In case you haven’t noticed yet, we like animals. ALL kinds o’ animals.
It’s like a zoo at our house already.
We have:
- 2 Dogs
- 1 Cat
- 1 Lizard
- 1 Fish
- 1 Bunny
- 4 Guinea Pigs
And not currently living at our house, we have:
- 2 Horses
- 1 Mini Pig
Oh yeah, and the 2 Goats I just bought!
I think Leah’s beginning to discover the real reason why I shut down pet requests without looking at cute pictures – because I have no pet willpower!
Left to my own devices, I will unlikely adopt new pets. I really, really, reeeeeeally love my corgi and she’s enough of a handful for me. But put me together with an animal lover that will clean the cages…we’re in trouble!
In our previous posts we shared that we were looking for a way to have fresh, raw milk. Cows were out for the following reasons:
- Neither one of us has experience with cows and Leah thinks they’re scary
- If you want cream or full fat milk, you need to separate them from the calves
- They’re expensive to purchase
- We don’t use that much milk
- And they poop too much!
So we’ve been tossing around whether to get goats or sheep.
Leah wants sheep but can’t find dairy sheep “in milk” here in Texas. They’re not common and the sheep people haven’t been very helpful. Most of them laugh at Leah when she suggests milking their sheep.
Apparently they’re skittish creatures even when you tame ‘em.
She was offered 3 older sheep which we may buy but they’re not in milk and won’t be useful as dairy sheep. I’m not sure about taking on 3 sheep that would just be backyard pests, oops I mean, pets.
Do we need ornamental sheep?
Every time I ask Leah why we would get them she says, “Don’t worry about it. I got this covered.” What does that even mean? Got what covered?
Because baby animals make me *squee* I’m not excited about the old sheep but the baby goats…that’s a whole ‘nother story!
Last week Leah got a lead on a woman with Nigerian Dwarf Goats. After chatting with the woman on Facebook we were excited to learn she has a bunch of babies right now and more to come over the next few weeks. Nigerian Dwarf Goats are good pets – friendly and funny – and they’re good milk producers relative to their size.
Plus, OMG LOOK AT THEM!!!!!!
Our plan (because it’s been tough to find ANY goats “in milk”) is to purchase 1-2 Dwarf Goat babies to raise and then purchase one La Mancha or Nubian in milk for our diary needs right now. Babies are pretty inexpensive. We could get these for $225 each and raise them with our family so they would be a long term investment. The adult would be more expensive but provide milk right away.
And with goats you can’t have just one. They’re herd animals so the more the merrier for them!
Here’s pictures of one of the ones we picked out…
So we were very practical in choosing the goats. We picked the cutest ones.
Luckily, after visiting the farm and chatting with the owner we learned that they were from her two best milk goats.
I’m now convinced cute = good dairy goats.
The older one, Aster, was bottle fed and is the friendliest little goat ever made! She followed us EVERYWHERE. Every time I bent down her tail would wag like a dog and she’d hop up into my lap. I carried her all over the yard and even bottle fed her.
[A little about bottle feeding goats. Whenever possible it’s best to leave the babies with their mommies. Even if you’re using your goat for dairy, you can share with the babies, usually only milking them once per day instead of two so there’s enough to go around. In Aster’s case, her mommy refused to let her feed so they milk LuLu (Aster’s mommy) and bottle feed her the milk.]
Along with Aster we’re taking home Chili. Chili and her sister Collette were born two weeks old! Not really but they’re the size of two week olds already. We couldn’t tell them apart from the older babies. Here are lots of pictures from our visit.
We’ll be picking the tiny goats up in about a month or so once Chili is weaned and ready to go home with us. That will give us time to set up their space and make sure there’s a solid goat shelter for them to go into at night so predators can’t get to them. Or maybe they’ll just come in the house… *squee*
On our visit we also checked out the other animals on the farm including the baby chicks. The owner shared with us some great ideas for the chickens and transitioning them out of doors once they’ve grown enough.
She also shared what she does with the extra chickens and roosters. She gives them to needy families in the area. Leah and I don’t feel like we can eat our own animals and this has been a big source of discussion for us. We’ve both spent a large portion of our adult lives vegetarian. We do eat meat now and our philosophy on eating meat has been that we only eat organic and we don’t eat it often.
We don’t plan on raising any meat animals on the farm. However, what do you do when you get extra roosters?
This is a real, practical question.
We’ve ordered chickens and ducks. When possible we’ve ordered females only. This isn’t an exact science though since the chicks have just hatched. There’s a pretty good chance we’ll end up with some male chicks.
If so, here are our options:
- Cull them
- Become overrun with Roosters that will fight each other and potentially pick on the hens
- Raise them and eat them
- Sell or give them away as meat animals for other people
- Give them away as pets
Very few people will want roosters as pets so while that’s a fuzzy, happy imaginary ending for the roosters, it’s super-duper unlikely.
We don’t want to cull them as chicks or eat them. And we DEFINELY don’t want to get overrun by roosters. So that leaves either selling them or giving them away as meat birds. I really like the thought of providing for people who don’t have a lot of money and probably can’t afford to eat organic, farm fresh food. Part of what Leah and I want to create is community. What better way to begin doing that then supporting people in our community by giving them more access to healthy food options?
We learned so much on our visit and feel like we made a friend for life. There’s so much to learn going into homesteading. It’s great to meet people that want to see you be successful and share their wisdom.