Goat resistance
We've been debating the possibility
of getting goats.
My main resistance boils down
to time. Anna brought up the good point this morning that some of that
time will be when the garden reaches a speed of 110 Miles per hour.
Megan made the whole process look easy
and fun. Her goat was trained to climb up on a small milking station
and poke her head through a hole where a bowl of sweet feed waited.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Right now it looks like dairy goats won't be on the table anytime soon. I did some number crunching for time required to care for two Nigerian dwarf does if we brought them to a buck once a year, then ran them in "tractors" made of cattle panels, bringing them into the barn for safety at night and to separate them from their kids so that we could milk in the morning. Even if we used the most sustainable method of just milking them for five months in the summer, this system would consume about 163 hours per year, which doesn't count in the pretty high startup time and costs, dealing with goat escapes, or the time making cheese. True, we would get some meat and dairy products, eat down those problem weeds in the chicken pastures (and new chicken pastures to be), but that extra half hour per day is significant. After all, I think we could whack down the same number of weeds in about half that time using Mark's ninja blade.
On the other hand, I'm still researching meat goats. It may take a visit to a meat goat operation to put that dream on hold too.