When we first moved out of the city to the more comfortable country life my husband and I were both more familiar with, we never had any intention of ever owning goats! So what happened??? We had a very nice garden, ducks, geese, a few bantam buttercup chickens, and a pair of pet turkeys that followed us around every where we went! Life was good. Life was simple. Then, 'the wife' wanted just one floppy-eared nubian goat....just one goat...(#1)....
Well, 'just one goat' just doesn't work! You need two goats, so the '#1' goat can have a friend (enter now goat #2). And if you want milk, that means babies. And if you need babies for milk, but don't want to borrow someone else's buck all the time-- you really you need three (#3). BUT...If you don't want your baby goats to get pregnant by daddy goat (goat #3), then you are going to have to separate goat #3 and give him a friend too! (Goat #4) So now, that 'just one' goat has become four goats. And four goats multiplies into 13 rather quickly! 13 goats eat more food (aka money) than the 'one goat', the chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese combined; so now its time to start selling goats. When you are selling goats verrrrrrrryyyyy few people are satisfied with just the 'pretty goat.' They want the gallon a day milker (even though they may not have a use for 7 gallons of milk/week!) because they were told that is the 'minimum' to expect from a goat AND they only want to pay $150 for a doe in milk. This didn't seem right at all! We paid $200+ for our girls, and not being able to sell the babies for at least that much seemed like a waste... so now we have to evaluate if selling goats is worth the trouble it took to raise them.... Raising goats was getting pretty complicated! The goat multiplication part worked great, but keeping up with the demand for the absolute best milkers at a price that was reasonable, and still being able to produce all the milk we needed was not! That was when we decided to step things up a notch. We learned pretty quick that not all goats were made equal (registered or not--- ears or not!), and since we only wanted to offer the best of our animals for sale, so folks like us just starting out didn't have to experience everything that we did starting from scratch,... things had to change! We immediately went to work changing our herd to fit the demand for milkers both for our family, and for the families looking to purchase from us. Slowly changing out our mediocre goats for better goats, and making sure to get them registered. Learning about registered goats, bloodlines, conformation, and how to read a milk test result showed us raising goats was some sort of science! Almost as complicated as having to become our own vet... Owning goats was harder than the internet made it out to be!! But fortunately, 'the wife' really loves her animals, and learning about them, and the challenge of producing a better animal than what she started with... So, today our herd is representative of our work... All though improvements will always be sought to be made, we are happy with the critters we have now, and are glad to offer them for sale to families looking for good dairy animals, that doesn't break the bank, and helps cover the cost of what we put into our herd. Then in 2013 we moved up to the White Mountains of northeastern Arizona, and left the Sonoran Desert behind us.... That's when 'the wife' disclosed that she wanted sheep (the saga continues)....
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