Itty Bitty Hooves

Updated pics of kids born Feb 29th (1 week old)

These guys are just huge. I’m so impressed with the builds on them. At one week the little buckling is already getting heavy to pick up. I have to find that danged weight tape, but I read somewhere it’s not as accurate on the meat breeds as it’s made to judge the dairy weights. I really doubt I’d get him to sit still in my hanging scale, lol. The little doeling I’m keeping to show this year. I really think she’s amazing. Hoping to find a commercial breeder who wants a really great buck that will put meat on their kids as a home for the little guy (we call him Bubba). He’s not registered (he is Boer) but I just couldn’t bring myself to put a band on him. He’s gonna be massive like his daddy.

Bubba at 1 wk (Now he’s super friendly, and was under my feet the whole time I was trying to take pictures just about, but if I moved away to get a shot, he’d turn his head as if to say if you won’t play with me, I won’t look at you, lol, stinker).

Man the chest on him is just like his dad, here’s a pic of Mickey his sire (registered fullblood)

And here is my show doeling for this year (plus one of the ones born yesterday I think if she looks as good as I think she will)
Her name is going to be Country Havens Lucky Punch

Here they are together, doeling on the left, buckling on the right (yep, still won’t look at me if I won’t play with him, lol, brat)

Thanks for looking, I’m just so happy with the way things have gone so far this year. The other two batches born yesterday and the day before are doing great. I hope to get out and get the LaBoer pics later on, have to wait for DS to get home though, because I have to drive him and am waiting for his call. The cell phone doesn’t work in the big barn.

Twins This Afternoon!

We’re on a roll here, our solid red Boer doe had twins this afternoon. She was in mild labor this morning and I thought for sure she’d have them by mid-morning. But noooo, she held out until 12:30. They’re happy, and healthy DOES. This is such a girlie year for us, Mickey is really throwing them girls around, haha. He’s also stamping them with such uniform color. In all 7 only one has been a paint color, all the rest are pretty much traditional. From the two boer mamas the babies are dark red headed traditional. From the LaMancha fawn colored doe the girls are traditionally marked, but their head color is more a mix of red and fawn. It’s really pretty though. In 7 days we’ve had 7 kids born to 3 does–only one buckling.

Here are the kids in their still slightly damp, and wobbly selves.

More New Babies!

Well kidding season is off to a really great start now. Our second doe to deliver gave us three—yeah triplets–beautiful girls. Savvy my LaMancha doe had her babies this morning at 6 am. They’re LaMancha/Boer cross. She was a real trooper, didn’t need my help at all (or want it LOL–she’s one of my friendliest does but definately had a ‘don’t touch me’ attitude) she never even laid down, not once. Just dropped each of them on their little heads as she squatted and dumped. Here are some pics taken right after their birth. I should probably wait to take pics until they’re all dry and all but I never can. LOL One thing’s for sure, Savvy has plenty of milk. She’s a great milker anyway, although I’m not doing that this year, but she was giving a gallon and a half last year. I took a cupful off of her this morning and syringed the kids because they were having a dickens of a time getting at those huge teats that were so low. Finally after giving them their little ‘boost’ they got in and figured out how to get low enough to grab onto those huge teats.

Here they are:

2 of the doelings, the other had walked over to mom and out of the shot just when I snapped

A close up to show the itty bitty elf ears. LOL

All three and mom.

Trying to get up close to show off their cute little heads.

New Pics of the New Babies

I’m just so thrilled with these two. They are doing great this morning, and first-time mom is being a great mom. Can’t ask for more than that. I still had a hard time getting a good pic of the little doeling, either she was eating, or moving around too much and making blurring pics. It’s just dark enough in there that I needed to use the night setting on my camera instead of the action one. If I could have gotten decent light on the pictures and used the action one I could have had some nicer doeling pics.

Buck–we’re calling him Bubba for now.

