Someone in our goat group somehow found out about someone that needed to store their billy goat someplace for a while. Coincidentally, we need a billy goat because it is time to get our goats pregnant. Amazing how things work out sometimes isn't it?
One thing I don't think anyone realized, I certainly didn't, was how unpleasantly fragrant goats in heat can be. Unfortunately, the billy goat is even worse. Together, they really stink the place up. To help keep this as minimally as possible, we are keeping the billy goat away from the nannys during the night and letting them be together during the daytime. We want to keep them out of the milking barn as much as possible so it doesn't make an already unpleasant situation worse.
I'm not sure how anyone else is handling this, but when I milk in the morning, I do the milking as normal, letting the nannys eat as normal. But when I'm done, I kick(sometimes literally) them out of the milking barn, lock it up and take a bunch of feed over to the sleeping barn. I then get the billy goat out of his holding pen and let him loose on the unsuspecting, but always affable, nannys. For the evening milking, I put the billy back in his holding pen, dump some feed for him there so he can eat as he wants during the evening. I then proceed to milk as normal.
I'm not sure how long until we know if all the goats are pregnant but I'll let Trent worry about those details. He and Mike seem to be the brains behind this operation. I do know that the taste of the milk has not improved at all since the billy goats arrival. I'm not sure how much more it can deteriorate until my minions start an uprising over it.
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