The Babies Are Coming!

It’s February and we are tingling with excitement as the anticipation of newborns overtakes us. There is a cyclical nature to life on a farm. If it is July then the garden needs to be weeded, if it is September then the goats need to be bred, and if it is February then baby goats are imminent. There is a purpose to each season which we base our lives upon. And now, as exciting as Christmas, we are looking forward to the arrival of spring babies. The very first ones arrived last week- two large breech kids, one buck and one doe. Yesterday, in our absence, arrived two more bucks. It was a community effort in that situation since we were gone to the ocean for the weekend. Wonderful friends and neighbors pulled together to deliver, milk and bottle feed the newborns.


This is when I am jealous of all those lambs that get to stay with the ewes in the field. As dairy goats we must take the babies away and bottle feed them. This is for a variety of reasons but the most important one is that they are raised to be very tame and easy to work with as their future will be working in close quarters with humans. It’s a fair amount of work but it’s also quite rewarding.


There is truly nothing cuter than baby goats. Cuteness of a lamb but with tons of personality. At three days old they are bouncing around like they have springs for legs. Their natural curiosity and desire to run and jump leads to all sorts of comical images. Our children run and the baby goats chase after them. Kids chasing kids!

I think back to my former life, the one made up of bus schedules and calendars on the wall. While I noted the changing seasons, the seasons did not change me. February used to just be another month on the calendar with all the usual deadlines and do lists. February is not that way any more. It tingles and crackles with excitement and anticipation.

I Can Smell the Earth

After the great snow and the great rain and the almost great flood came spring in January. I love how early our spring comes. Of course it stays until mid July before we get summer. But the worst of winter is behind us. I went outside last week and I could smell the earth. It was letting me know that I could come and work in it. I’ve been itching to get into the garden so I was elated. The sarcococa (sp?) or vanilla plants were giving up their heavenly, daphne-like smells that kept catching me unawares. The robins have returned from wherever they’ve been to add their songs to the chattering of the starlings and sparrows. The eagles and hawks seem to be more active as well. One huge mature eagle landed in the top of one of our evergreen trees that line the driveway and stayed there, spying out the situation. Our chickens were hilarious as they tried to dash from shelter to shelter to get to safety- something from a bad spy movie. The eagle finally moved off and the roosters gave their all clear crows.
I love the animals but I also really love the garden. This year I am re-organizing the whole layout of the vegetable garden so that it can be larger and easier to manage. That means that my shovel and I are back together again, an inseparable pair.
Yet I’ve realized that I’m not completely bought over to the farmer mentally. After much agonizing, I’ve decided to keep my dog. I know that I should have sold him. I found a nice family that wanted him. But he’s too much my pet. So for a price, we keep him. The price being a completely new and separate 2nd invisible fence. Should one line go down the other will still work. It’s still a risk I know, but I’ll have to live with it.
Kidding time is coming up. I calculated it and there’s a good possibility that two does will kid mid Feb. That’s in 2 weeks. I don’t hardly feel ready. But Steve is almost done with the wash room so that will be ready to use. We will do an all hands on deck of cleaning and scrubbing out the milking parlour and the wash room and everything else.
We worked like crazy to get our web site up (gardenhomefarm.com) and I feel good about having most everything somebody would want to know on it. Potential customers have been contacting me like crazy- I hope I don’t run out. The whole goat share thing is new to me so I hope people bear with me while we work the kinks out.
I really think that the whole raw milk movement it far larger than anyone realizes. Once people start coming together about it, it’s just going to snowball and that can only be great for everyone. The Weston A. Price Foundation (see realmilk.com) has chapters all over the country. One is starting here in Mount Vernon so I’m joining that. If anyone is interested they have a fantastic web site (westonaprice.org). It’s great to be part of something which so many people are excited about.
Maybe it’s the spring air that is so palpable that is making me excited, maybe it’s seeing the light at the end of the tunnel of construction, maybe it’s seeing the does’ bellies swelling more and more every day. Whatever it is I’m lovin’ it!