The best pic of the doeling I could get–eating of course (come to think of it, considering how mom was during labor, maybe she just is taking after momma and never gonna stop eating). We were going to call her ‘Leap of Faith’ since she was born on leap day, but I was joking around with my son and said boy, what a knock out, and he said yeah, it was a lucky punch. I thought that was perfect, since leap day is also supposed to be lucky, her name is gonna be ‘Lucky Punch’ (I think anyway, lol).

The two of them-Bubba was trying to get his sister to let him have at the bar, she was being a pig, and he hasn’t figured out there are two spigots yet, haha.

Finally Babies!

The first babies of the year are here. After several weeks of watching and waiting and not knowing exactly when any were due because we pasture bred, the first goat kids of the year finally arrived this afternoon. They made their entrance as eventful as possible too. The first one, a big buckling was stuck and first-time mom was having a heck of a time pushing him out so I helped pull, and boy pull hard! He finally came out and I thought well, he must have been a single because he’s so big, but no, out popped another foot. This time, a little girl, but only ONE foot. She was out of position and not coming out. I had to get down on my belly in the hay and go in after her. After a few minutes of being up to my elbow inside a goat trying to find the other front foot, I finally got a hold of it and was able to bring it up and into the right position. Then she got stuck! This was a biggun too!

Both are doing great and are happily eating. The pictures below were taking the moment they hit the ground, and on my camera phone so they’re not the best quality, but I was just so thrilled. Mom is a half Boer and Spanish cross, and dad is a fullblood Boer. The babies are perfectly Boer marked! I’m just thrilled. Being as big as they are I’m anxious to see how they grow. The little doe might just be a keeper. Hey, being born on leap day has to be lucky right?

Friendly kids

One thing I really didn’t take too much into consideration when thinking about getting back into goats this spring was whether they were friendly or not. I’ve never owned an unfriendly goat, or one that didn’t want to be around people, or be touched, or was hard to catch. Goats just seem to really like humans as a rule. At least that’s how I’d always known them to be. Certainly it’s more the rule than the exception with dairy goats. Those are all I’d ever owned before so maybe that’s why the perception I had of goats liking people. Dairy goats have to be handled daily. Usually twice daily. So they’re quite accustomed to being handled. Add to that that the majority of dairy kids are bottle fed making them EXTREMELY human bonded and you have the recipe for love.

Just recently getting involved with meat goats where the animals are generally not handled as often, or bottle raised I’ve found that many of them are hard to catch, or touch. I still don’t have any ‘mean’ ones, or none that don’t like me. They come running, BUT, they stay just out of arms reach whenever possible. LOL Recently I started looking for a purebred Boer doe and one of the breeders wrote me that the one I was looking at was very personable and liked being handled. She went on to say that most breeders don’t care. I DO. Short of building expensive shoots and catch pens I am doing my darndest to make the few I have here at least catchable. They don’t have to be lovey, in your face, like my dairy girls are, and my bottle raised kids are, but I need to be able to catch them for health care.

Now I know from new experience that it’s not necessarily a ‘bottle raised’ thing. My newest little Alpine doeling that was born here in May is being raised by her mother and she’s still the friendliest little in your face climb all over you thing on the planet. I’m really hoping that the Boer kids born here will be too just because I’m out there so often.

What Do You Think? Would You, or not?

A question came up while I was talking with another newer breeder who just started with Fullbloods a little over a year ago at the show I went to last weekend. (For the record for any who don’t know, I’m just starting in Fullbloods now, so the two of us conversing was like a couple of freshmen talking about all the cool stuff in High School). We were just talking breeding and some of the things done now that are pretty commonplace amongst especially the larger breeders. Things like AI and Flushing etc.

Now I don’t think flushing is all that common in dairy goats. It’s more a Boer/meat goat type commonality.

The point I kind of thought about when it came to flushing was that I was under the impression that although males continue to create sperm throughout most of their lives, although it may dwindle to a small amount at older ages, females are born with a set number of eggs.

The other person I was speaking to had never given that any thought so he didn’t know.

I’d like to know, if you were looking at buying a doe (there wasn’t any in question and this isn’t about any specific animal) would you buy one that had been previously flushed?

