Goats at Wickham Farm

Goats were the first "real" livestock that we had here on the farm.Being the greenhorn goat herders that we were, we made a lot of mistakes when it came to goat farming. Our very first mistake was purchasing a pair of goats from a sale barn. We didn't really know anything about goats at the time, but they looked pretty good to us and we heard that goats would be good for keeping down the weeds around the farm. Sounds simple enough. Boy, did we have a lot to learn! One of my coworkers who just happens to have grown up on a goat dairy stopped by after work one day to look at our newly purchased goats. To our surprise, she took one look at our goats and laughed out loud. "Why did you buy such old goats?" We were a bit surprised. They didn't look all that old to us. Like I said, we had a lot to learn about goats.

That was about 12 years ago. While our first goats didn't last long... after all, they were already senior citizens... we did learn to love goats. At times, we have had as many as 50 goats on our small farm.  I have hand milked as many as 10 goats twice a day everyday. Jane made cheese and soap from the milk and our children earned a lot of ribbons showing goats at the county fair. Today, we are down to only five nannies and my milking chores have been nearly non-existent. While we will probably always have a few goats around, I don't think we are likely to have a large herd again. At least not anytime in the foreseeable future. Notice that I didn't say that we would never have a large herd. I have learned not to say never when it comes to our farm animals. Just three years ago, we didn't have any pigs. Today we have over 50! But then that's another story.

Last week, one of our boar nannies, Heidi, had twins. A boy and a girl. Thank goodness she had them before the current cold snap hit. Mother and kids are doing fine and our goat herd now numbers 7!