Here We Goat Again

Bruce and I bought most of our little farm about 10 years ago. We had just started raising meat animals–pigs, turkeys, and goats. We had the nondescript variety of goats, bought from relatives and rather casually reproduced.

In between the animals, the boys, and his full time job, Bruce was working on a master’s in International Development, which eventually took us to Kenya.

The farm is our Road Not Taken, the broader but also unknown path that we left when we packed up our kids and took the Road Less Traveled to the continent where Bruce and I had lived for some of our formative years when we were kids.

It’s not that we have any regrets about the years we spent in Africa, or the experiences we had with the boys over there. But I will be telling this with a sigh, nonetheless. You can’t live two lives at once, and raising the boys on the farm and teaching them about farm animals, manual labor, and machinery is the life experience we gave up when we moved. The farm is our Road Not Taken.

It’s not like they didn’t learn anything about farm life or working with their hands during the years of Mom school they were subjected to in Kenya. For example, the compound guard Josiah Sang and his family taught them how to build a mud-walled house for the pigs we raised together.

But those experiences, as rich as they were, gave the boys a different kind of education than they would have gotten growing up on a small farm in the US.

By the time we moved back our oldest son, Christian, was married and living in China, teaching at an international school with the girl he met in boarding school in Kenya. Only the youngest, Jacob, is still in high school. The kids are mostly grown up, and it’s too late to raise them on the family farm.

So here we are, Bruce and me, trying to pick up where we left off. Without the boys. With goats.

We spent two weekends goat shopping, hoping to find a deal.

This is one of the more fascinating destinations in Harrisonburg, Virginia. With only one of our two COVID vaccinations, we went to the auction floor with our masks and our flannel shirts, hoping to blend in. There were two other masks in the place. It wasn’t full, and was rather airy, and we sat at the front right in front of the sand pit and there were no other bidders or observers within 20 feet of us, but we still felt pretty COVID-jumpy.

Understanding a Virginia auctioneer is a rare skill, and one I haven’t acquired quite yet. I kept leaning over to Bruce to ask what the auctioneer was saying. Were those does? Wethers? Bucks? What was the price now?

There were two bidders who seemed to be buying up all the goats. You had to pay close attention to recognize that they were even bidding. Someties a subtley-raised finger or a nod was the only indication they were raising the bid. Bruce bid a few times on a group of four pregnant nannies that looked to be Boer or Boer-cross. By their curled horns I knew they were older girls, but if we could buy them we would have kids yet this spring that we could raise and sell next year. We dropped out at $250 a head. We saw a two-year-old weather go for $450. Goats were more expensive than when we left, that’s for sure!

We spent two Saturdays at the auction and didn’t come home with anything. Both days there was a donkey for sale, and I began to evaluate the benefits of having a livestock guardien donkey rather than a dog. I’m still thinking about that one.

The problem with the auction is that you don’t know much about what sorts of animals you’re getting. That’s fine if you are buying animals to use for meat, but what if you are looking for breeding stock? Once we got over the sticker shock of higher prices, we began to look for goats from breeders who raised their animals for 4-H projects and shows. These would be more expensive, but we figured it worth the investment to find high-quailty breeding stock to build our herd.

That kind of searching led us to James and Rebecca Bowman who breed Boers for show, and that’s how we found our first four girls.