I wouldn’t put a chandelier in my chicken coop but apparently above my milk stand is acceptable? I don’t make the rules. One last touch was adding several pots of beautiful blooms all around the stand. The mama’s (June and Patsy so far) seem uninterested since grain is being offered but those babies, they will destroy everything so these may not last back here. But the initial beauty is nice while it lasts.

I’m hoping to share our full milking routine soon (and what we feed the girls), but I wanted to start with the porch itself—this little corner of the farm that makes a daily farm chore feel beautiful.