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Newborn Goat Kids

Posted in Goat Care (and General Farm), tagged Goats, Kidding on February 25, 2009| 12 Comments »

It is difficult to get good pics of newborn goat kids.

We are up to 4 kids now, the latest born a bit after 8:00 yesterday evening.

This is our favorite buckling so far this season. He and his twin brother were sleeping outside this morning, beginning to hop at 2 days old.

Newborn kids at this age get pretty active. Hilarious when they first start hopping. They leap without letting go of the ground, and then begins the tiny bunny hops, and at a blink of an eye, so it seems, they pick up a lot of speed!

The twin brother…

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Goat Kidding Has Officially Started

Posted in Goat Care (and General Farm), tagged Goats, Kidding on February 23, 2009| 7 Comments »

No, that many girls did not break lose and have kids today, but one did. She had a pair of bucklings.

This is a picture from a few years ago. It was a cold morning (notice the snow on the ground to the far right). Some of the kids were huddled inside the door of the barn, in the early morning sunlight. They sure were fat little kids!

I promise to try to avoid zombiehood. If I say something weird, write something odd, just let me know. I sometimes go with a total lack of sleep when kidding season starts.

We are running very late this year with the meat goats. The earliest they could have started was 12/9/08! We knew they were pregnant, but because we field bred (did not breed individually), we did not have exact due dates.

Just a farm announcement. 🙂

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Restoration

Posted in Goat Care (and General Farm), tagged Goats, Reflections on February 22, 2009| 2 Comments »

Sundays, the first day of the week, the day to restore the mind, heart and soul…

RESTORE

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end

in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end on certainties.

-Francis Bacon

For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless.

O Lord Almighty,

blessed is the man who trusts in you.

-Psalm 84, 11-12

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Aleecia Says Goat Soap And Lotion

Posted in Goat Care (and General Farm) on February 13, 2009| 5 Comments »

Aleecia says, “Mom, some day I will make you milk!” Aleecia is one of my does born during the blizzard last year. Her dam is Cammille. Camille is spotted, but in a reverse sort of way. She is tan with some slightly darker rings and spots.

Today was a soap and lotion day. I felt creative today, tried some different soap combinations. Cutting will be interesting tomorrow.

The sun is wonderful! I am sure you can see that in the pic. It isn’t exactly warm, but it feels like spring is definitely on the way! I received some more seed catalogs in the mail. I need to hideaway with them. I just may order some chicks this year.

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Goats On The Hill

Posted in Goat Care (and General Farm), tagged Goats on February 8, 2009| 5 Comments »

They are all M.I.A. today, hiding. Obviously not missing in action to them, just enjoying the sun as much as they can. The dairy girls (and a few boers) are on the other side the hill. One occasionally pops her head up.

Notice…no ice or snow on the ground! What you cannot see in this photo is mud. Get further down the hill, towards the barn, and the 2″ of standing water from yesterday is now mucky mud.

But I am glad…and I am happy. The average temperature in our part of Ohio is 40 degrees this time of year.

Didn’t sleep well last night. The coyotes are strong out here in February. I could hear them darting back and forth. Sounded surreal because they were moving fast. Probably was more like a scattering of them. Caleb, the LGD (livestock guard dog), that barks at everything, and most nothing, didn’t bark at all. I kept imagining him being the one under attack. The mind plays funny tricks on a person at 2:00 in the morning.

Anyhow…I hope you enjoy your Sunday too. We are off to visit friends for a few hours. I didn’t work much today (not on a Sunday). I priced and labeled gift sets for the shop.

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Boxer Dogs

Posted in Goat Care (and General Farm), tagged Boxer Dogs on February 2, 2009| 7 Comments »

You might be asking, what is it?

I do not know if she has always done this, but I saw it happen for the first time several days ago. Tyra, my oldest boxer, takes a few morsels of her morning kibble out of her bowl and carries it to the laundry room floor. She plants her feet in front of the bits of kibble, and pretends to pounce around it, as if she were playing with a bug, teasing.

This morning I looked across the room and saw a smiley face. I know, it is not unlike the faces seen in the clouds, or in growth patterns in a tree, images that just look like something else, but none the less, her kibble was smiling this morning. It certainly made me smile!

