Guinea Keet Hatching Success - First Births on the Farm

New parents huddled over their keets in the rain

The influx of baby animals continues. This time with the first actual births on the farm. Our broody guinea hen hatched out her eggs. Of the five remaining eggs, three hatched. If you remember, she started with 23 of her own eggs and 1 turkey egg. About 2.5 weeks into it she lost 15 eggs, including the turkey egg, to a predator. She sat on the remaining nine eggs until today, at which point there were only five left (something must have come last night for the other four). Three hatched and now there are tiny little guinea keets running around chasing her.

Her timing has been less than perfect. First she chose to sit on the eggs through a serious heat wave. Then she hatched out on the first rainy day we've had in months. It literally rained all day, and it wasn't very warm either. She managed through it though and we're very proud of her. She lost a ton of body weight over the course of those four weeks and now she has three healthy babies. We want to see if she can raise them.

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Adopt-A-Goat

Our little baby kiko goat
Scrapple was wrapping up the typical chores on Tuesday night. Just finished moving the cows to a new paddock. Brought water out to everyone. Gave the pigs some whey that was left over from the day’s cheesemaking. Just as he was stepping into the truck to head back for dinner, the phone started buzzing. It was our neighbor and it was almost 8pm, kind of strange. When he picked up the phone all he could hear was goat baaa’ing in the background. “uh oh”,he thought, “wonder what’s going on over there”?
 
Turns out he had a doe (or ‘nanny’ as everyone but us calls them) that had a buckling and a doeling on Sunday but didn’t seem to be letting the little doeling nurse anymore. He found her curled up in the field, no longer following along with momma, as it had been in the days prior. Since he raises meat goats (not dairy) and he has a very hands-off approach we get the sense that he didn’t have many options for raising this little girl. But since we have dairy goats and a plentiful supply of milk he called us. We decided to give her a shot.
 
About 10 minutes after getting off the phone we had a new baby goat. A three day old baby goat. A three day old baby goat that was clinging to life, couldn't stand up, and had an eye infection.
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Elusive Blue


Blue

Not everything goes as planned on the farm. Before moving to Tennessee we put in over a year’s worth of research and planning to make the start-up as “smooth” as possible. Since then lots of stuff has gone according to plan, but just as much has not. Things not going according to plan is what we spend most of our time figuring out, fixing, and trying not to do again.

With the dogs we’ve been very lucky. Our three girls, Sophie, Sheba and Izzy, all stay within the perimeter fence, they love the animals, they love us and they hate anything that tries to get inside the fence. So far they've been fantastic and we haven't had any predator problems. However, because of our property's layout and the amount of land we’re managing it will make sense for us to have more guard dogs as we expand. We’ll be running goats in different paddocks. Bucks will be separate from Does. Kids will be separate. Cows and pigs are all run separately. In addition, the land is split between three (or four, depending on how you look at it) distinct parcels. It’s too much to ask of three dogs and we don’t want to set them up for failure.

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