We visited the LaClare Creamery Dairy Goat Farm, in Malone, Wisconsin as a part of the Harvest Hosts program. We stayed in our RV at the farm on an overnight visit.
Harvest Hosts Program
The Harvest Hosts program is a unique network of wineries, farms, and attractions that invite self-contained RV’ers to visit and stay overnight.
The idea is that RV’ers stay for free but support the vineyard, farm, or attraction by making a purchase to support their business.
Campers are expected to dry camp, meaning that you do not connect to the business’s water, electricity, or sewer connections.
Read more about several other of our Harvest Hosts visits.
We stayed in the parking lot of the farm’s restaurant, shop, and visitor area, which was very comfortable for our stay.
We spent time viewing the goats being milked, eating in the fabulous restaurant, buying cheese, and touring the area on our bikes during our overnight visit in our Airstream travel trailer.
(If you are interested in joining Harvest Hosts, follow this link to Harvest Hosts and you’ll receive 15% off an annual membership.)
LaClare Creamery
The LaClare Creamery is a family-run business that focuses on dairy goats and the artisan products that can be made from goat milk.
Currently the farm houses 800 dairy goats and produces award winning cheeses, yogurt, and other goat milk products.
The farm also a fabulous farm to table restaurant that serves the LaClare Creamery’s products, as well as produce and other products produced locally.
When you arrive at the farm, you’ll notice a goat petting zoo area.
The owners have friendly young goats here.
Visitors can pay $0.25 to get a handful of oats to feed the cute young goats.
When we visited, there were four young goats who were gentle but also very interested in the oats we had in our hands.
Kids will likely love this activity.
The goats spend their time in between the barn where they eat hay and outside in the green grass area.
There were also several llamas and donkeys in with the goats, as both llamas and donkeys serve as goat herd protectors to keep the goats safe from predators such as coyotes.
Milking Time at the Goat Farm
If you’re at the farm between 4:30 and 6:30 PM each day, you can watch the 800 goats get milked.
While we were at the farm, the goats seemed very interested in being milked, and quickly organized themselves in the milking area.
There is a special viewing area for visitors to watch the goats get milked.
The viewing area is accessible from within the restaurant area or via a door next to the main entrance to the farm’s shop.
The viewing area includes seating where visitors can watch the entire milking process.
As you might guess, milking 800 dairy goats takes some time. When we visited, the process was managed by two men.
The goats gladly come into the milking area, where they are attached to machines that milk them automatically.
As the photo below shows, the goats eagerly line up and wait their turn to be milked.
The goats come in to the milking area in groups of about 20 or so goats.
They know the drill and go directly into little stalls while they are milked.
The cute goat below is named “Lucy” and posed for a photo for us while awaiting her turn to be milked.
LaClare Farm Restaurant
One of the highlights of our visit to LaClare Creamery was having lunch in their restaurant.
The restaurant focuses on a farm-to-table approach in which they serve their own goat dairy products as well as produce, meat, and beer and wine products produced locally by other farmers in Wisconsin.
The restaurant is a bright and cheery place, with direct access to the viewing area for watching the goats get milked.
We found the prices to be very reasonable and the food was fantastic!
Apparently cheese curds are quite the thing in Wisconsin.
I had never heard of them before, but basically, cheese curds are the solid pieces of curdled milk that form after the curd is cut and drained, but before it is molded in the cheese-making process.
LaClare Farm’s restaurant served them beer battered and fried along with a cranberry mayo and they were delicious!
We also had a small tasting of several of their cheeses, along with a local white wine. Rave reviews all the way round.
And for the final lunch course, I had a grilled goat cheese and apple sandwich, along with a salad of local produce.
It was fabulous!
You can find reviews of the restaurant online and you’ll see that they restaurant is definitely worth a visit if you’re in the Malone, Wisconsin area.
Other Things to Do Near LaClare Creamery
In addition to visiting the goat farm, we decided to explore the pretty Wisconsin countryside on our bicycles.
It turns out that Lake Winnebago (named for the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, not the RV company!) is only about half a mile from the farm.
If you turn out of the farm and go to the end of the street, you’ll come to a dead-end directly into Lake Winnebago.
We arrived just in time to see a pretty sunset begin over the lake.
Further down the road, we came up the Columbia Park of Fond du Lac County. It turns out this is a county-run campground that has sites for 40 RV campers and is right on Lake Winnebago.
There’s a 70 foot observation tower in the park that you can climb to overlook all of Lake Winnebago.
We climbed to the top of the observation tower to take in the final moments of a beautiful sunset over Lake Winnebago.
It was a quiet day on the lake, with only a few boaters. Locals told us the lake freezes over entirely in winter and many locals spend their time ice fishing.
Final Thoughts on LaClare Creamery
We had a fabulous time staying in our RV at the LaClare Creamery in Wisconsin.
The hosts were gracious; the goats were entertaining; the cheese and other dairy products were delicious; and the farm’s restaurant was fantastic.
We ended up buying lots of cheese to take with us on the rest of our RV trip, which we’ve enjoyed with some local Wisconsin wine.
This was our second Harvest Hosts experience, and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed this unique approach to RV camping. (Our first Harvest Hosts was to a winery in north Georgia.)
(If you are interested in joining Harvest Hosts, follow this link to Harvest Hosts and you’ll receive 15% off an annual membership.)
