Caprine Adventures (Our New Dairy Goats)
Good morning my lovely blog readers! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Yes, I know that was over a week ago now.
Gabriel, Garrett, and I spent the holiday traveling and visiting family. We just got back Tuesday evening, so it doesn’t feel like a week ago to me!
From left to right: Cinnamon, Unnamed buckling, and Vanilla
My sister-in-law in Texas raises high quality dairy goats, so guess what? We brought a couple of them back with us!
We’ve had goats in the past, but switched to dairy cows because we wanted the cream for making butter, and to be able to make more and better cheese. We really missed the goat milk and yogurt though.
There were multiple reasons behind getting goats again.
- Firstly, they’re small and easy to take care of. I can take Garrett out with me to milk them without worrying that he’ll get stepped on. Worst case scenario is that he gets sniffed aggressively.
- Secondly, goat milk is highly digestible. Gabriel is mildly (if there is such a thing) lactose intolerant, so raw goat milk is many times easier on him. It’s also much, much better for Garrett.
Cinnamon being nosy about my camera.
- Thirdly, as you can see in the pictures, there are a number of weeds on our farm that cows don’t like to eat. But guess what? Goats do! So they make a great addition in land management if nothing else.
- Fourthly, we’re toying with the idea of adding a dairy share program to the farm. That means that we’ll offer shares of our dairy animals for sale. The owners of the shares would then pay a monthly fee for board and upkeep and be entitled to a certain amount of milk. We’ll start with goat shares since that’s the easiest for me to take care of. We have a very nice heifer who should calve in early summer next year, so if we like the dairy business, we may just add cow shares to it!
Vanilla, just being a goat.
Yes, goats have a reputation of being something of a nuisance. Particularly there penchant for escaping. Fortunately, as long as they’re well fed, we have found that an electric fence does a very good job of keeping them in.
I’m looking forward to having some fresh goat-milk yogurt on our granola cereal!
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