Tyra is 6 years old, turning gray in the face, a big solid girl, one that likes to play, and sounds vicious when she does, but she would never hurt a soul. We rescued her when she was 9 months old. She has had 2 litters of pups for us, 10 pups each. She is now retired.

Here is our faithful friend…

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Girls On The Hill After The Snow And Ice

Posted in Goat Care (and General Farm), tagged Goats on January 31, 2009| 8 Comments »

The kids got to run today, and they really enjoyed themselves. We had several things that kept part of the herd in the barn this week. We had snow, thick ice, snow again, and then the side door that the dairy herd exits from froze solidly shut. Today they got to experience the great escape!

The doelings in this photo range in age from 6 to 10 months.

The doe second to the left in the photo is nic-named Ski Slope because of her fun ears. Her mother is an american nubian, her daddy is an american alpine. He made a sneak midnight visit at some point, obviously, and returned home before we caught him. Tee hee. Anyhow, she is a nice doe. A chatter box. A joy.

The photo below is a close up of one of the alpine doeling twins, the youngest kids on the farm (until we have one tonight, perhaps).

I worked in the shop most of the morning. Today was a lotion making day. I have an upcoming store placement that I am preparing for.

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Does Ready To Kid

Posted in Goat Care (and General Farm), tagged Goats, Kidding on January 29, 2009| 14 Comments »

Ouchie…the shoulders, knees and ankles hurt from walking and slipping in the snow/ice/snow mixture. I do not live on a mountain, by any means, but the only flat piece of land I have is right at the house. The tiniest flat yard surrounds my house, that is it. I am ready for spring!

I checked the boer girls tonight. Some are growing closer towards the big kidding event. I am seeing milk beginning to come in. I didn’t see the taught udders that come with imminent labor, but they are growing closer.

This is a picture from a prior kidding season. Annie always has some handsome kids.

I was lost for things to write about today, but I just remembered a phone call that I received this morning. I knew I had to share bits and pieces with you.

My friend has her milk house filled with bottle kids, all 37 of them, rescued from freezing in the recent cold snap. At one point all of the kids were in the house! This is the part of our conversation that began to make me giggle. I began spurting, to be honest. As my laughter began, I said to her, “It is not funny.” She replied, “No, it is not, but the story is.” She and her husband had so may Rubbermaid tubs of kids in the house they began to divide them between rooms. For those of you that have never had bottle kids in the house. Let me tell you, they can be noisy. My maximum number has been 19. I cannot imagine 37! And there are always a couple of screamers. Kids that scream can sound similar to newborn human babies. She said that she and her husband where so tired they slept on the floor several times, for several nights, they were simply exhausted. They are my age. 🙂

So, they made their feeding rounds from room to room. Bedroom kids fed this hour, living room kids fed next hour, laundry room kids next. At one point she said there was one kid that just would not be quiet, including right after he had been fed. So she put him away, in a nice cozy warm room for a while. She just had to had silence. Her husband came into the house, headed straight to the bathroom, and then all she could hear was, “Helen!!!! Why is there a kid in the bathroom????” Ha ha ha…not funny, right???

The things we do!

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The Holstein’s Of The Dairy Goats

Posted in Goat Care (and General Farm), tagged Dairy, Goats on January 26, 2009| 13 Comments »

Many people have asked me, “What breed are the best dairy goat milkers?” Hands down, my vote is a snubian. What is a snubian? A cross between a saanan and a nubian.

For those of you not familiar with goats, you really can catch a lot of flack for choosing one breed over the other. But I live in my own little goat world out here, preferring to not show, and also preferring to see who becomes the best milkers on my farm. I mix and match, and I’ll admit, I have some “different looking” dairy goats from time to time.

The doe in the photograph is Chameaqua. Her dam is an American Saanan, her sire is a pure bred Nubian. The genes for white are fairly strong in this breeding. The ears are not pendulous, as in a nubian, but they are not erect as in a saanan.

