Goats Everywhere!

It has been a busy few weeks here on the farm, especially on the goat side of things. Late in the evening on March 5, our Alpine/Nubian doe Abbie delivered quads. Yep, that's FOUR. Full term, all normal size, two girls and two boys. She has always had two so we weren't expecting to walk into the barn that evening and find four balls of wet fur in the stall. Like clowns in a clown car, they were. No wonder mama Abbie was so miserable for the last few days before delivering all of these babies! She has successfully been feeding them all, unassisted. These babies are 3/4 Nubian, 1/4 Alpine and named Arlo, Alice, Abner and Annabelle.

Barely three days later on March 8, one of our Lamancha does Molly had twin girls with impressive paint jobs. Molly has a history of only having one big baby, so we were surprised that she had two. We named them Matilda and Mabel and they are half Lamancha, half Nubian.

Three more days go by and our darling Greta (who was born here two years ago to Molly) gave us two boys, Grover and Gonzo. We kind of expected Greta to only have one as well, knowing her genetic history and the fact that she didn't get really big with this first pregnancy. Are you noticing a theme here? Three does kidded so far and all three have had twice the number of babies we expected. EIGHT babies in six days!

So that just leaves Sage, who we purchased in October. We are fairly certain she is bred, we just don't know her due date. She's definitely putting on weight lately so we will be keeping our eye on her.

But for now... cute baby goats are everywhere!

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We've been asked a lot if and when any of the babies will be for sale. My answer: stay tuned. They will all stay with their moms until they are fully weaned (around 8 weeks). Right now our plans are to sell all of the boys except for one, but we don't know which one yet. We are reserving that decision for after we see what Sage has. As for the girls, right now we don't have any plans to sell any of the girls. This may change later on, and if we make this decision, we will let everyone know. As soon as we make a decision on which boy is staying we will begin taking deposits for the others. For sale information, please email us directly at TheFarm@BeamansFork.com

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Team Greta

Friday, February 9th started off as a normal day in the barn, but as I was doing chores and feeding the horses and goats, I quickly suspected that Greta, one of our La Mancha goats, was showing early signs of labor. It was her due day, so I wasn't surprised. I removed her from the herd and placed her into one of the three kidding stalls in our barn so that she could have some peace and quiet. Four hours later at 10:46am, she delivered two beautiful big twin boys. As per her normal (this is her third year with babies), she was quite proud of herself and insisted on showing them off to me nonstop. The twins were up and wobbling around in no time and Greta was a busy mom fussing over them. Saturday morning was uneventful and Greta and her twins were comfortable in their kidding stall, but by early afternoon, something wasn't right. Greta wasn't finishing her meals and she just seemed tired. I took her temperature at 3pm and it was normal -- 101.9 -- even though she...

Barn Improvements

I've been putting off a much needed barn improvement project for a while in hopes of catching the necessary materials on sale. Specifically, high grade rubber mats for the stalls and aisle way. The heavy stall mats I needed finally went on sale today so Seife & I headed into town. We will need to remove the old mats in the stalls and do some leveling of the clay floor before we put the new ones in place, as well as have some sand brought in to raise the floor level in the aisle way because we occasionally have flooding problems when it rains a lot. Project benefits: Reduce bedding costs (which are at an all time high) because rubber mats keep the bedding from being ground into the dirt/clay floor. Reduce flooding problems by allowing us to raise the floor level and then protect it with the mats Reduce dust issues... our barn is very, very old and the aisle way is made up of very, very old fine dusty dirt that gets on everything. This will also help keep our milking stat...

Heated Buckets

We recently installed heated water buckets in the barn, one in each stall for the horses and one for the goats. I probably should have done this years ago but I think I've finally had enough of busting ice in the morning only to have it refreeze a couple hours later. The buckets have cords, so you have to put some thought into where you are going to hang them. The cords are wrapped in a protective metal spring to deter chewing, but especially with goats, the cords need to be completely out of sight of them. I don't trust their wandering mouths. I placed the goat bucket pretty much on the ground (still attached to the wall by a bracket) so that it is low enough for the chickens to access it also if needed. They frequently come in the goat stall for water, especially if all of their drip waterers are frozen. The cord goes through the slats in the wall so they can't reach it. I also put a bungee cord around the bucket to keep them from moving it at all (and possibly exposing...

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