Notes About Goats

Our four original girls have settled into their role as future breeding stock at our HomeAgain Farm.

And we have a name! We are HomeAgain Farm, named in part after Bruce’s parents house in Yankeetown out in the mountains. They moved home again to the Shenandoah Valley after living in Alaska and running a Bed and Breakfast for eight years. They call their second dwelling in Yankeetown HomeAgain. We moved back to the farm after spending eight years in East Africa, and are also moving home again after being abroad. There’s one other reason for our farm name, which I will address in a separate blog.

Our starter nannies have names as well. Pirate (the herd queen with the white ear), Almond (with the brown foreleg), Fluffy and Cloud (which I can’t tell apart anymore) were named by the elvish nieces who live in a nearby farmhouse. Fluffy and Cloud were unbelievably soft when they were babies, but have lost their silky baby fur now that they are adolescents.

We thought it was time to scale up our operation a bit, so yesterday we brought home a dozen more does. Yes, a full dozen, just like a box of maple and cream donuts.

Maybe not quite like donuts, but the color does bring those pastries to mind! We got them from an Old Order Mennonite farmer in Mount Crawford. The tall brown goat seems to be the queen of this herd, watchful and vigilant and the first to make a move. They’re not as impeccably bred as our four original goats, which are 100% Boer. These are mostly Boer mixed with some Kiko goat and maybe a hint of Tennessee Fainting goat. They will be hardier on pasture than the purebred Boer goats.

These are the goat daddies. Imperious, horny, and stinky!

Mr. Witmer has about 400 goats, a scale to which we will aspire in the years to come. He designed and build his goat confinement and sorting systems himself–an ingenious warren of doors and passageways to separate, vaccinate, de-worm, and load animals. When we arrived, he had about 50 of the spring does sequestered for us to choose from.

We picked out the 12 we wanted and he gave them an injection and de-wormer, then sent them down a chute into our truck. They were reluctant to leave their nice warm barn.

Having lived most of their young lives in the barn, they were worried about getting out of the truck and onto the grass paddock where they would spend the next three weeks before being introduced to the older goats. But as soon as they took the leap, they put their heads down and went to business.

Welcome to HomeAgain, little doelings. May the grass always be greener on YOUR side of the fence.

And if you get tired of grass, there’s always the walnut trees!