Tag Archives: lamancha

goats

Kidding Season 2023 has begun

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Sawfish Camellia started off our kidding season today with a super easy delivery of twin does. She was due yesterday and based on how big her udder got earlier this week, we actually expected her to deliver about 36-48 hours earlier. Amanda didn’t have school on Friday, so she set up a hammock in the barn Thursday night and did hourly checks on Camellia (Camellia is her goat). Unfortunately, the temperatures were in the 20s last night so she had to sleep inside.

Amanda sleeping in the barn on kid-watch

Throughout the day, we were checking on Camellia every hour. Around 1, Amanda came into the house and announced she saw discharge and kidding was imminent. She went back to the barn and called the house almost immediately to announce “there were feet “I see feet!” 15 mins later we had twin does at 7.1 and 7.2 lbs.

10 min old goat kids
10 min old goat kids

This year, we have shifted to all bottle babies. That means we are pulling the kids at birth and they are coming into the house for a few days before moving into a kid pen. We made this choice because the bottle babies are just always friendlier and easier to handle. It also means kids we are selling can leave earlier.

This year’s name theme is cars. The baby with a lot of white on her face is Sawfish AS Mercedes (barn name Merce) and the black and brown faced doe is Sawfish AS Porsche. The AS in their names is for Amanda Sawyer since they are in her herd.

This morning, Anna snapped a picture of Camellia’s udder while she was on the stand. Once Camellia kidded, we hand milked her for the colostrum for her babies. I honestly don’t think we have ever had a first freshener that was as easy to hand milk so fast after kidding. In the first 5 hours she has given us 2 quarts of colostrum and didn’t kick the milking bucket even once. Let’s hope that continues!

We have 2 more first fresheners due over the next two weeks. We will be retaining one of either Mercedes or Porsche and the other will be available for purchase.

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Introducing E.B. Farms LL Regal!

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It’s kidding season and some of our does will kid soon, however, the first kid of the season arrived today from Exponential Blessings Farm in MD! E.B. Farms LL Regal was purchased to breed to the does we have kept out of Yoshi next fall. We don’t plan to allow outside breeding to Regal for this year.

Pictures courtesy of Essential Blessings Farm

Regal has a great pedigree that we are sure will help improve our herd.

The human kids are enjoying having a bottle baby in the house.

goats

Let’s show goats! In a tropical storm!

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This weekend was the North Stonington fair. In 2012, we showed goats for the first time at that fair. After 6 summers without goats, we made our return to the fair scene and the goat barn with our Lamanchas. And it rained. A lot. I saw estimates that we had between 3.5-4″ of rain in just over 24 hours, but let’s not jump ahead too much.

Last fall, we rebuilt our herd of Lamanchas and had 5 does that kidded this spring. We have already sold some goats, but at this point we have 3 does in milk, 2 dry yearlings, and 5 baby doelings (plus a buck and his wether companion). Quinn and Amanda wanted to show goats and this was their first time back in the ring. Another one of the girls from the 4-H club, Kaylin, leased some goats as a 4-H project. The three of them have been working hard at getting the goats ready – clipping, studying, handling, etc. Thursday afternoon, we loaded up the trailer with goats and headed to the North Stonington fairgrounds. We got the pens set up and the kids did finishing touches on clipping and cleaned up udders on the goats. After that, they headed out as a group to ride the fair rides and eat some dinner. Fair food!

  • Cinnamon wasn’t happy with her accommodations
  • Practicing leading goats at the fair
  • Quinn clipping udders

Everything was going well, but there was this little rainstorm coming through. Let’s call it, Elsa. Elsa was a tropical storm as it passed through the area. It started raining overnight Thursday to Friday, and it kept raining. A lot. The fairgrounds were already pretty saturated from rain over the previous week. The area where the travel trailers were parked was a bog. You couldn’t get to the trailers without rubber boots. But we took care of the animals and retreated to the trailer for some food and hanging out until the rain subsided.