Progress

Here we go. I’ve posted our upcoming availability of milk on some sites and have already started to get responses. How exciting. I’m always amazed when you say something out loud things happen. Steve got the commercial sink put in this last weekend. How just he and a neighbor were able to lift this huge thing up and through a side window, I have no idea. It was during a snowstorm to boot.

What a beautiful snowstorm, albeit short-lived. After feeding the girls I just stood there in their cozy shed looking out at the snow coming down. It was one of those moments you try to remember as when everything feels right. There are so many moments that you feel everything is going wrong that it’s great to take a moment and enjoy a delicious moment of things going right.

Crises!

We had a near disaster this week-end that has resulted in heartbreak. My prized, beautiful and wonderfully loyal German Shepherd dog jumped the fence into the goat pen and ran my goats around and beat up Maude, the queen goat pretty badly. He wasn’t there for blood, only a rough game of chase, but with all the goats in their last two months of pregnancy, it could have been deadly. Because Maude is herd queen she took on the dog, head butting and challenging him. This kept him occupied with her while the others huddled in a corner. No one else was touched but she was bloodied with some tooth bites and worse, in a state of on-coming shock by the time we arrived. We administered all kinds of first aid and supplements and had her and a herd mate (good ‘ol Freddy the wether who’s everyone’s friend) spend the night in our main floor bathroom (I knew that I’m living in a barn). We were very worried about whether she would survive the night, but by mid-day the next day she seemed much better. She still seems sore and slow but she’s eating so that’s always a good sign. She is the hero though for defending the herd. We had just put the big goats in with the young ones two days before. If Maude had not been there the smaller goats would not have been a match for the dog.
However the result is that we have to get rid of Kasper. I put an ad in the paper this week. It broke my heart. We got him as a pup and he’s been a member of this family. He’s been with us since we were city people and I personally socialized him by taking him everywhere with me- from neighborhood parks to dog parks, from hardware stores to parades, and to waiting outside the school as children to came up and petted him while he sniffed each one for hidden candy. He’s come on family vacations when possible and patiently waited at kennels for our return when not possible. He’s of the athletic german line and has stayed athletic with daily racing of our neighbor’s car as it speeds up alongside the full length of our property. He looks the protective part but once he’s given you the full sniff-over he’s nothing but friendly. He’s the perfect dog except for the fact that he likes to chase goats. We’re in this too heavily to back out for the sake of our dog. We’ve given him three chances (this is not his first transgression) and we’ve tried back-up firewalls. But the firewalls have holes in them and he’s so smart he knows just when that opportunity exists. When these goats kid, we’ll have that many more goats to protect. It just won’t work. He has to go……
Oh, but that hurts to see those words I just wrote. I know one thing though, he’s not going to some shelter or rescue. I’m selling him. He’s a proven dog. Past the forever juvenile stage. I paid $500 for him as an 8 week old pile of fluff. So I’m asking $300 for him now that I’ve done all the labor. Only serious potential owners should respond with that. Maybe even someone interested in taking him to herd dog training- he certainly has the instinct. I did that with my first German Shepherd and it was very rewarding- my dog had fun learning how to chase sheep in a controlled manner, and I got a naturally better trained animal. Oh well. That will be beyond my control.
They tell me this is how I have to think now that we have a farm. They tell me that farm life is hard. This is definitely the ugly side of things. In Seattle I would never have to make such a choice. Now I do. My daughter cried and said she just wanted to go far, far away from all of this. She loves her goats and doesn’t want them hurt. She loves Kasper as well. She doesn’t want this dilemma to exist. Neither do I. Maybe I’m not cut out for this after all, I ask myself. Maybe I’m just some soft suburbanite, farmer wannabe after all. But no. It’s just life. Real life. And real life is about hard choices. I look at Kasper asleep on the floor at the foot of my bed, oblivious to his fate. He has confidence I won’t stay mad at him for long. He knows I love him. I do, but he still has to go.

On your mark, get ready…

We spent a wonderful Christmas break in Michigan, visiting family and all the usual. Steve and I had a chance to really focus on our business plan. We’re completely excited about what lies ahead.

