The Goat Life

Whoops, so a great deal of time has gone by since I posted last. All I can say is that I am rather busy these days. With school full time, work full time, and part time assistant goat farmer, I am spread pretty thin. Many entertaining things have happened, however, as you may have gotten the gist, I just don’t have the the time to do them justice at the moment. Still, thanks, for stopping by to check on the farm.

Well, one of the three eggs that we put in the incubator, the one I wrote “keep” on hatched today. Actually, it broke a small hole indicating it was ready to come out of its shell. Then after about four hours of the hole not getting any bigger, I decided to peel the shell the rest of the way off. This evening after it had dried off and was fluffy Abby brought the chick  to the barn and stuck it underneath the hen with the rest of the chicks, but then she decided to bring it back in when she realized that all of the other chicks were sitting on it and smothering it. This chick hasn’t quite built up his strength enough so that he can escape from his brothers and sisters yet. Yesterday, Abby and I noticed that one of the chicks were missing from the dog crate where they were being held. Abby found it this evening, it had been smothered by the rest of the chicks and the hen. Instead of a lucky 13 she will only be keeping a dozen. Anyway, I thought I would give an update on the chick incident.

So today is Saturday afternoon and I am lounging in the kitchen listening to cars on the road, birds chirping outside, and the trees and grass blowing in the wind. On top of all that noise I can also hear the constant humming of the incubator. Now, we are suppose to be done with the incubator. In fact abby hatched her last batch of eggs in it almost over a month ago and it has been sitting around waiting to get put away for several weeks now, but Abby just hasn’t gotten around to it. However, the return of the constant humming sound is not really my older sisters fault. It is mine.

Two days go after ten chicks had hatched there were only six eggs left under the hen. The hen had started walking around and was not constantly sitting on the last six egggs so I felt like these eggs might be duds.  I decided to throw them into the manure spreader, which is what we do when we want to throw bio-degradable things out. As I was grabbing two of them, I heard them chirping. Instead of throwing them all out, I only three four out and I decided to leave the last two under the hen. Sure enough one hatched later that day.

Last night abby came running into the house with a chick polking it beak through the last egg under the hen. Abby was upset because the egg somehow ended up in the water dispenser and was cold. However, it was still chirping so we knew it was still alive. Abby handed the chick over to me for care and I put a heat lamp on it for a halfhour to warm it up while I peeled its shell off. As the chick was pushing through the last of the shell I held it in my hand and felt its movement. There was something amazing about watching this little yellow chick come out of its shell, beautiful and messy all at the same time. I bet that is why no matter how many times my older sister hatches eggs in her incubator, we always get excited when the chicks first start coming out of their eggs.

After the chick had warmed up under the heat lamp for another twenty minutes I decided to deliver it back to its mom, not that she probably missed it very much with the other 11 running around. I stuck the chick right under the hen and let it finish drying off that way. Seeing the last two eggs hatch made me wonder if my decision to throw the last four eggs into the manure spreader was a bit hasty. To Abby, who was standing right next to me I said, I wonder was the development of those last four eggs were. Abby followed me as I walked to the manure spreader where is still is parked right outside of the barn. I picked up the first eggs and cracked it a little all the way around. As I peeled off the first little bit it started bleeding, not a good sign because that means it was pretty far along in its development, then Abby started peeling off more. When there was about a dimes worth of shell peeled off the egg the little critter inside the shell started moving. WHOOPS! Guess that wasn’t a dud!

Abby and I ended up bring all four eggs up to her bed room and stuck them under a heat lamp for a few hours while her incubator got up to temp. We peeled the rest of the shell off that first one that we found in the manure spreader, but sadly I don’t think he was ready to come out. He continued to breath for about an hour, but he didn’t make it through the night. I think it was just a few days too early for him to come out of his shell. If I had known I wouldn’t have broken his shell open.

