When we came to the farm a month ago it was the perfect time to be looking for some milking does and their baby goat kids. Most goats are bred to have kids in the Feb/March/April time frame, so we started contacting people in December and January about availability for March. Our mission was to find some milking does and kids that we thought would thrive on our farm.

Our first doeling, Sabine.

There's a lot that goes into the beginnings of a herd, so I’ll talk about a few of them in no particular order. One of our primary hopes was to find goats from Tennessee (or at a minimum from the South.) By focusing on goats in TN we were hoping to find animals acclimated to our climate, and our parasites. It’s stressful enough to move an animal from one location to another, let alone take it to an entirely different climate, so we tried to keep our animal purchases local. If a goat has lived in our climate previously then it’ll have a better chance at surviving in our climate in the future. It can get hot and humid in TN, which is different from a state like Vermont or Oregon. It didn’t make a lot of sense to us to seek out goats from that far away if we could source them locally. As we expand the herd this may be a more difficult task (and we may want to expand our genetics eventually), but we hope we to keep our livestock purchases as local as possible.

We took the goats on their first pasture walk today. While they have a nice size area to browse and forage during the day, it's really not enough diversity for the goats and we'd like them to get accustomed to browsing in the pastures. The plan is to rotationally graze the herd once we get more goats, the electric fencing and some form of mobile shelter and feed/watering arrangement in place.

When I say "rotationally graze" I'm referring to the controlled movement of the goats around the farm to specific areas for specific amounts of time. This will allow us to monitor forage consumption, provide adequate forage regrowth time, and also limit parasite reproduction. By moving the goats on a regular basis the plants can regrow, the parasite cycle is broken without a host, and our ability to optimize browse and pasture consumption is optimized. Rotationally grazing has many benefits that we hope to exploit. However, the rotationally grazing dairy goats is a rare proposition and it isn't nearly as well-developed of a practice as it is for grazing cattle, so it's a bit of an experiment for us. Most goat operations either provide free access to pastures (i.e. continuous grazing, not rotational), or inadequate access to pasture/browse at all. We think neither of those options are optimal, so we're going down a different path. This year we'll be taking baby steps to see how it works. Today was the first step, albeit a very small one.

At first we took the goats out on leads. We were pretty sure they wouldn't bolt on us, but you never know!

Goats on leads eating a mini-blackberry bushThen we decided that was silly, so we let them off the leads

Sweetbreads with the dogs and goats, turns out they kind of like us and don't want to run away!

The Beginnings of a Tennessee Goat Herd, From Tennessee

Dogs and the Dairy Goats on a Pasture Walk

LITTLE SEED FARM

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