Now that we’re in our house, it’s almost goat time!
We had picked out goats from two breeders. The goat breeder in Tennessee is where we decided to get our organic Nigerian Dwarfs plus one mini-Mancha buck.
We had picked out 3 doelings, 3 bucklings, and a doe in milk. Most of them are 3rd generation organic which REALLY excited us!
The second goat breeder is only about 2 hours from us.
From her we were getting just two mini-mancha doelings.
That is until she announced to us last week that she would selling one of her does in milk – woot!
So we decided on Monday to go visit the farm again and play with all the goatee-os, grab some fresh milk, and go hiking at a nearby state forest.
Shortly after leaving our house we received some terrible news…
One of the bucklings we had picked out had died 🙁
The poor little guy got pnemonia and the breeder tried both holistic methods and then, as a last resort because sometimes you just gotta do it – antiboitics (once antiboitics are used on an animal it can no longer be considered organic). They thought he had bloat at first but the next day it was clear he was much worse and likely had pnemonia. Only two days after he started getting sick, he passed away.
Eventhough we had never met him, we were still sad that the little guy was gone.
So that was the bad goat news…
The good goat news…
Leah got the goat she wanted!
The breeder we were visiting wasn’t sure which doe in milk she was going to sell. She just has a small backyard herd – 3 adult females and their babies. The “girls” produce milk for their family and she’s noticing that she has more milk than she needs so she’s selling one of ’em. Kissy was her favorite,a bottle baby she’s had for the past two years, but she doesn’t produce as much milk as Kerrigold and often dislikes the hand milker (a small, handheld milking device). So eventhough she’s having a tough time doing it, she’s going to sell us Kissy.
While we were there she showed us her newest projects – a mineral feeder and a hay manger – both easy items for me to build for our new herd.
There are so many minerals that can be missing from a goats diet and they can fluctuate based on the weather, seasons, food supply, etc. When possible, you should put out a huge variety of high-quality mineral suppliments. But the challenge in doing that – how do you seperate them all out so the goats can choose what they need? This breeder built a clever feeding station. Check out my picture!
Leah already has this project on my honey-do list.
I’ll write in another blog post how some of the farm projects are doing and what we’ve decided to put a hold on for now. It feels like so many things are coming together while so many others are falling behind.