So now there are three eggs left. However, I am pretty positive there is only one with a live chick in it. At the beginning of the summer I googled how to candle an egg. Don’t worry, there is not an actual candle involved. Candling an eggs is just making it so that light shines through the egg so you can see how the develpment of the egg is coming along. If you have ever taken a strong flash light and covered the light with your palm in a dark room so you could see your veins you know how to candle an egg. The same theory applys. However, that said, You tube got much better results than I did. I don’t have a high powered LED flashlight handy so I was using a soup can and regular light bulb. Anyway, I was able to figure out that one egg looked like it was solid inside while the other two had runny fluid inside of them. My theory very verified when the one I thought still had a live chick in it decided to chirp and rattle his shell. I wrote my theory in pencil on the eggs. Two are labled “dud” and the last one “keep.” I have checked the egg twice today and I have felt movement inside of the egg both times. We are going to wait a couple more days to see if he can come out of his shell on his own. However, we are not sure if he’ll make it. The stress of being outside and not kept warm enough for 24 hours could have depleted his energy sources enough that he won’t be able to make it out on his own. However, if we break him out of his shell before he is ready, it’ll kill him. So we’ll wait and hope he’ll be lucky number 13.

One of the ways we make an income on this farm is through the making and selling of hay. Our holiday weekend was extraordinarily busy because the weather was perfect for making hay and so, we made hay. To make hay you need a three to four day stretch of dry weather. Ideally, you also want a little bit of a breeze because it will help the hay dry faster. That was the weather we have had the past week, hay weather. We have had about three stretches of three to four days of dry weather in the past ten days and so we baled hay. Baling hay is not as simple as it sounds. Over the past couple of years I have come to have a healthy respect for people who hay in this area because it can be quite the gamble. If your hay gets rained on, it is ruined; if you let it grow too much before cutting it the value decreases because the later in the summer you cut the first cute of hay (which is what we were doing) the more dead grass and the lower the protein content. Ideally hay should also be baled at very low moisture content, the lower the better. Our experts tell us they bale at 12% moisture, some farmers will still bale up to 18%, but we have noticed that hay baled at that high of moisture content tend to be dusty later on. Dusty hay is bad hay and not worth as much.

Our first hay advent this summer began on Thursday July 2nd when Dad cut using a combination of his sickle bar mower and his self propelled haybine. He started out with the haybine and then had to switch to the sickle bar mower when he got stuck in a soft spot. After the grass is cut it needs to be fluffed so that it dries faster and better, this dad did using a piece of equipment called a tedder. Then, when the hay was deemed dry enough on Saturday my dad put me on the Minneapolis Moline and I started raking. However about hour into it I heard a horrible clunking sound; I looked back behind me to find that a weld on the rake had broke and the spindle was no longer properly attached to the frame. Luckily my uncle, who came down for the holiday weekend to visit, decided to check on my progress and he had some tools in his vehicle which were helpful. With his help I was able to get the rake off the field a neighbor’s house. Our neighbor is a welder and when he finds the time he’ll fix the rake. When I realized the rake was broke I immediately called my dad at his work. Luckily Dad works at a place that sells farming equipment and he was able to get another rake, however this put us two hours behind schedule because his work is an hour away, and he still had another hour of it. At around three my dad came home with the borrowed rake and he immediately started raking. When he was almost done that rake broke. We are pretty sure that it probably wasn’t our fault that it broke because my dad was using it the way it is supposed to be used. We think that the rake probably started breaking at the owner’s farm last year when it was accidently rolled onto its side. The stress of using the rake on the hill probably completed the break that had started when it rolled. My dad dismantled the side of the rake that was broken and pressed on with the side that still worked. However, that issue took a half hour to fix and so we were behind another half hour; getting behind takes its toll because when the dew hits a certain point in the evening the hay becomes too heavy to bale.

