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State of the Farm – Spring
Spring is one of my favorite times on the farm. It’s always full of changes, new life, anticipation, and hope. This year is shaping up to be a big one on the farm. It’s set to be a season with lots of beginnings and endings.
Let’s knock out the endings first.
-We are selling off most of our goat herd this spring. We have a handful of purebred Nigerian Dwarves still available, but I anticipate us being down to only three goats soon. We are transitioning away from the goat market to a different one (one of those beginnings, I mentioned).
-On a sadder note, our sweet gelding lost his battle with heart failure yesterday. Our boy will be missed. He was forever begging for treats from anyone and everyone, and was exactly the horse we needed and loved.
That does leave us without a rideable horse for kids over 100 pounds for the time being. Please keep this in mind when you are booking an event with us. We will still be able to accomodate pony rides for kids under 100 pounds with Princess Sparkles (and soon, Marshmallow!).
Ready for the beginnings? Yeah, me too.
-For the first time ever, we will be offering lamb shares in the fall. We’ve raised meat sheep before, but only for our family. It’s mild in flavor, tasty, and an incredibly healthy option. This year begins sharing lamb with the public, and I’m super excited about it! Availability is quite limited this year, so message me to be put on the waitlist.
These lambs will be grassfed on rotating pastures, making them healthy and happy while also enriching the soil. We are adding some Katadhin ewes and a Katadhin/Dorper ram from Oakvale Farms to our sheep flock. They will produce excellent meat lambs, and fantastic breeding stock for other homesteaders interested in adding hair sheep to their farms.
If you aren’t familiar with meat shares, the way it works is that you can buy a whole or half of a market-sized lamb, we deliver the sheep to a processor, and you pick up the meat from them, then straight to your freezer. It’s a great way to buy in bulk from local farms.
We charge $8.75 per pound, and then you pay the processing fees to the processor. It usually ends up being about $10-12 per pound. The total amount of meat from a Katadhin lamb varies, but is usually somewhere in the realm of 55-80 pounds.
We will also be offering meat chickens again this year, after a break last year to have a baby right at the begin of meat chicken season. They will be $5 a pound, so approximately $25 for a whole chicken.
This is not just any whole chicken, but the best chicken you’ve ever had. Our chickens are raised on rotating pastures, scratching for bugs, and living their best lives. We feed locally milled chicken feed, and they will be processed right here on the farm. Meat chickens will be on-farm pickup, though we also offer delivery within the surrounding area with a per-mile delivery fee. They will be available starting in early May, so jump on the waitlist now.
Another cool development is that we will be adding a store to our farm website, so you should be able to order products (like our meat chickens) right from the comfort of your home. Bear with me as we struggle through the initial hiccups I’m sure will happen! 😉
-Lastly, we will be adding a Livestock Guardian Dog to the farm. A female Maremma puppy, who will need a couple years of training before she is effective at her job, but who should help with the predation we’ve been experiencing the last few years. She is unnamed, as of yet, but will certainly be making an appearance in our photos. LGDs may end up being serious, somber dogs, but they sure start off as cuddly, round, ridiculous puppies like every other.
I’m ecstatic and hopeful about the direction the farm is going. We look forward to partnering with the community to bring more healthy, local food options to the table.
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Animal Profiles: The Kids
Basil’s first set of kids was born this past spring, and they are both beautiful. One is Sage, a buckling from Rosemary, and the other is Clover, a doeling from Tansy.
Sage shares his mother’s beautiful and unique cream & white color. It’s breathtakingly lovely. While he was a wild little goof when he was tiny, Sage has settled down significantly as he has hit his teenage stage. He is one of loudest goats, but oddly, tends to fade into the background in a group. If you are ever here handing out cookies, don’t overlook him. I suspect he is going to be a stunner when he grows up.
For now, he lives with Basil, and occasionally Fig, in the boy goat herd, but is still thoroughly attached to his mama. Their pens are right next to each other, and they will still sometimes lie next to the chain link by each other. Sage was just getting a little too interested in the girls to stay in the same pen, if you know what I mean. 😉 We normally run mixed herds of girls and boys, but for now, we have to keep the boys away from little Clover.
