Supplies for kidding and milking
We don't know when or if Abigail is due
--- could be early February, could be early March, or could be never.
But I figure it's far better to be prepared for something that might not
happen rather than being caught without supplies when kids start
popping out.
To that end, we had three
major decisions to make. The first choice was already decided by my
weak wrists --- carpal tunnel means that an automatic milker was a
necessity. We ended up choosing the Dansha Farm model
due to good reviews and low price, and realized in the process that we
won't have to buy a milking pail and strainer after all since the milk
stays clean with an automatic milker and goes right into a glass jar.
The other two decisions were thornier --- do we buy supplies for castrating males and for disbudding
both sexes? Our goal is to eat any male kids, which means we won't need
to castrate them --- here's hoping the cuteness quotient won't hold us
back when the time comes. (As a halfway house, we may take the kids to
the packing plant to be dispatched if we want the meat but can't quite
stand to pull out the knife.)
As for disbudding, Mark
does prefer our hornless goat, but he also isn't keen on the act of
disbudding (and he knows that the unpleasant task would inevitably fall
to him). Since Abigail is a mutt goat whose female kids probably won't
have too much value, we decided to skip the disbudding process and plan
to eat any of her girl children along with any males. After all, the
kids' value as pastured meat for us is probably greater than the cash
value they'd bring on the open market.
Decisions made, we can
now sit back and wait and hope. In the last couple of days, Abigail's
right side (where babies go) has suddenly started to look more like her
left side (where hay goes)...or maybe that's just wishful thinking.
Either way, Artemesia is still regaling us with kid-like cuteness and
sweetness, so I guess we'll survive even if Abigail didn't get knocked
up, although we would miss a spring full of milk.
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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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I've read that if you don't want to bottle raise the kids, one of the easiest ways to share milk is to let the kids have access to mom all day, then separate them at night and milk first thing in the morning, then put them back together for the day.
Will you be using a system like this, or bottle feeding, or something completely different?