 Luckily this year my dad bought a couple of kicker wagons so we didn’t have to load the hay onto the wagons as it came out of the baler. However, the wagons that he bought are small and have roofs so they don’t hold many bales, only about 100 or so when using the kicker. This means that we were unloading as we were going along so that we could get the wagons back to farm to be reloaded. Eventually seven o’clock in the evening rolled around and we still weren’t done. The balers kept breaking sheer pins because the dew made the grass to wet. After about the eighth sheer pin breaking, and dark fast approaching, my uncle and dad called it a night. At 4am it rained hard for a couple of hours and what was left out on the field was ruined. On Sunday my dad looked at the weather again and saw that there was supposed to be another nice stretch of weather so he decided to cut grass again. My uncle decided to stay until Wednesday and help us, I am not sure that it was just because he wanted to help us though. My Dad is convinced that he was having a blast playing with the tractors. According to my dad, being on the farm this past week has been like being at Toys R Us for big kids for my Uncle. My Uncle hasn’t been able to drive big tractors around like this in a long time and needless to say, he has really been enjoying it; so much that he might even come for a visit later in the summer to help with second cut. Anyway, my uncle having a blast aside, since we were going to have another dry stretch we were baling again on Tuesday. This time my dad hired two guys, Nick and Austin, to help us out in the barn. This time we were able to put about 1000 bales of nice hay in our barn. It was considered a successful couple of days because there were no unusual delays on baling day. My dad borrowed another rake from his work, so things went rather smoothly. Between loads of hay I discovered that the eggs that one of my sister’s hens has been sitting on for three weeks started hatching. Under the hen a very chirpy fluffy black chick sat on top of its fellow un-hatched siblings. Between the next couple of loads my older sister and I moved the hen, chick, and the eggs she was laying on into a dog crate so that they would be safer. Today (is Thursday) the last chick hatched and the hen has 11 chicks total. They are such an interesting batch of chicks because they vary in color so much; two of them are mostly black, two of them are a dark oak color with vertical stripes down their backs and the rest of them are a fluffy yellow color.

Like I said we were the only ones doing hay this week, while we were putting our own hay in, one of our neighbors who we sell hay for, was putting about 1500 bales in one of our barns. Everybody was doing hay this week. Then again tonight we helped the same people move another 600 bales into that same barn. That barn is now two-thirds full and boy is it an amazing sight to see hay as high as the roof. Eventually, when we finish filling up this barn we’ll be able to touch the rafters that hold up the roof.

This week has been pretty successful hay wise. The only serious casualties were my dad’s sickle bar mower, which a part broke, and his elevator, which the tin got dented up when we moved it, but it is still functional. I’ll be picking up the part for the sickle bar mower next week when I go to Buffalo to clean out my apartment there.

Several other things that happened this past week where I am not sure to put in; we brought a goat to be a stud for a neighbors milking goats; we also added a young stud into one of our pens in the barn and gave him two ladies to cozy up to. Now there are only two adult does with kids out in the pen behind the barn. This is good because now those does will be eating a lot more grain. They won’t have to fight the domamamas for it anymore. The younger bucks will also be getting more grain since we moved the biggest two out of their pen to be studs. It’s good that it works well all around. The bucks and ladies are happy to be together and the little ones get more food.

This evening we let Zoey out while we were feeding and she followed us around like a puppy. She is getting bigger by the day and it is beautiful to see. She is the only young kid and she is getting large amounts of attention from me and Abby. She will be four weeks old this Saturday. I am sure Abby will post a photo of her sometime soon. But it’s been pretty busy with all of the hay we have made this past week. That is the reason that it has been about a week since my last post. I have been extremely busy helping out with hay, chores, and random other things. It is a dawn to dusk kind of life at the moment and then when I finally crawl back into the house at the end of the night I fall asleep not long afterwards.