Everyone of course was curios about our endeavor and I had fun educating people about the benefits of raw milk. It was interesting talking to the Cheeto crowd about the healthiness of raw milk and have them all excited about trying to find some for themselves. My sister-in-law joked about my sending our milk to her UPS.

The fact of the matter is that it’s hard to disagree with thousands of years of raw milk drinking. Anyone can read about Weston A. Price’s research into traditional cultures around the world and their common food uses for good health. Raw food is found in some format in these cultures. While the Eskimos may enjoy raw whale blubber, and the Japanese yum yum over raw fish heads, I find our cultural practice of drinking raw milk to be more palatable. Fermented foods are also a common denominator among traditional cultures. My husband could get his fair share with sauerkraut, but I prefer fresh yogurt. This all has to do with enzymes and lactic acid helping the nutrients to become more available to your body.

What is really easy to explain to people about the benefits of raw versus pasteurized milk comes in an illustration that is no more difficult than a basic high school science experiment. When researchers wanted to study milk they took two groups of rats. The first group, Group A was fed raw milk. The second group, Group B, was fed pasteurized milk. Everything else was the same. They studied these groups over several generations. What they found was very straightforward. Group A (the raw group) experienced normal healthy lives, conceived and gave birth without complications, had off-spring with strong bones and straight teeth and jaws who were equally healthy as their parents. There was little difference from generation to generation. Group B however, was very different. While the first generation of Group B seemed fairly normal they gave birth to off-spring with crooked teeth and unsound jaws who had trouble conceiving and giving birth. The health of each generation deteriorated over time, showing all the “modern” diseases of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc. Any high schooler could figure out this correlation.
It’s too bad that our modern health care (oxymoron) has chosen the path of pharmaceuticals rather than just plain good science that points out the benefits of foods that traditional cultures have relied on. Ever since God created the goat and loved its milk so well that he created the cow and sheep, people have been reaping the benefits of this food.

This is the biggest reason why I want to become a Grade A certified raw goat milk dairy. I think it should be made available to anyone in the stores. I could just sell it under the table or be word of mouth but I want the public to see it there on the shelves and question their choices. I want the government to acknowledge by certifying me that they are open to raw milk and stop being blind to the truth.
Do I think they really will? I hope so, but I’m realistically skeptical. If not, then I will still move forward with my planned goat share. By offering people a share of a goat then they are technically drinking milk from their own goat- which is legal. They then pay me a fee for boarding and feeding “their” goat. This works out to be the same price as a quart of milk. This is how it is being done across the country as people will not be denied the food they want.

Hello? Is anyone out there?

My husband, Steve convinced me to try this blog. I only heard of this word two months ago. Now here I am trying to create one......

It is Monday after Thanksgiving and the real world calls to me. The frost was so thick this morning that my youngest had a hard time breaking the ice on the water buckets for the animals. The young goats all cried out to be let out into the field but I knew they would just huddle together in the shelter so I left them in their "lounging barn"- just a converted old car port. The meat chicks are growing so fast and they, as well as all the layers, came running up to my son when he went to feed them this morning. There isn't much for them to eat when the ground is so frozen. I sent out some extra oatmeal for them from our breakfast. My oldest daughter appreciated the recent new addition of hot water to the milking parlour when she went out to milk this morning. I'm sure the goats appreciated having nice warm water on their udders when they were washed up. They are coming to the end of their milking season as we will be drying them off soon so they can have the last two months of their pregnancy to sit back and relax and restore their energies.

I am looking forward to spending this "dry" time on advancing our dairy plans. So far so good. The inspector came out last summer when I wanted to ask if they were going to let me be a raw dairy (very, very few of us). He scratched his head and let me know that as long as we jumped through all the hoops and followed all the regulations it seemed likely. Other states have vehemently opposed such a thing and have even declared out right war on raw dairies. So I feel somewhat encouraged. We'll see. If not I'll develop a goat share. What's a goat share? Just like a company share. You own one or more parts of a goat and therefore you get to drink milk from your own animal. I wonder what Wall Street would think of that?