Thursday, October 12, 2017

First Dairy Goats Arrive

Three new arrivals have joined our homestead farm, making the farm a bit more complete. 

Cali.......the mom. She's mostly Nigerian but not pure. Around here, purebred anything is the oddity, it appears. I'm not sure why people here prefer to mix their breeds of goats, cattle, horses, chickens, dogs....you name it, whatever. But they do. So Cali is mostly Nigerian, but something else was mixed in. She was bred to a mostly Nigerian buck, resulting in 2 kids........

Chipper......
It's a doeling. Cute, playful. Sweet. 

Francis......
A handsome little buckling. Smart and friendly. 

The kids are about 4 days old and doing fine. I plan to let them nurse off of mom during the day, boxing them at night so that I can milk Cali first thing in the morning. We shall see how well this works out. 

Being mostly Nigerian, Cali has small teats. She's a two finger milker, for sure. I've already been working with her and she allows me to milk her with very little problem. Nice goat, considering she's never done this before. I'm taking whatever amount of milk that I want for our breakfast table, then letting the kids rejoin mom. 

2 comments:

  1. Oh my, those kids are sooooo cute! But then I'm a sucker for baby goats. Nigerians can have small teats, but it looks like Cali has good leg length for milking. The shortest ones are a real pain! I'm working on a blog post for a manual milking machine I'm making for one of my own small teated goats. Hopefully I'll get it up next week and maybe it will be something that could be useful for you too.

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