That’s right Abby and I are constantly playing pimp to our Boer studs. Last night Abby and I moved three goats into the barn with Boo and this upcoming weekend Abby and I will move another couple ladies in with him. We didn’t want to do them all last night for a number of reasons. One is that there is no need to overwhelm our prize stud by throwing him in with too many ladies at once (Not that he wouldn’t be up for the challenge) and another is that a couple of these ladies still have kids that are nursing, although it is almost past time to ween them. Weening is never fun and we don’t look forward to the separation anxiety that we know the does and their kids are going to feel. However, that’s part of our pimp duty, letting the ladies know when it is time to let their kids do their own growing up.

Pimp duties aside, its always interesting to watch goats right after you introduce them to a new pen with different goats because immediately a new pecking order arises. Every time we put a new doe into the breeding pen, Boo exerts his domince by corralling them and even mounting them to show them whose boss. Boo wasn’t the only one, Blue Eyes, who has been keeping Boo company for the last two weeks (and a known doma mama – what I call a dominate mother goat) was head butting every goat that came into the pen to show that she’s next in charge after Boo. The amusing part of all of this is all of the mothers took one look at Boo and wanted back out of the pen and tried to escape. If those mamas could talk I bet they would have told us that we were crazy if we thought they wanted to get it on with such a huge beast. Luckily the ladies withheld on the commentary and in about 15 minutes the new chain of command was established and everyone settled down. Its always good to stick around during this time to make sure that no one goat is getting pounded too hard. This morning I also did a check to make sure that everyone was getting their grain and no one was repeatedly shoved away from their grain because of their low status in the pecking order. 

This weekend when we add a few more goats the pecking order will be rearranged again, but that’s something I’ll worry about when I get to it.

As promised, I am back, although, admittedly about four weeks behind schedule as far as blogging is concerned. My only excuses are that I lost the user name and password and my laptop is on the fritz, both of which had the effect of curbing my enthuasim for actually putting to text the adventures of day to day life here. However, now I have solved both those problems and here I am writting about them. Honestly, it would be much easier and faster just to say that not much has gone on in the last couple of weeks, but also honestly, that would be a lie. There is rarely a dull day at home, or a day where something of interest doesn’t actually happen. However, because I don’t feel like dedicating more than my next few hours to this blog I will try to give the breif version of it all.

For my first weekend home, the third weekend of May, I had one of the most memorable times of my life. My sister Abby and I were planting pumpkin seeds by hand in the field on the North side of the house (which we sometimes refer to as the corn field or pumpkin patch because that is the only place we have those two crops). My cousin Kyle was about a half hour ahead of us on the Case International (the one with the cab) tilling right before we were planting. Abby and I were using the most ununique and conventional method of planting where one of us would walk several feet ahead of the other making deep foot prints with our rubber barn boots while the other would follow behind and throw a seed or two (or in my case sometimes five or more) into the boot impression and then use our boot to cover the seed(s) with dirt. (I know, our methods are just so modern…..yep, it’s the 21st century and we are still planting by hand and boot.)  Right now, you are probably thinking…one of this womans favorite memories is planting pumpkins by hand?!?! LAME…. I would agree except for what happened while we were planting. While we were planting Abby had a little boot mishap which made my week. We were about two rows from finishing for the evening when I look up and watched Abby, who was at this time ahead of me making holes in the dirt. As we were getting to the far end of the field Abby neared a muddy spot that hadn’t yet dried. She was about halfway through the wet zone when she took a mamoth sized step and left her pink rubber boot behind. When Abby’s white socked bootless foot squished down in the almost knee high mud she let out a very unlady like shreak. She then turned around to find her boot and saw me chuckaling. After Abby took a few seconds to pull her vacuum stuck boot of the mud she forged ahead with her muddy boot in hand. Now there was about 8 feet separating Abby and the dry land at the end of the field. In a valiant attempt to cover that distance, she took another mamoth sized step. This time loosing her other boot in the mud and landing with her remaining dry foot into the water logged mud. As her white sock touched the ground she let out another high pitched shreak. With another quick step she made made it to the side of the field where the grass growth keeps the ground solid. At the end of the field she just stood there, bootless, speachless in socks that were no longer white. After throwing seeds in the last few holes before the soft spot I took the long routearound to join my sister at the end of the field. It took us about five minutes to get her second boot unstuck from the mudd because I was laughing so hard that I was incapable of getting a solid hold of the boot we were trying to pull out of the mudd.