  • Kaylin milking goats during a tropical storm
  • Warm breakfast after chores

The rain ended Friday afternoon, and all the exhibitors started emerging from their hiding places. Due to all the rain and standing water, the fair didn’t officially open on Friday evening. After some back and forth, the fair board did decide to allow the youth goat show to go forward on Friday evening since all the goats and exhibitors were already present. So, at 6:30 pm Friday, the youth show started with 60+ goats.

  • Amanda practicing with Rainbow
  • Quinn showing Phaylene
  • Amanda and Kaylin setting up their goats
  • Amanda and Kaylin showing goats
  • Our 5 doe kids in the ring
  • Our 5 doe kids in the ring
  • Kaylin showing Cinnamon
  • Kaylin and Cinnamon
  • Amanda and Rainbow

The show didn’t end until about 9:30 and by the time the kids were done with chores, everyone was ready for a shower and some sleep. As I started to fall asleep, another big storm hit the fairgrounds and dumped another inch or so of water on the already saturated grounds. We woke up Saturday to find that our canopy was destroyed overnight, but the weather was clear. The show on Saturday included ~160 goats. It took all day.

  • Baby goats in the ring
  • Amanda and Rainbow
  • Amanda and Kaylin answering questions
  • Quinn showing Phaylene

At the end of the day on Saturday, we headed home with a trailer full of tired goats and 3 4-Hers who had a great time working together. They showed all our goats and helped others show Alpines, Nubians, Oberhaslis, and others. On the way home, they were talking about the next show, making an FAQ for the stalls (“why don’t your goats have any ears?”), and in general looking forward to the next show.

Goats are a lot of work and cost a lot money. But watching the kids work together, take responsibility for the animals, build their confidence the in show ring and speaking to the public makes it all worth it.

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Baby Goats!

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For the first time since 2015, we have baby goats on the farm. Yesterday night, 2 of our does kidded, giving us 4 buck kids and 1 doe kid. Both does and all 5 kids are doing well. We have 2 more does due in the next few days and then 1 more due in May. All of the kids are sired by Idikka Yoshi. I’m very pleased with his contribution to these kids and I see improvements on each doe in the kids.

Rainbow (Longvu Log Over the Rainbow) surprised us by going into labor first and dropping both her buck kids in under 30 minutes. The first one was 10lb and the second was 9.3lb. Rainbow has a nice length of body and milked for 18 months on her first freshening.

  • Amanda cleaning off Rainbow buck kid #2
  • Amanda cleaning off Rainbow buck kid #2
  • Rainbow buck kid #1 (right) and #2 (left)
  • Rainbow buck kid #1
  • Rainbow buck kid #1
  • Rainbow buck kid #2

Tulsi was known to be carrying at least triplets, so we were pleased that she was showing signs of imminent labor 4 days before her due date. She was a little slower building to delivery, but eventually provided buck kid #1 at 6.3lb, buck kid #2 at 7.2lb, and doe kid at 6.5lb. Tulsi is registered Native on Appearance, so her kids are considered Experimental in the American Dairy Goat Association (ADGA) registry.

  • Tulsi kids trying to eat
  • Tulsi buck kid #1
  • Tulsi buck kid #2
  • Tulsi doe kid
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Introducing Quinn

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  • Quinn milking Tulsi
  • Quinn milking Tulsi

After a 5 year hiatus, we have decided to get back into goats (it was mostly Rob’s idea). Lamanchas were our preference and we have started gathering our new herd of Lamanchas. In this picture is Tulsi, a 4 year old doe in milk we purchased last weekend with her kid from this year. Tulsi is currently giving us a little over 2 quarts of milk per day with her kid still nursing.

Milking Tulsi is Quinn, or as they were formerly known, Vicki. A few weeks ago they decided to change their name to Quinn. While we haven’t processed the full court name change yet, it will likely happen in the future.

goats

Bottle Baby Video

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Today at work, a friend said I should add some video of the goat kids to our site.  This year we are doing things a little different with the goat kids: we are planning to raise them all as bottle babies.  We have chosen to do this because we have always found the bottle baby kids to be so much easier to handle and more docile as they grow up.  So, Sawyer Farm’s Milky Way and Sawyer Farm’s Caramel who were born on Monday, are living in a dog crate in the office.  It’s not that they couldn’t live in the barn, but rather, Anna likes the convenience of not going out to the barn in the middle of the night to give them bottles.

