Why Did We Sell That Goat?

We sold a goat today. A goat in milk that is a trained, experienced milker. Two years old, good mom, has had two sets of healthy twins, good udder, easy to milk, responds well to our routine. So why did we sell her? It wasn’t because we have too many goats. It was because her lungs and vocal cords get a good workout everyday any time she sees us. This goat yells. Some goats talk normal goat talk and that is good. Not this one. I don’t think she has any volume besides an irritating, yelling, screaming, demanding bellow. I’m not sure of any other way to describe it.

But, the good news is we sold her to some old friends of ours that we haven’t seen in years that are both deaf. Just kidding. Just wanted to see if you’re paying attention. They’re not deaf, but they did buy the goat. They had a tragic accident at their farm a while back. Their barn burned down, and all of their goats perished. So, they needed a milk goat, we had planned on selling her anyway, they knew the circumstances as to why we were selling her, they were okay with these conditions, so it was a good fit for both of us. And we had a great visit to boot.

Now we have two adult does, both pregnant. One is in milk, but she is drying up, and the other one is not in milk. What this boils down to, is in a couple of weeks our source of fresh milk will dry up, literally. Somewhere around February 10th we will be back in fresh milk again.

Where will we get milk? For years we drank powdered milk, and it’s okay, you can live on it. Other times we had neighbors that were milking a cow and had an abundance. But that source has since dried up also. We have tried freezing milk, which we still do, but it’s only for emergency purposes, we just don’t care much for the taste of thawed milk. We did try something this year with our frozen milk. This time we skimmed the cream off before we froze it, so we will give it a try again. But, if I were a betting man, I would bet our milk is going to be coming from the grocery store.

It’s really nice to live in a country where I can go to the grocery store and have a choice of skim milk, 1%, 2% or what they call whole milk, that, of course, has been homoginized and pasturized. Seriously, it is nice to be able to buy just about any food item we want or need. As most of you are aware, this situation will someday change. Let’s take advantage of the good times we have. We often write about the failures of our garden, because now we can afford to fail. But that may not be the case tomorrow, six months from now or six years from now.

Back to the goats and the milk. We have two adult does that will be giving us babies, which means we will start having fresh milk again. We have three young does that we will breed November 1st which will give us babies around April. Then we will be flowing in milk. We will have to train the three young ones to milk, and then make the decision who stays and who goes. If things go according to schedule, we will have about 8 to 10 babies. We will evaluate how the new mothers are doing, but will only keep four milkers at the most. This means we will sell one new trained milker, and we will probably have three to four young females to sell. All of the boys, except for the billy, will become next year’s meat supply.

So that is where we are on the goats right now. We are going to have a dry period with no fresh milk. Now that it is cooled down we need to butcher last year’s wethers. And the cycle continues. The goats we keep fit into our scheme of things. The goats we sell, hopefully can benefit some family needing milk. This is what we do. I hope you find this interesting, and I hope you’re preparing for what’s coming.

We’ll talk more later. Frank