Goats! Farm Update
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- čas přidán 29. 02. 2020
- First video in a while, thanks for the folks who still remember Oxbow Farm! 2019 was a big and busy year for the farm and we made big progress and big changes. Unfortunately we didn't get much of a chance to document any of it on CZcams due to hardware, software, and enthusiasm issues.
One big change we made was to move away from raising cattle and switch to trying to raise some homestead milking goats. After visiting many local goat farms and breeders we decided to purchase a pair of Nubian dairy goats from a wonderful Nubian breeder who happens to live just a few minutes away from the farm! We also constructed out goats a high tunnel barn/greenhouse barn/hoop barn which was easy enough for us to do given our experience building high tunnels for the vegetable farm. The main difference being the goat's hoop barn is fixed and concreted in place with lots of solid wood attached for the walls and feeders etc. So far the goats seem very happy and chores have been easy and efficient. Right now we are in the countdown to kidding as both goats are due to freshen in the second week of March. - Jak na to + styl
Thanks for the update, always looking forward to hearing more about your activities
Loved seeing your girls, Tim and I wish you much joy. I loved mine! So good to have a video from you. That is an awesome barn!
Thanks Cathy. I'm pretty happy with it so far, we'll see how it holds up long term, especially this type of plastic.
So good to see you and the new goats! How exciting! We were thinking about goats too, but I'm afraid they would outsmart me and eat the whole garden in one night 🤣
The whole editing and equipment stuff behind CZcams really is tiresome. I didn't upload much last year either. Choosing between getting actual stuff done vs. battling the technical obstacles of the digital world... yeah 😁 sorry internet, I got things to do!
Hi Torp! Editing is worst thing about making videos. I have to listen to myself which is cringey and try and figure out how to remove as much rambling and empty space while keeping a decent thread going. When you then lose all the work because your hardware fails you it really kills the motivation to make videos. Hopefully I've got it solved for now.
Man, I loved Star. I understand the movement though, goats are much more doable for a small scale farmer in terms of sustainability. You get milk, cheese, meat and hide in a manageable amount versus a giant carcass that you need to divvy up between folks that are able to do something with it. Well done.
There are pros and cons to both. I really like cattle and I hope to have more steers soon, but we had to get rid of the two we had left. Cows are actually a lot easier to fence than goats, and have far fewer disease issues comparatively. But the advantages of them being smaller and more "modular" is really nice. Most of the disease issues are controllable by good biosecurity and buy purchasing disease free stock to begin with. The biggest danger from day to day here with goats is deer worm (brain worm) which cows are immune to, but is VERY common around here. So I had to build a pretty elaborate deer fence around the goat pasture to keep the worms away from the goats.
Nubians are awesome! It's been some years since I had goats, but if I remember correctly... 2nd best milk production volume, highest milk fat content, best dual purpose breed, easy breeding, easy kidding, largest teats, making them easy milking...
Mrs. Oxbow Farm really liked them the best of all the goats we looked at. I wasn't particularly stuck on any one breed, but I wanted to use a breed that was available locally from other breeders that would provide buck service. That narrowed it down to three breeds mainly, Nubians, Nigerian Dwarf, or Saanens but really just the first two. And our very closest two goat breeder neighbors have Nubians and this pair became available just as we were getting serious about picking out some goats so it was pretty easy to decide.
@@oxbowfarm5803 I'm glad, personally I wouldn't touch Nigerian Dwarfs... They have a cult like following, but they also seem to have the largest proportion of ex goat keeper who never want goats of any kind ever again.
@@trollforge The Nigerians seem like nice goats to me, but I feel like it is harder to tell if you are buying a really good dairy goat with a Nigerian Dwarf. Some of the Nigerian breeders actually do milk their goats consistently and even do milk test etc so there are clearly good milking genetics in the Nigerians. They also have crazy high butterfat and solids numbers, even compared to Nubians they average a lot higher in milk components. But there are also a LOT of Nigerian breeders (including near us) that basically never milk their goats and just sell all the kids to the "pet mini goat" market and you'd have no idea what the milking ability is, and they are charging the SAME price for their doe kids. So I feel like the selection for dairy qualities is really patchy. I'm pretty happy with our Nubians so far.
Did the kidding go ok?
Petals kidded first and she had some problems. The vet said she probably had mild milk fever/Calcium deficit issues which made her labor progress really slowly and she wasn't pushing strongly enough. If we had more goat experience we would have recognized that things weren't going right and intervened sooner. I eventually realized it was taking too long and called our neighbor (who sold us the goats) she came over and helped us pull the first kid which was a 7 lb buckling. It was dead from being stuck in there too long. Presentation was perfect but she didn't have the juice to push him out. In hindsight if we'd pulled him about and hour earlier he would likely have been fine, or if we'd giver Petals some calcium sub-Q to get her strength back she might have been able to get him pushed out alive. Her second kid was a 5 lb doe, which was alive. Petals was totally wasted and ignored the doe so we ended up bottle feeding her. Pumpkin kidded about 4 days later with no issues, triplet bucklings.
Are the oxen gone?
Yeah. I do hope to get some more steers but I need to find a dairy farm that is in the Johne's disease prevention program to buy calves from. It really sucks to put all this time into training a steer and then have him go down with Johne's. Most dairy farms are really badly contaminated with Johne's.
@@oxbowfarm5803 Sorry to hear it.
@@owenmaguire3578 I still want oxen so I haven't gotten rid of anything, I just need to be careful to buy disease free calves. Probably means Holsteins from now on.
@@oxbowfarm5803 What is the rational that Holsteins won't have Johne's?
@@owenmaguire3578 Nothing special about Holsteins. Pretty much only dairy farms are working on Johne's eradication and most dairies are using Hosteins or Jerseys and I don't want to use Jersey oxen.