Virtual Visitors & 5 things I have learned from our growing dairy herd this year.

GoGo snuggled up with her pile of kids!

Over the past year, virtual visitors have popped in to the Sunflower Farm Dairy Blog from all over the United States, Germany, France, Canada, Japan, Singapore, Cambodia, United Kingdom, Ghana, Malta, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Korea, Russia and Thailand. In total 1000+ folks have stumbled in for a moment of small farm life in Cumberland, Maine. 

I love this for so many reasons. Unless you grew up farming (and I imagine even if you did) there are always a million curious questions which pop up on any given day. Knowing that there are people out there with a million different answers makes the journey less lonely. Farming allows us to disconnect in many ways from the insanity of modern life, but virtual and real live visitors to the farm remind me of how much the simple act of planting a garden, tending goats, collecting eggs and making cheese connects me to people, traditions and history which have persevered throughout all time, all around the globe. I am hoping to add a forum soon where we all can share our hard earned wisdom with each other on topics related to goat herding and cheese making! Also coming in August to the blog, hard cheeses and more on the creation of our dairy! For now my small gift to those in their first year or two of goats...

5 things I have learned this year.  

Note: these are simply my observations based on experience with my goat herd. I am interested in what others have experienced! PLEASE leave a note about something you learned this year!

Giving Shots is worth doing yourself...for sure there are things we call the vet for, but to have them make a farm call to give shots was getting pricey and unnecessary. This year we saved about $900. giving our own antibiotics, BoSe and CDT when they were called for. It's easiest with kids if one person can hold the goat while the other gives the shot. Set adults up on the milk stand with some food and they will not even notice a shot. To be prepared buy: alcohol, wipes needles- it is worth having a variety (Banamine calls for a tiny dose, CDT always a whopping 2 cc.), and a scale. Side note: The bottle of CDT says to dispose of the bottle after opening and using once. I asked my vet and he said it was fine to keep it between the first round of shots and the second round of shots 3 weeks later. Be sure to wipe bottle with alcohol wipes, use a new needle for each shot and to keep the bottle in the fridge when not in use.

Disbudding will hurt you more than it hurts them. In my opinion it is best to get someone with a lot of experience to do it. They will do it once, right, and be quick about it. We tried it the first year on our own and had to have the ones we sold redone by the vet. He used lots of painkiller and took a long time which in my opinion added a lot of stress to the goat kids. We were keeping Luna, so we let her one horn grow calling her our One Horned Wonder. When done correctly the whole process takes about 1-2 minutes and they will yell most of it, but when they hop down, they run to nurse and act as if nothing has happened. It does not appear to cause them lasting pain. Side note: Luna broke her little horn off the other day wrestling over food with another doe. It was a bloody mess and an excellent argument for disbudding. When I called the vet in a tizzy, he sensibly suggested that if I stopped chasing her and trying to DO SOMETHING, her blood pressure would drop a bit and the blood would likely stop on its own. If your goat ever breaks off their horn apply some blood stop and iodine or blue cote and let them be. Keep an eye on it and step in if needed, otherwise let nature heal her up. Her little horn nub healed up great without any real help from us.

Elastration is easy on the owner but clearly is not fun for the goat. In addition to shots, we elastrated 8 of our little bucklings this year. We waited until 7 weeks to give them time for their systems to develop as much as possible to help prevent urinary calcifications later. They are fertile at that age, so waiting longer than that was not possible with our setup. You might imagine burning the hornbud would be far more painful than placing a band at the top of their testicles, but this is not from my observations true. We gave our goat babies Banamine this year, an antinflamatory painkiller prescribed by the vet which did seem to shorten their discomfort. The procedure is cheap and easy to do yourself or with a partner. No vet needed for this either, save the $300 for an emergency! Weigh them and give the correct amount of Banamine. Then wash them up with an alcohol wipe, put the band on and then cover the area with Iodine. Quick and easy. At first, they are fine, they run and nurse and seem unaffected. Then it hits them and for 2-4 hours the poor kids are miserable. They all draped themselves on their moms and took turns crying piteously. Chris left the farm that evening! He could feel their pain. That night life was back to normal and after a week or two the nuts were shriveled up and ready to fall.  If you think about the surgery we do on cats and dogs...or humans for that matter, I suppose the 2-4 hours of discomfort is not any worse and perhaps better. I am looking into other methods though. Many folks seem to use the Burdizzo which I am curious to hear more about. 

Goats will Waste Hay-No matter what hay feeder you buy or build, goats will waste hay. It used to make me a little crazy (second cut costs about $3-5 a bale in Maine and our goats each eat about 25 bales a year.) Then I read someone's blog who said that you need to see it as food and then bedding and you will not go so crazy. They are able to spread the hay feet from a feeder and it does provide them with a constant fresh source of bedding! This is a good reminder to fix what you can and to let the rest go until you find a better way! HAY, if you're not having fun what is the point?

Goat Families Love Each Other-We can't keep all the goat kids born on our farm, but boy do we wish we could. This year as our herd grew we were able to see how sweet the goat families are together. Pick any summer day to observe and you will find piles of goats laying on top of or following around their mom.  Luna our doe born last year still follows around her mom (now with her 2 kids in tow.)Watching this touches my heart and is why we have chosen to let the mothers nurse their kids naturally. Many bottle feed the babies to increase the amount of milk they get and to avoid spread of CAE, but I hope we will always be able to balance the farm profit with the daily gold of seeing goats being goats together. Our herd tested negative for CAE, so we are not worried about spreading something we do not have on our farm and for now we have plenty of milk. We separate the kids and moms at night and milk in the morning in the first 8 weeks, then once the majority of the kids go to new homes this weekend, we will begin twice a day milking. Even with all the kids still here, we get a range of 2 cups to 2 quarts a day from each doe. Our goal in the next few years will be to add more 2 quart a day goats! Since we started with goats as pets, milk production was not our original concern. Side Note: We want does to expand our dairy herd but only 4 out of 13 kids were girls this year. We leased a buck who ran with our does for the month of December. I recently heard that many farmers believe that a buck who is allowed to see the does and build up his interest and is then given one shot to mount a doe in heat, will be more likely to produce does! Very interesting! I'm sure there are great number of humans who have tried crazier things to improve their odds of creating offspring of a certain gender! I'm guessing each time, you've got a 50% chance of the trick working! Hopefully the coin flips more in our direction next year, but I wouldn't trade this batch of sweet kids for anything this year.