The $500 Hoop House for Hay Storage

We're remodeling an old red barn that was used for milking cows in the 1970's and 80's. It's been abandoned since then and was infested with termites, brown recluse spiders, and who knows what else (actually, I know everything else that was in there, but the list is way too long).

The old milking barn was our hay and lumber storage. We recently decided to transform the barn into a small creamery/classroom space/milking parlor. Over the next few months I'm working with Sweetbreads' step-father to fix up the old building. Good thing he knows what he's doing...

With all that going on we needed somewhere to put all of our hay. We couldn't afford to put up a nice, big hay barn, so we sought out an economical solution. What we found was a $500 hoop house. All of our materials were bought new (except for some screws and a few 2x4's). If you have access to free PVC or plastic covering you could build this thing for next to nothing. 

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First Breeding Season - Triumphs and Travails

We are just wrapping up our first attempt at breeding the dairy goats naturally. We are not using AI this season. But I won’t bore you with the specifics of all that. This is a time for stories. Stories that are a daily experience of farming.

Gozer, hollerin' at the ladies

In an effort to synchronize the girls’ heat cycles we put them in a paddock near the bucks. They were about 2 feet apart. The boys inside their fortified pen and the girls inside the electro-netting.

Immediately the two boys started going bonkers. Making strange noises and butting the fence repeatedly. Neither tried to jump out or climb the fence. Just a lot of running straight at the fence, trying to plow it down. They know where the gate is, so they focused on that area the most. It also happens to be the weakest part of the fence, so I had to reinforce it twice within the week.

When we noticed a specific doe in heat we would take the rest of the girls away to the milk barn and leave the girl in heat in the pen. She would be wagging her tail, making a strange sound we’d never heard before and have a noticeably moist tail.

Next I would go into the buck pen and let one loose to run in with the girl, meanwhile holding back the other buck until Sweetbreads locked the gate.

Everything went surprisingly smoothly until the last few “dates”. George, the Alpine, had proven himself to be the casanova of the two. He had style and finesse. Upon entering the girl’s pen, George would immediately mount and seal the deal, usually two or three times in the first few minutes. You knew it was a good one because George would end with a big thrust and then fall over backward on the ground! Talk about hilarious.

Then he would go back to the doe and she would pee on his face. To which he would stare up at the sky and snarl his upper lip. At this point it’s impossible not to laugh. This is what he’s been waiting for all year. A doe to pee on his face.

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Will Goats Eat Anything?


Willow, happily munching on the rose bushes around the house. She's quite spoiled that Willow

This was a question posed by one of our readers a few weeks ago. It's a subject I've often thought about addressing. 

A common belief is that goats will eat anything. Many people imagine a goat eating a tin can. I don’t know exactly where that image comes from, but it’s prevalent. A quick Google search brought back tales of goats eating the labels off tin cans because they liked the taste of the glue.

So is it true? Will goats eat anything?

The answer is a definite “no”. At least for our goats. Prior to owning goats I too thought they'd eat anything. I figured that of all the grazing animals (goats, sheep, cows, etc) goats were the least discriminating.

Turns out goats are the MOST discriminating. One of the first things you hear from farmers raising multiple species is that the goats are the hardest to keep in good “body condition”. Goats like to “browse” rather than “graze”, meaning they like to eat at head-height. They also like to eat a wide variety of grasses and forages, easily getting bored with one type of grass and quickly moving on to something else. You can't just plant a bunch of fescue, orchard grass, and other common grasses and get away with it. Goats will do fine, but they won't thrive in that type of pasture management.

That's why, despite low fertility, our "diverse" pastures are perfect for goats. It's a wild territory out there, filled with all kinds of weird stuff. The goats can happily move from one species to another, picking and choosing what they'd like to eat. In fact, when forage specialists from UT have visited the farm they generally say just keep on doing what you're doing. Maybe lime it a little and add in some legumes, but for the most part don't screw up the diversity of forages. Roses, lespedeza, privet, and other less-common "forages" (or "weeds", to some) are natural de-wormers, high in protein, and won't easily die in a drought. They also grow most of the year in Tennessee.

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