Billy Goat Gruff

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.

Bad day at the Farm.

The last few weeks, we've seen a drop in milk production. It has been pretty consistent across the board for all of us milking. We're not sure what is causing it. They seem to be eating plenty, we have a new field opened up for them to graze in. They don't eat too much of the hay we lay out for them. So I don't think it is a lack of food. They do love to gobble up the grain that we give them while milking, but according to one of the books that the others have been reading, we are giving them about the right amount of that. It is a mystery...

Our last milking didn't go very well. The goats were acting up like crazy. They were antsy the whole time and kept trying to break out of the milking stands. The big old goat was struggling something fierce, causing the whole thing to shake, we might have to put some supporting cross braces on it if this behavior keeps up. Anyway, one of my minions was running the gate between the feed area and the milking area. He wasn't doing the best job of keep them in the feed area once they got down from the milk stands. They kept sneaking back hoping for some more grain.

I'm fine with the goats when they are behaving, but once they start acting up, I lose all patience with them. One of them jumped back up on the milk stand and stuck it's head in the grain bin. I grabbed it's collar and started to pull it out. I've noticed that they don't liked to be pulled back, doesn't matter the situation, but as soon as I pull on them, they start fighting against me. So this time, already a little annoyed by the other goats, I wasn't putting up with it. I grabbed it by the collar and threw it off the stand. I didn't know it, but Diane was right behind me. She was bending over to do something and all of a sudden a flying goat slammed into her side and they all went down in a tumble of arms, legs, hooves and hair. Needless to say, now SHE was annoyed by everything as well.

Just a bit later, my minion was again having trouble with the gate and the goats. Diane went over to help out. The goats picked that time to all make a run for the opening, which is where she was standing. Spitting out hay and dust, she slowly got back to her feet from being trampled by the stampede of wild goats....

It was a bad day at the farm.

Don't Fence me In

Now that the routine for milking the goats is pretty much....well routine, I've been looking around our farm area a bit, checking things out to see what's there and if it is something that will make our life easier. The other day I noticed this gate (it isn't like I didn't know it was there before and would think "this fence could really use a gate." ) but really noticed it.

Like a lot of barn areas, there is a lot of hodge-podge stuff around so this gate fits in with the general randomness of how things are. Opening and closing it isn't very easy as the gate is slightly wider than the one post that it latches to, so you kinda have to slam it shut.

Upon closer inspection I realized the posts to this thing are made out railroad rails! Rails are anywhere from 39-60 feet long, so unless they dug a really big hole, they have cut this thing off, but what kind of animals did they keep in this place that they needed something as strong as railway rails to make the posts out of? Locomotives weigh over 150 tons, the size of the pig that would require fences that strong, would keep us in bacon for a lifetime!

Open Fields

Last week we got a bit of a setback in our grazing area. We were going to have 2 large additional fields to graze the goats in. We heard from the owner that we would be able to graze them in the new fields when the grass was tall. One morning we opened the gate and let the goats in. They seemed to love it, they were running and jumping around like crazy. That afternoon we spoke with the owners son(the owner is on an extended leave) and he said that the goats shouldn't be in the big fields as they are going to graze horses in them instead. The cuts the goat grazing by 2/3, with it being the better 2/3 that is going to the horses now. We can let them graze in the original area we had them in(which has been significantly expanded with new fence lines) so that is good, but not as good as we originally had thought it would be. So, we have been opening up the new area in the day time and closing them back into the corral during the evenings. I'm not sure that we need to do that and I'm not sure if that will have an impact on milk production or not. We'll have to let it go for a few days and see how the milk numbers come out.

It has been very hot(in the upper 90's) the past week or two. I thought that might have some affect on how much milk the goats produce, but I haven't seen any trends to show that. Some days have been low, but then others have been very high. Have to keep tracking it.

Final Stretch

Ok, we just finished our last day of milking on this marathon milking session (3 days in a row). I can't say it has been a joy, but it has made me realize that there is no way I could be a dairyman. The time commitment is more than I could handle. My Dad worked at a diary for a time when I was growing up and this makes me appreciate his efforts for us even more than I did before. Hats off to all those who work in a dairy, I certainly appreciate all the milk you've worked morning and nights, weekends and holidays, with never a break, so that I could drink it up.


This mornings milking was the worst..."What? Time to milk again? We just got done milking those goats!" At least I didn't dream about doing it...although, those aliens I was blasting with my BFG 9000 last night did look kinda of goaty....

One the bright side, we did get the most milk tonight than we(meaning me, I'll have to check the milk log against everyone else) have ever gotten before: 38.8lbs!

We have the next few days of milking due to vacations and other scheduling so we'll see how my allergies stand up to the constant assault, but I'm hoping it goes OK. We are pretty efficient and this morning went fast so if I we can sneak in and out before those allergens know we are there so much the better.

Some of these goats have always been more of a bully than others but it is usually been to see who gets to be milked first. This morning they were keeping this one goat from eating after all the milking was done. I think this goat tried to get in between all the other goats in order to eat. I only caught the last few attempts on the camera. It finally got its spot but even then the goat on the end kept leaning it's body into it to keep it from reaching the hay.

Biggest day so far

Well we are finally getting on track, I think the biggest difference was the bad hay that we were using because the milk production is going up. Since Janina put in the scale and we have been keeping track we have gone up pretty good, we started out at about 34. 4 pounds and our best so far was this morning at 38.6 which ended up being just over 2 gallons and 1 quart. This weight of course includes the complete milker, the other difference is that I am adding the strip milk in which actually makes a big difference, bigger than I would have thought anyway. When I first weighed it this morning it came up to 37.2 then I remembered to add in the strip milk and it raised it almost 1 and a half pounds so remember that when weighing. I think that we should be up to 2 and a half gallons pretty soon. That hay makes a big difference.