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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Moving On From Grassfed Beef

When we first moved to the farm we wanted to gain experience in lots of different farming endeavors and ultimately choose the ones that worked best for us and our land. We knew from the beginning that raising goats on our land would work. It was obvious just by looking at the pastures. Wild blackberry, multi-flora rose, lespedeza, ironweed, and many other "weeds" and "noxious" plants were growing everywhere. It happens that many of these plants are great forage for goats. Thus far we've been right. The goats are thriving, we've had almost zero illnesses, no losses and they're giving a bunch of milk on very minimal feed.

Pigs also make a lot of sense for us. We have about half of our acreage in woods, which provides an excellent habitat for the Ossabaw hogs. They can root, eat the mast, make wallows and be happy pigs. It's a great companion to the goat dairy as well. For every 10 pounds of milk used in cheesemaking, only about 1lb of milk soilds end up as cheese. The other 8-9 pounds would typically go down the drain as whey. Or in our case we'd need to build a lagoon for it. So instead we feed it to the pigs. This left over fluid is full of whey protein and other vitamins and minerals that are not captured during the cheesemaking process.

So pigs and goats fit perfectly. Unfortunately, the idea of raising grassfed beef just didn't make sense. Much of our forage base is not palatable to cows. Fattening up a beef on grass takes a very skilled grazier utilizing high quality forage. If the beef does not gain a certain amount of weight before finishing it won't be well-marbled. That's why so many consumers have had bad experiences with eating grassfed beef. It's very hard to do well, and the people that do it well are few and far between. Sure, we could grow out some beef cows and get them slaughtered, but would it be the best beef you've ever had? Probably not, and that's not what we're aiming for.

Over the past couple weeks we sold Joplin to a neighboring farm and processed Janis for beef. We miss them, but it was the right decision for the farm. Narrowing our focus also helps free up some time for when the baby arrives!

-James

 

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.