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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