Of course, goats that live inside, get to wander around the house for exercise.  It has become a routine that they follow the people into the kitchen to get their bottles.  They love to run and hop around.  Unfortunately, all the antics were complete by the time I started the video and both kids were getting down to the business of drinking milk.

Watch the video on YouTube!

dog, goats

Lamancha babies

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Last night, Anna went to bed as I stayed up working on some things (ok, I was on Facebook).  Around 11, I was ready for bed, but first went to the barn to check on West View Swan’s Saffron, one of our Lamancha does, who was in the kidding stall for the night since she was already 2 days overdue.  I discovered she was in labor.

I headed back in and woke Anna to tell her I was getting more warm clothes and heading back out to the barn since Saffron was in labor.  She thought I should get a couple of hours of rest first and then go out around 1.  I didn’t think so.  As she drifted off to sleep, I headed back to the barn.  When I arrived, the first kid was already on the ground.  She was a long legged doeling that looks a lot like her sire, Blue-Ridge Apache and weighed in at 6.6lbs.  Her brother followed not too long after and weighed in at 6.9lbs, and has the look of his mother.  Both started with wobbly legs, but by this afternoon, they were getting around a little better, so we took them out for some quick photos.

Introducing Sawyer Farm’s Sassafras (dark colored doe) and Sawyer Farm’s Birch (light colored buck).

Turbo, our Sheltie, was watching over the photo shoot.  After we finished, he went back in the barn and hopped up on a bale of hay to take a break.

goats

Goat’s milk – by the numbers

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Since our last doe has been dried up and we are getting ready for kidding season, I closed out the milk records for last season.  If you are not familiar with the dairy industry, milk production is actually tracked and discussed by weight (pounds of milk), not volume.  While it was obvious on a day-to-day basis what the production of the goats was, we decided last June to start tracking it for analysis (I am an engineer after all).  So, after each milking, we would weigh the milk for the doe and record it on a sheet in the milking area.  Then, at the end of the month, I entered the data into a spreadsheet.

This year, we had 4 goats in milk.  We chose to only milk 1 time a day because it provided enough milk for us and reduced the chore load in the evenings.  When we dropped to 1 time a day, we saw the daily total for each goat drop by about 30%.  Lilly was sold shortly after starting the records, so she is excluded from the totals. Here is how the others did.

Saffron – Lamancha, first freshener. 283 days in milk. 840 lbs produced. 3.0lbs avg per day over entire cycle.

Tang – Lamancha, first freshener. 266 days in milk. 656 lbs produced. 2.5lbs avg per day over entire cycle.

Betty – Oberhasli, second freshener. 303 days in milk. 565 lbs produced. 1.9lbs avg per day over entire cycle.

Total for the 3 goats: 2061 lbs, or about 257 gallons.  If we were purchasing raw cow milk, it would have a value of $2570.  If we were purchasing raw goat milk, it would have a value of $5140.  If we were purchasing the milk, we probably wouldn’t use as much as we do.

We had already observed that our Oberhasli’s don’t produce nearly as much as the Lamanchas.  Therefore, if we decided to change to a single breed, it would be Lamanchas.  Of course, we are not in this from a maximum production standpoint.

Conclusions.  We use a lot of milk.  It is  cheaper to raise your own goats for milk than to buy milk.

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More goats? Sounds good to me

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To say this week has been busy is an understatement. I haven’t even had time to write about our newest goat herd additions. Last Sunday afternoon, I drove to New Hampshire to meet Cliff Parker of Longvu Lamanchas. I specifically went to buy Tangueray Texter, a first freshened in milk. She come from a very good pedigree and will help improve our herd. With her coloring, she should make nice babies with Apache, our lamancha buck.
While I was there, I looked at the kids they had, and decided to buy Pocohontas. I love her coloring and she is super friendly. The kids love to play with her.

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