Goats & Steers

The first of our bottle calves have arrived. We expect at least 10 and as many as 20 over the next couple of weeks. It is quite a job feeding and caring for them all. Bottle calves are usually from dairy farms that need their cows to bear calves in order to induce milk production but have no interest in raising the calves. They are taken away from their mother after 72 hours, and sold to operations like ours that will bottle feed the calves twice a day, often by hand. Each calf consumes 1/2 gallon of milk replacement twice per day, for roughly 45 days, depending on the calf.

My son is feeding "King Lear" the (soon to be) steer (we will castrate the calf tomorrow).

A nice shot of a head of broccoli from the garden, on its way to tomorrow morning's omelette...


Sorry back to goats and steers...

Here is a shot of my goat milking stand with built-in stanchion (with my 2 year old playing nearby to give you some sense of scale, and yes, those are Zebras in the background... my neighbor raises them along with Camels and Kangaroos... go figure):

This is merely a knee high bench my son and I made from old decking and some 2X4's, and then a stanchion has been fashioned from cheap pine with a jig saw (you could use a coping saw, too) with one side complete stationary and the other pivoting on a bolt on the bottom that closes with the hook and eye hardware typical on outside fencing. This holds the goat's head while you milk. I always give the goat a tasty snack while I milk to keep her occupied and happy.

Some goats kick, especially those that are new to being milked and were not raised on a bottle by people.  See that blue thing on the platform? That is a "Goat Hobble" (click the link to see more about the hobble).  This hobble will make your life a whole bunch easier - if you want to have a milk goat I highly recommend it.

By the way.... while milking as somewhat of a commitment, it ain't all that big a deal.  Once you get good at it, milking 15 minutes twice per day will keep you in all of the milk typical family needs... speaking of which...  we pasturize our milk... don't listen to those back-to-the-land jag off's that tell you that pasturizing kills off all the nutrients in your milk.  Not a shred of truth.  It DOES kill nasties, like Listeria, and other bacteria, and the vast majority of the nutrients remain.  

Our goats are raised 100% on pasture, so the milk ewe collect from them is very high in Omega-3 fatty acids.  Here they are enjoying a beautiful Tennessee Spring evening:

While we do eat our animals and sell others for human consumption, we make sure that that they live a very comfortable, stress free, cruelty free, free range life.  This is no factory farm.  The animals have access to fresh pastures free of herbicides and pesticides, water and shelter, in a completely organic and perma-culture environment.

But I digress...

Back to the bottle calves.  We can rotate several batches through the farm each year, and actually make a decent profit doing so.  The best thing about a bottle calf operation is that you can decide when you want to raise a herd and when you want to sell them all and go on vacation.  That is not true of many other farm operations, like dairy.  A small holder bent on self sufficiency would still need a "cash crop", and these bottle calves will be 450 to 500 pounds in 6 months or so and ready to go to the feeder and finishing market.

Bottle raising dairy goats makes milking and handling them a BREEZE.  I recommend it highly.  It is a bit more work than bottle feeding calves, as goats need to be fed 4 times per day for the first 3 or 4 weeks, and twice a day for an additional month, but they are as cute as a new puppy at this age, so it ain't all bad.

"Live Long and Prosper"!

Greg