The first weekend in June I came down stairs in the morning to hear my mom yelling that the dogs got into something and sure enough both Kacelia and Hercules were sporting a good number of porcupine quills on there head and muzzles. We started pulling out quills at 9am and at noon we were still at it. I stopped counting the quills on Kacelia after 60 because at that point she was getting testy because we were starting to pull out the quills in her nose. It my guess that Kacelia had over 100 quills in her face. Hercules, who is not as an agressive dog as Kacelia had less quills on his face (though he had one in his tounge) had about 30 in his paws. It took us a couple of days to pull them all out. It’s my hope that the dogs have learned there lesson about porcupines, but only time will tell. On a side note this was not the first we have seen of porcupines this summer. The first weekend I was home Reno, the horse, had a run in with a porcupine and got a few quills lodged in the back of one Reno front legs.

The following Wednesday my older sister took one of her 6 months old goats, named Angel, to get an umbilical hernia fixed. It was quite an adventure for them both. From what my older sister told, the vet actually intended on doing the surgery here at the house because she doesn’t have the facilities for surgery. However, when Abby arrived at her place, they found a storage closet and laid a surgical mat on the floor to do the surgery. Enough they didn’t have the proper facilities, its probably better that Abby went to the place because I am sure my mom would have loved that her kitchen table would have been used as an operating table (again…aparently there was an incident this spring, but I was at school so I don’t know much about it.) After Angel came home we placed inside of the wire dog crate, inside of the pen that she had been in. This way she could still see her friends, but she couldn’t cave to the temptation to jump up on the sides of the pens, which would have been torn the stiches on her stomach. My part of this particular adventure is that for the next two weeks after this surgry Angel needed antibotics twice a day. Angel hated the shots with a passion. If there wasn’t someone around to hold her down I would crawl inside of the dog crate with her and try to adminster the shot while she was doing laps around me. I can’t tell you the number of times I stabbed myself with the needle because Angel would jump the minute I touched her.

This past week has been good to the farm money wise. We have sold three goats and about 30 chickens of various size. It is always good when you are making money at your hobby.  We also had a healthy kid born two Saturdays and she has been named Zoey.

Written by Gabrielle:

This morning I woke up in my college apartment, 200 miles away from the farm, to a text from my older sister that went like this:

The cow jumped over the fence, & ran up the road as fast as her stubby legs could take her until she saw a truck halfway to Thedas. Then she turned around and ran back down the road as fast as she could. After finally catching up to her, I bribed her with a bucket of grain, which lasted long enough for me to loosely tie a rope around her neck. Then she dragged me into a snow bank where the rope came off of her. Then she visited the apple tree, the dogs, & the far end of the barn….

Needless to say, it made my day. All I can imagine is my older sister who is only 5’3″ and 110 pounds to be chasing down a 450 pound cow at 10am in black snow boots, green snow suit and pink winter hat. All while secretly cursing in side her head (not aloud because that would scare the cow away) and out of breath because our neighbor’s house is about a half mile away, so understandably, after a half mile of running in snow boots, I would be out of breath too.

This is what I have to look forward to when I move home back from college this summer. Chasing the animals down, feeding them, trying to hold them down while giving them shots and generally laughing at myself and family members as we learn how to become goat farmers. Goat farming is still relatively new to us. The whole family is involved (whether we really want to be or not…ahem…Maddy& Ben) although it is mostly my parents, my older sister Abby and me; Soon to be much more of me in a few months when I move back home.

After seeing that text and posting it as my facebook status, much to my sister’s dismay, I thought, me and Abby, we should start a blog. We should be recording the family’s journey on this adventure they call goat farming. So here it begins. Enjoy!

Gabby