We had a couple nice warm sunny days here at Long Creek Farm which were a very welcome break from all the cold weather we have been having for the past two months or so! But now we are back to cold, we are expecting possibly three inches of snow this week in addition to freezing rain and sleet.
Where we are, the grass is growing enough to start pasturing the animals around the beginning of March, so we still have about a month to go until we have to start moving fences again. We bred our goats so that they would start kidding the same time they can start grazing so that we don't have to feed them alfalfa.
Last year almost all of them kidded before they could start grazing and their milk production was so low that we waited about a month to start milking them partially because it was a waste of time, we would have gotten so little and partially because we were afraid the kids wouldn't get enough.
This year we are doing a waiting list for our kids, which helps to get the kids sold faster (which in turn saves you the money of feeding them) since some of them (or hopefully all) are already spoken for before they are even born.
We are offering both two-day old bottle babies (have to be fed night and day but have had plenty of time to get all the colostrum they need from their mothers) and two-week old bottle babies (no longer have to be fed at night) as well as weaned kids.
For anyone expecting kids this spring (or anytime actually!) I would recommend that you have all the supplies you will need two weeks before you expect the kids to be born. It is much less stressful to deal with a kidding problem if you can just stay home and don't have to run out to the store on top of whatever is going on.
Some things I would suggest you have on hand include:
Old towels for drying the kids off if the mother won't
Bottles (at least two, because something will happen to one of them)
Milk pail in case you need to milk the mother
Funnel that fits into the top of the bottle (since most bottles have very narrow openings)
Molasses (1/4 of a cup in a gallon of warm water to give the mother energy after she kids)
Heat lamp, if there is a possibility of it getting cold
Small pen (minimum 4'X4') to separate the mother and kids from the rest of the herd for the first couple of days
Baking soda for treating floppy kid syndrome
Baby lamb strength (a natural supplement from Premier One supplies that can be used for kids or lambs, we have never used this yet, but it is highly recommended by Premier) for kids or does that aren't doing well
You can read these blogs we have written if you would like more information:
We also set up a goat milk waiting list on the home page of this site to try to get an idea of how many people are going to be wanting milk this year. We are looking to possibly increase our herd to 30 milking does (we currently have 10 does that we plan on keeping).
So, we recently added another three does, Sweet Pea, Hazel, and Shadow, to our herd, Sweet Pea and Hazel are due in March, as are most of our current goats, and we still have our buck with the herd so Shadow should probably have kids in July.
We are also getting an automated fodder system so we can stop buying grain for our pigs and goats and reduce the amount we have to buy for our chickens and ducks. We did it manually last year while we were milking but were not able to grow enough to keep up with how much we had to feed our does.
So, we usually ended up feeding the fodder to them with barely any roots, and no grass. Fodder is SO much cheaper than pellets (and we have a lot of animals to feed!), so it will be very worth it for us to spend the money on an automated system.
We will see how the system we are getting works and let you know if it a company we would recommend!
We received our order of Whitening True Blue chicks last week, the new brooder box we built is working well, and is much more convenient than the one we were using last year!
If any of you are interested in increasing you flock this year, I would recommend that you order your chicks ASAP, not only do hatcheries tend to sell out later in the season, but the longer you wait the longer it will be before the chicks you order start laying.
With hatchery prices nearly double what they used to be, you may want to consider selling hatching eggs to people who may not want to pay hatchery prices.
We have started some transplants for this year's garden, mostly tomatoes, and a few herbs.
One final thing I would like to mention, we tell people that we do not use chemical dewormers on our animals, which we don't, but we have not had a worm problem ever that we know of. When the grass is growing, we pasture rotate our animals very often, sometimes every day!
That can be enough to prevent a worm problem, but sometimes it isn't, especially if the animals are coming back to the same pasture soon after they left it. Ideally, you wouldn't graze the same pasture twice in a year. However, that is not practical, or even possible for most of us.
There are some very effective natural options though. One surprising one, that may be the best, is Shaklee Basic H! It is a natural surfactant which tests have proven to be effective in eliminating internal parasites.
To give it to your animals you can just mix it to their regular drinking water at a rate of about a tablespoon per five gallons of water.
There are no side effects, and you can't really overdose it. We have given it to our goats as a preventative measure since it doesn't hurt them even if they didn't need it.
We will probably give it to them soon since we just penned them all up (they have been free ranging since about August when we had a drought that made pasture rotating impractical) and they are going to be kidding soon.
Another natural dewormer is oil of oregano, however this one you have to be more careful with, and you also have to administer it to each animal individually, which isn't easy when you have as many animals as us!
Here is a blog I wrote on it last summer when we thought one of our baby goats may have had coccidiosis Oil of Oregano.
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