Baby Goats on Pasture


Goat babies and their portable taco truck shelter

Y'all are due for an update on the baby goats. It's been a while!

Almost three months into their little lives they are all wonderfully happy and healthy. Our final tally was 7 doelings and 3 bucklings. We are retaining all the doelings to grow our milking herd and we're also retaining one of the bucklings to serve as a herd sire next year. The other two bucklings are available for sale, so shoot us an email if you're interested (farmer@littleseedfarm.com), both come from great milk lines and would make excellent herd sires. One is an Alpine and the other is a Nubian.

Until recently, we had been training the goat kids to the electric fencing by rotating them around our front and back yards. The grass is shorter in the yard and we can keep an eye on them a lot easier. After grazing all day we would put them back in the pen where they would spend the night. We used a pen/barn area at night to keep them safe since they didn't have a guard dog with them.

But now they're big kids and they turned into voracious foragers. Our lawn just wasn't cutting it for them and they were proving to be well-trained to the electric fence. All they needed was a portable shelter and we could have them out in the fields, rotationally grazing just like the big goats.

I went on Craigslist and found a trailer that had been in the process of conversion into a "food truck" of sorts, but never quite made it. It was a guy's pet project for making a portable food trailer for his family's BBQ's, but he just didn't have the time to finish it out. It just so happens the unfinished food truck projects also make excellent portable goat housing. So I snapped it up and now the kids have their own taco truck. I love watching them pile out of it, it's like a clown car, only it's baby goats jumping out of a pseudo-taco truck, which is far more entertaining than creepy clowns.

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Goat Buck Pad


My lovely wife putting on the finishing touches

Male animals on the farm are a difficult proposition. They’re harder to manage, they’re stronger and they generally only have one thing on their mind. Yet you need them to make milk. If you don’t have babies you don’t have milk. So we needed some bucks to help us breed our ladies this fall for milk in the spring.

Enter Gozer and George. One is a Nubian (such as Bridget) and one is an Alpine (such as Mayday and Sabine, Queen of the Truck Roof). Both have excellent blood lines for milk production, which is a critical quality for our bucks. They are responsible for 50% of the genetics in our herd. Each doe has less of an impact than the bucks. Yet neither buck has produced kids, so we can’t be sure that their progeny will be up to par. But that’s the risk you take with bucks. No one wants to sell you their best buck, you almost always have to go with an unproven youngin’ from good blood lines.

 

 

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Portable Goat Shelter and Shade Shack: Attempt #1


It looks so nice when it's standing upright and providing shade and shelter

Now that we have the goats out in electrically fenced paddocks each day we want to provide them a little area to get out of the hot sun, or cold rain. Goats are susceptible to pneumonia and dairy animals in particular can be adversely affected by extreme heat (lower milk production, etc). So on Sunday we took a couple hours and built them a little shelter/shade shack.
 

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