Speaking of Clover, it is time to discuss one of the mascots of the farm! Clover is the spitting image of Basil, but is thoroughly feminine in body type. Her life started off a little rough. While Clover’s birth was uncomplicated, she had a stillborn twin buckling that wasn’t born until 2 full days after her, a complication that is quite rare. We didn’t even know Tansy had another kid in there, as she’d shown all signs of being done.
Whether simple bad luck, or from in-utero exposure to her twin, Clover got sick when she was less than a week old. We had to bring her inside every night for an antibiotic shot, and give her some extra nutrient supplements by mouth in a bottle. On top of that, Tansy, who had started off a good mom, made an instant 180 when the buckling was born, and was no longer interested in her surviving kid. We had to put Tansy on the stanchion (a milking stand), and hold her still so Clover could nurse. Mark and I vacillated over whether we should make her a full time bottle baby. While bottle babies are a lot of fun, they don’t tend to be as healthy or mannerly as doe-raised kids.
After a harrowing week or two of injections, stanchion feedings, and other such happenings, Clover’s fever went away for good. It took time, but Tansy started taking on her mom role again too, and we were able to breathe a huge sigh of relief.
One might think that all the injections, temp taking, and such would have driven Clover to fear us, but it was quite the opposite. Clover *adores* people. She is one of the most laid back, sociable animals on the farm. She’s never met a stranger, whether they have cookies or not. She is universally loved by everyone who meets her, and has quickly become one of our most popular animals. Even the pizza delivery folks know us as the people with the friendly goats.
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Animal Profiles: The Gentlemen Goats
Fig was our first male goat, as a bottle baby utterly terrified of people. He would do whatever it took to get away from me, even when he desperately wanted the bottle. He was born out in a large pasture full of goats, and hadn’t had much contact with humans when he was caught and put in the back of my van. You would never know that now! Fig is one of our most sociable, friendly goats. He will even walk away from food to get loved on by someone, which can be difficult when we put food out as a distraction. It is quite difficult to get new photos of him. They all end up being extreme closeups.
While Fig was originally to be the founding stud of our farm, we discovered that he is not a purebred Nigerian Dwarf. You know those fainting goats that everyone loves to watch on YouTube? Yeah, he faints when he gets surprised enough. We wethered (neutered) him, and now his only job is being a social dude with our visitors, a job he excels at.
After Fig ended up being a bust as a billy goat, we brought home Basil. He is one stinky guy sometimes, but he is incredibly handsome, so we put up with the smell. Did you know that a buck will pee on their beard to attract the ladies? Yep, boys are gross. Another fun fact, when goats lift their upper lip like in that photo of Young Basil, they are using a special organ to transfer pheromones in the air into a special organ on the roof of their mouth. It’s called a flehmen response, and a lot of animals do it, including horses and cats.
Basil is the ringleader when it comes to making trouble. If there is a weakness in the fence, he will find it every time, and lead all the other goats willing to follow him on a merry adventure. He’s friendly enough, but would generally rather go on walkabout, or hang with his girls, rather than seek out people. He does enjoy scratches, but we don’t give him scratches on the face, for the aforementioned beard reasons.
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Animal Profiles: Lady Goats
I’ve been asked a number of times to do little introductions of our farm animals, so here they are!
We will begin with our two mama goats. Tansy and Rosemary are sisters, two girls from a set of triplet Nigerian Dwarf does (a doe is a female goat). I jumped on the waitlist a bit before Michael, before they were ready to be weaned and leave their mama— who was gorgeous! They came from Bellemeadow Farm, and their breeder, Becky, is a treasure. She has never hesitated to offer goat advice, and has been an enormous help with the occasional sick goat, or weird goat birth situation.
Despite being twins, the girls are remarkably different. Tansy is darker in color, quiet, and sweet. She is shy with strangers, but once she trusts someone, she is loyal and sociable. While I’ve never administered an IQ test to our goats, I suspect she is the brightest. Tansy is also an incredible mama, and has given us our sweetest goat on the farm.
Rosemary is lighter in color (a gorgeous color, with the prettiest markings), and is brash and intense. She knows what she wants, and goes for it, no matter what is in her way. Rosie is extremely food motivated, and will socialize with anyone if she gets cookies out of the deal. She is one of our loudest goats, which really saying something. The only goat louder than her is her son, Sage. I wonder where he learned it… 😉
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