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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Mister P and Nevat, When Farming Gets Real

Mister P, our resident Pekin duck, and Nevat, our Great Pyrenees puppy, have an interesting relationship. Since day one, Mister P has had it in for Nevat. He travels great lengths to let Nevat know who's boss. Surprisingly, Nevat is quite accepting of this fact.

I've literally watched our fearless, white duck waddle across the entire yard to peck at Nevat's fur. He pulls out tufts of hair and really goes to town on her. To her credit, she just lets it happen. 

Now, Nevat is no saint. She chases down ducks, guineas and chickens on a regular basis, and we scold her for it, and it drives me a little crazy. But for some reason she doesn't have the same tendency for "playfulness" with Mister P. Sure, she'll give him a soft paw to face, or maybe chew on his beak a little, but it's not the pouncing that the other birds get when Nevat is being bad.

I've been trying for months to get this on video, but I'm always too caught in the moment, laughing my head off. And it never lasts long. Mister P is a sniper. He moves in with a rapid waddle, snaps his beak with extreme ferocity, removes as much fur as possible, and quacks himself back to safety. Nevat never knew what hit her. 

 

Nevat, Our Newest Adopted Baby Animal

Nevat, following us to round up the milkers on a particularly windy day

Following the tradition of adopting small, white, baby animals, this past week we welcomed Nevat to Little Seed Farm. Our neighbors found Nevat a couple miles down the road in the forest. She was howling in the woods like a coyote and was far too cute to leave to fend for herself. Despite an unhealthy coat full of fleas and ticks our neighbors knew a beautiful puppy lay beneath. They also knew she could find a happy home with us.

As our herd expands next year and we experiment with running the milkers and the kids separately, Sophie will get promoted to full-time goat protection instead of her current perimeter job. That means we’ll need another dog to run with Sheba on the perimeter. Sheba alone would have a hard time managing the 50+ acres of fields. By April Nevat will be ready to join the patrol team. Hard to believe she'll be so big so fast.

Nevat after her bath time

We think she’s a Great Pyrennes somewhere in the 5-8 week range, but we’ll know better once she visits the vet this week. She has double-dew claws, which is a Great Pyr trait. Full white coat that’s very thick and fluffy.

The name Nevat comes from a Spanish (bloomy rind) cheese, available in both sheep's milk and goat's milk versions. It resembles a meringue and is one of Sweetbread's favorite cheeses. The word "Nevat" translates to "snowy" from Catalan, which is fitting for both the cheese and our little white fluffball. We took the picture below while in the caves at Murray's Cheese in NYC. 

Always fun to have a joyful little animal running around. Maybe one day we'll have a little one to name after our own bloomy rind.