What I like about goats

We've been keeping goats for coming up on four years now. I don't consider myself an authority on goats, but I have had a chance to learn if I like them.

I got goats because I wanted a secure source of milk that I confidence in. I chose goats over cows milk because I liked the human scale of goats. A typical milking doe weighs in at 120 - 200 lbs. As a friend of mine is want to say, "When a cow kicks you, you stay kicked". There's also the issue of goat tough. Building to the international standard "goat tough" is a lot cheaper than building for "cow tough" certifiaction. It didn't hurt that I was offered a Saanen doe that I was sure of to get started with. Saanens are a large breed dairy goat and I knew the doe I was getting was a good producer because I had been milking her for close to a year at a friend's.

I find goats to have personalities similar to dogs. Friendly dogs. They seek human attention and are easy to train to routines. They can be skittish, but not hard win back over.

I have had challenges in keeping goats. I started from scratch, I didn't have any fencing or housing, I didn't even have that much grass. I chose to go with a high tension smooth wire fencing for their first paddock. While that might be handy for training a new goat to electric fence, but I now think those five wires are over kill. I have been quite successful keeping them behind three flimsy poly wires strands for most of the season. I am trying to do rotational grazing, something I am growing into. Since my first season, I have continuously expanded our pasture areas and I am able to feed them for about six months a year on pasture. For the remainder of the year, I have to buy in hay. The steady expansion of our pastures means that even though we have grown from two animals to 7, our hay costs have been pretty steady. I do face a dilemma about grain though. I haven't found a ready source of organic that I feel I can afford, so I am using a conventional grain to supplement the hay for milking animals. For housing, I didn't want to have something permanent. I didn't want to have lazy barn goats or the parasites and health problems go with them. I have found that goats do just fine in our cold snowy winters with three sided stock panel structures. And there are enough health risks to worry about, making sure the goats have access to minerals, don't carry a heavy parasite load and don't succumb to something like Johnnes or CAE. As big as anything is the daily grind of milking. My wife or I have to milk goats everyday if we are going to keep the goats in production. Because of that, we have only been away overnight together once since we got goats. My final challenge is breeding. I have found only one other Saanen breeder in my area. For some complicated reasons I have chosen to stick with purebred goats, but I am not a big enough operation to carry a buck for breeding. For the time being, I am lucky the one farm close enough is willing to provide stud service for us.

So, after all that, why would I keep goats? Primarily Daily milk. Before I got goats, I was buying three or four gallons of milk each week. I consume a lot of milk, it's an important part of my diet and always has been. Now that I have goats, I also have milk to make cheese with. On a weekly basis, I make chevre, my wife makes a nice mozzarella and quaso blanco. And this year I have started making a Gouda. There is also meat, an inevitable by product of lactation. We can't keep all the offspring created by freshening our goats for milk. Bucklings just don't have much use, and there will come a time when we can't keep all the doelings. On farm slaughter has meant that we also get a small amount of meat from our goats. Then there is the compost. Sure, everybody poops, but not every bodies poop is equal. Goat poop is ready to go from day one. It is nearly perfectly balanced Nitrogen Carbon. And with brush control like goats, I doubt I'll ever need to put a rear mower behind my tractor. Goats clear out many aggressive species like sumac and raspberry. And they love Japanese knot weed and honeysuckle.

I enjoy my goats. They are affectionate and likeable. I enjoy the work and the fruits of my labor. Even early morning milkings in the field are pleasant. There is something refreshing about a goat latte right from the teat on a crisp morning before the mist has cleared.

Manual Mowing

I have heard people call it "scything" but that sounds funny to me. There must have been a time when if you said mowing, you couldn't mean any other way. I guess now you could say manual mowing to be clear there wasn't an engine involved.

I bought a scythe this spring. A friend had let me borrow his brush scythe and snath. I bought a 30" grass blade and tried it on his snath. I found it a great combination for what I wanted to do. Pictured is the grass blade on a snath I made from hemlock (and reinforced some) with a broom handle stem and nibs I whittled from odd bits. I patterned it after a purchased one.