My saanans come from a very thin line. I wish they would put on weight, they tend to look more on the emaciated side. Someone once asked me, after they connected to my dam’s lines, “Do they put their food into their hips, or into their milk?” Without a single thought, they put their energy sources into their milk. They eat like horses, and milk like crazy.

The snubians have the best of both worlds. They are blessed with the wonderful richness of nubian milk (very high fat content in nubian goat milk), and they carry through with the very high volume of a saanan.

I have two snubians up and coming behind Chameaqua. I cannot wait to see if they also naturally take to the milk stand!

One more excellent point for snubians, they grow like weeds! I have never, ever, had a kid on my farm that grew like these youngsters do.

One particular snubian (thank you to the ADGA.org list that I copied from) belongs to Yvonne Roberts, a friend that I chat with from time to time. The doe is amongst the top 5 experimental breed milkers in the United States (GCH R R RESOURCES PEPPERMINT STICK 2*M). Way to go Ms. Peppermint and Yvonne!

Well, that is my goat talk for today. I’ll come back next week and showcase another.

Happy Monday! Stay dry…and hopefully we will all be able to post while the latest winter storm pushes its way through.

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Dairy Goat Milk Transporting

Posted in Goat Care (and General Farm), tagged Dairy, Goats on January 24, 2009| 6 Comments »

One of my favorite things in life are goats. We have meat and dairy goats on the farm. I am interested in all, however, dairy is my passion.

I love visiting the local cow dairies. I love dairy cows. I am a city girl, gone country 8 years ago. You should hear the comments that emit from my mouth. I do not look at houses or cars. I comment about pick up trucks, tractors, barns, and more importantly, udders. I constantly look at animals, udders, backs. Did I ever think I would know the difference between the profile of a dairy cow or a beef cow? LOL! I do. Look at the hips, it shows. If I were rich, and could afford the large dairy barns, huge amounts of pasture, and if I could pay the helping hands, I would run both a cow and goat dairy!

As I looked at the calendar this morning I realized that my dairy hiatis is about to end. Cammille will freshen once again sometime around 1/19/09. The rest of the girls follow shortly behind. Until then, I am working out of the freezers. Yes, that is freezer with an “s,” plural, and I could easily say plural(s), if there were such a word!

I have a commercial freezer in my soap shop, filled to the brim with milk. My kitchen side by side freezer is filled with milk. I have an upright freezer in my laundry room, filled with milk. My side by side in the barn is filled with milk. My friend’s freezer, 15 minutes way, is filled with milk. Gulp! I think I have milk. Milk…good for the soul.

Normally, no matter when I put the boer buck in with the girls, they decide to start kidding out sometime between 1/29-2/2. And, normally, there are several things occuring around that date. Last year it was a blizzard. I have plenty of blizzard kid pics (in the house) from that week last year. The year before, it was a siberian express, meaning, the temps were below zero each morning and kids were hitting the ground in numbers. I had 20 kids in the house for 3 weeks! More on that someday. It was a hilarious, exhausting, fiasco!

This pic has a story behind it. One of the freezers is not frost free. I still had girls in milk when we bought the commercial freezer for the soap shop. So, my husband came up with a milk transport plan. Our green machine came out, lined with a twin size fitted sheet, and the milk was transported out and away from the old freezer. It saved on the backs, and it brought on some fun, a LOT of laughter! My husband and I do some goofy stuff, and laugh at the same antics for many-many years. Anyhow, we proceded to fill the commercial freezer with the transported milk and was able to defrost the old freezer. Thank you to the green machine!

Why so much milk in the freezers? A newborn goat kid takes a lot of bottles, and even when I resort to milk replacer, I mix it with goat milk. If a kid takes 2 bottles a day, multiply that by 3 months, and multiply that by 20-something kids! I bottle feed all dairy kids. A freezer empties very quickly.

So far this year, no boer kids have been born in abnormal temps, nor any adverse weather, in fact, no boer kids yet at all. Someone asked me a few days ago, “Are they pregnant?” Yeah, they are! The first possible due date was 12/9, but guess what? They know it is not yet 1/29, or 2/2…it is on the way…they are holding out. Of course, they are goats!

Take care…have a great Saturday!

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