For those newer reading this that might not know–flushing is when you have a vet come out, and using certain techniques that I won’t all go into here, retrieving a large number of eggs from a doe, then the eggs are inseminated with a particular buck’s sperm and deposited into a large number of what are called ‘donor does’. That way you can have a purebred doe bred to a purebred buck but instead of having just two to four babies from that one mating, you can have ten, twenty, whatever just grade does delivering two to four purebred babies from that single mating.

So if a doe has been flushed–if I’m correct and a female is born with a set number of eggs–she could have a much more limited ability to conceive, maybe not right off, but over a normal period of breeding life.

What do you think?

It’s A Small World

I can’t keep that song out of my head this morning. I was emailing someone yesterday about a Boer doe I am interested in. She must have gone to my website to check me out too. The url is in all my emails so it wouldn’t have been difficult for her, because she wrote back that my buck, Mick (CJM Mighty Mick), was a really nice buck. What made it most exicting, besides having a big time show breeder say I had a nice buck, was that she also let me know in a later email that she’d owned Mick’s grandfather, RENAISSANCE LUCKY SPIKE, a few years ago, and he was a wonderful producer who put big, meaty kids on the ground. I was thrilled.

When I’d first bought Mick I tried to do some research on his pedigree. I didn’t turn up much except that his great-great grandfather was a son of a big name buck called Eggsorcist. That was nice to know, but it wasn’t all that much info. Having someone say they’d personally owned one of his recent ancestors and what a good buck he was was quite a thrill. I didn’t really need that to know that Mickey is wonderful and will produce fantastic kids for us, but it sure is nice to know.

Good Girls Do

I have to tell you I just love my new dairy goats. I’ve only had them a few weeks but they are giving us a gallon and a half of the best tasting, sweetest, creamiest milk every single day.

Usually when you buy a doe (female goat) that is already producing milk and move her to a new location, she will drop production. Sometimes only a little. Sometimes completely. Neither of the two I bought did anything of the sort. They are both producing exactly what the seller said they were at her farm.

Not only that but they are the sweetest girls. I have a third I brought home from the same seller, but she hasn’t kidded yet. That means she hasn’t had her babies yet, so he’s not producing milk. She’s due around the 28th of this month and I’m so excited to see the first goat babies born on this farm in many years, and anxious to begin milking her as well.

A goat has to have babies to produce milk, just like any other mammal. So every year they must be bred and have babies. That’s no problem because Mickey is waiting in the bullpen. LOL He has the two girls I just brought home last weekend with him now, and in July when I’m ready to breed him to the younger girls I got with him I’ll rotate him out into their pen, then in October I’ll take him out of there and put him in with my dairy girls. Then by January I’m hoping my youngest kids will be ready to meet Mickey. So I should have some nicely spaced babies next year, and Mickey should have female companionship for most of the year round–win, win.

Of all the goats, only two more, the youngest of the bunch here are dairy and will be taken over to the dairy side after being bred. All the rest are Boer, or Boer percentage and will stay on that side, just raising their kids, not being milked. A total of five goats to milk a day is plenty for me, and should provide plenty of milk both to drink, and to make cheeses and soaps.

I’m hoping to have soaps to sell at next years farm markets along with the kids.

Minor Glitches

I’m still experiencing a few minor glitches with the files here on this blog so if you occassionally come here and something seems off, or as in the last case, only half the page loads… please come back, it’s a temporary problem until I fix whatever it was causing the snafu.

Those aren’t the only little glitches I’ve been having though–today we went to a farm swap (large sale for farm animals, and crafts held at the Kankakee Fair Grounds on the first Sunday of every month from April through October) and sold two colts… now that doesn’t sound like a glitch until I tell you that while I was SUPPOSED to have my ‘eyes closed’ I still happened to come home with two more goats. LOL

I picked up two Boer/Spanish cross does. They didn’t really cost me anything–not really. Actually I only sold ONE horse for cash. The other I traded for the goats. The goats came with an added incentive though–they’re bred to a full-blood Boer buck and due to kid in four months. So hey, Bonus. Hubby says I don’t understand the concept of selling to make a profit. haha He’s probably right. But it’s fun.