In a few minutes I can easily cut a day or two's fresh grass to help with my rotational grazing. It allows me to cut grass from paddocks ahead of my parasite rotation. That allows me to get the benefit of the growth without exposing the paddock to parasite eggs.

I also frequently use the scythe to true up a paddock after the goats have been through it. I take down any weeds left standing. I particularly want to control poison ivy and black swallow wart or anything else the goats don't care to eat.

I ended up buying a 20" bush blade to go with my grass blade. The bush blade is much stouter, but it's shorter length allows it to maneuver in tighter quarters. The stronger blade allows me to cut light woody material with more confidence. Using the bush blade for blackberry canes and this year's saplings saves me a lot of banging on the grass blade. It is excellent for cutting paths through the wild berry patches. The bush blade does a lot of work keeping the electric fences clear and is excellent for cutting under the fence. I can even reach through the fence to get the opposite side. And a wooden snath doesn't carry current. I know I cut more volume with the grass blade, but the bush blade gets more frequent use.

I am very happy with my first season of use. It's probably right up there with a shovel for usefulness and I think I probably use one more often. I think I am as fast with a scythe as I am with my fancy string trimmer. And since my string trimmer engine is in never ending need of adjustment or repair, maybe faster. The scythe is easily as capable. I have a sickle bar mower that I have used for under the fences, but that was always dicey. I had to loosen the low wire and tie it up out of the way but I was still worried about cutting the wire. And I needed to turn off the fence to cut. And I feel a lot more confident about cutting around the new fruit trees. And the string trimmer burns mixed fuel while the sickle bar engine needs new rings. I am saving all that particulate, too.

I got to do some bailing

A friend of a friend needed help getting in his hay. He has a bumper crop of hay and is struggling with where to put it all. So he was selling it in exchange for help getting the rest in. I ran a baler today and yesterday, maybe eight or nine hundred smallish bales. And there was the work of gethering, loading the bales onto a trailer and then loading them into the barn. Noon to eight or nine PM yesterday, one to six PM today. In the middle of this I got about 150 bales out of it today. It's not great hay, but I was willing to trade experience for labor.

It was a small baler, I think, maybe five feet wide. An old New Holland. It was good experience. I've been interested in learning more about hay production to better understand what I buy for hay and to do a better job with the little bit I cut myself.

So what did I learn? I am not an expereinced tractor driver. Most of my tractor work is loader work, and it does not translate well to open fields. I am slow as molasses because I lack experience. But slow is better than fast and risky, anyway.

I only sheared one pin, I didn't break anything and we didn't re-rake anything I baled. I feel pretty good about it.

in the whirlwind

The wood is down at the house, split and piled, waiting to stack. At least it's now under cover.

The Rice Paddy has it's stock panel cover to keep it warm into the early fall for a little more growing and maturing. We probably won't eat any rice out of it this year, but we will harvest enough seed to start our One Hundred plants for next year. One hundred plants will fill the rice Paddy and that should give us some eating rice for next falls Harvest Festival dinner.

The mill across the way was doing whatever it is they do to produce the premier bedding shavings. Most of the time we get the rough chips from the de-barker, three inch and longer wood fragments. They are usable, but the shavings I got this weekend are a much more palatable option.

Our hay came in this weekend, also. We have a fair amount left from last year still. Good thing, as we can't get any alfalfa this year. And we weren't sure to get any grass hay either. It's been so wet, there's been no cutting going on until the last two weeks. The square bales are in the barn and we are trying out some dry unwrapped round bale this fall. The round bales are new to us and it took a couple of tries. The first two I got were plastic wrapped and too wet for goats. The hay ferments in the wrapped bale and there is too much risk of lysteriosis. The other thing about round bales is we don't have a barn to store them in. They are too big for me to get into the loft like we do the square bales. So we will station them in the back field and put an Arch over them to feed them through the fall. When real winter comes, we'll be bringing the goats closer to the house.

Today was chicken butchering day. We have been saying we wanted to get to it for at least two weeks now. Sometimes the que is that long.

It's been a busy end of summer, making up for lost time while trying get the usual stuff done.