When we explain to people that we drink milk from our own goats pretty much no one from the city blinks. It sounds normal. Get a dairy animal, get milk from it, drink the milk. The reality is that the iconical vision of the happy, dairy animal is extremely far...
Our plan when we moved to the farm was to start construction on a licensed creamery for making cheese. We postponed those plans as we settled in. It was clear that we needed a full season to focus on growing our herd and continuing to develop our cheesemaking and animal...
We've been building a hoop house for hay storage this winter. It's almost finished - we'll be starting on the end walls today!
Rotational Grazing "Rotational grazing" means controlling when and where an animal grazes by moving the animals between grazing locations (aka paddocks) on a regular basis. For us, we move our goats to a new paddock every 3-7 days. This is very rare for goats, which are normally managed in confinement...
Izzy and Sheba in the sunrise Most of you know Sheba, she's one of our Livestock Guardian Dogs (LGD, for short). In fact, she's the head honcho when it comes to LGDs around here. As the Alpha dog, she runs the show and we rely on her a great deal....
Lady Guinea with her tribe Last week Lady Guinea and Sassafras were due to hatch their eggs. I wrote about their dueling nests here. And an eventful week it was. I'll start with the good news first. Lady Guinea, out of the 23 eggs in her clutch, hatched 18 rambunctious,...
Goat's-eye view Fencing is what I spend the most time doing (and thinking about) on the farm. That's probably why I bore our readers with posts about fencing so frequently. My time is split between so many different things that saying one thing dominates another is hard to do, but...
When we moved in, one of the first things we did was clean up what is now the goat stall and holding area (where the herd hangs while the four big girls are being milked). We found pile after pile of old rusty metal. Hooks, nails, stakes, chains, saw blades,...
