Nary an Udder the Same & Goat Happenings

As I milk the does each morning, it is always interesting to note the differences in their udders. It's something I have experienced for years, but I didn't think about sharing it with you until recently. Goats, just like people, each have their own special peculiarities that make them unique. And since I milk my goats, one of the things I pay particular attention to is their udders. Many goats udders are very similar, but the group of does I have right now don't share many characteristics, and because of that, I thought I would explain the differences and what I think about them.

I'll start off with One Stripe, our old lady goat. She is now seven years old and has been with us since she was five months old. I think she is starting to slow down a little, but for an old lady, she is doing quite well. Her udder is getting longer as she ages. It also has more mammary tissue that the other does. The first year or two I milked One Stripe, her udder was much firmer and more congested than the other does. She didn't have mastitis, but either she wouldn't let me have her milk or the mammary tissue took up so much room, she didn't have much. I have always wondered if that has affected the size of her udder. It still never completely empties when I milk her, but she is a breeze to milk. One Stripe's teats are straight, easy to handle and allow a good amount of milk with each squeeze. She and I have been doing this together for so long that sometimes she will turn her head around and nudge my shoulder when she is ready to leave, but I'm not finished.

Copper is One Stripe's two year old daughter. Copper's udder is even, and holds a nice capacity. She does not have the longer, type of udder her mother has. The teats are even, a little longer than some, and also allow a good amount of milk with each squeeze. Copper is a taller, longer goat than the other does I have. I scoot my chair closer to the end of the milk stand to reach her udder comfortably. Copper was an accidental single kid in the middle of winter, so she didn't have anyone to play with when she was born. Consequently, she came back to the milk stand with One Stripe while I was milking. She has always been very tame and easy to handle, if sometimes a little onery.

Cricket and Lady Bug are twin sisters that are one year old. They each had their first kids this spring. It is always interesting to see how a doe will turn out on the milk stand. Ivory, their mother, was a great milker so I had high hopes for these two.

Cricket started off with very small teats. She was hard to milk and not at all interested in letting her milk down. After a few days I remembered that Ivory started off the same way. That gave me hope that Cricket's teats and udder would develop well during her first lactation. So far so good. She is definitely easier to milk, and she will let her milk down for me now. One of the challenges of increasing her milk production is having her son continue to nurse through the fence. With the work on the barn and the addition of pigs, available space for weaning is limited for now.

Lady Bug started off too wound up for my taste. She was not relaxed, but furtive and anxious. Now, after almost three months she has calmed down nicely, and is very easy to milk. Surprisingly, her teats are much larger than her sisters. They are not as long as One Stripe's or Copper's, but they hold a good volume of milk per squeeze, making her very easy to milk. For a first freshener, Lady Bug also has a very good quantity of milk, even though Easter is still nursing some through the fence.

We sold Penny, who is Copper's daughter, to Faith back in April. I wish I had remembered to take a picture of her udder before she left. She is the first doe I have had that had two different size teats. Noticeably different. One side is much easier to milk than the other. At first I wondered if it was because her twin bucks were nursing more on one side than the other, but Faith tells me they have continued to remain different sizes. She doesn't have any trouble milking Penny, and has adjusted to the different techniques needed to get milk from each side.

Every milker has a preference for the type of udder and teat they prefer to milk. I know I do. As time has passed and my experience as a milker has increased, I am now much more particular about the animals we add to our herd. If we are looking for a new buck, I ask to see the mother's udder in milk or at least pictures of it. If it is pendulous, or the teats are large and bulbous, I pass. If the teats are small, or the udder is poorly attached, I pass. Since I plan to milk our does, I want animals that have the genetic propensity to produce healthy, well formed, udders and teats. I don't have to have an animal that will produce a gallon a day, but I would like to have a decent amount per animals.

Speaking of bucks, when the vet was out recently working on our new pigs, we also had him work on Bill's horn scurs. Bill's horn burning didn't go well before we bought him. We knew he had some scurs when we brought him home, but we have never had any that grew
out like this. Bill had rubbed or caught the sideways scur that had gotten pretty long, and ripped it away from his skull, which caused it to bleed a little. The vet takes care of these types of scurs with large landscaping loppers. Scurs on goats don't generally bleed a lot because they don't develop the same type of blood supply that a regular horn has. This was true for Bill this time. The vet applied some standard blood stopper powder for good measure. While we had Bill in hand, we also wormed him and trimmed his hooves. We hadn't caught Bill in a while, but he is usually tame enough when we feed. You can reach over and pat and scratch him then. But when I poured out the feed and took him by the collar, he jumped up on his hind feet, hollered and fought valiantly to get loose until the vet could take over. I was very happy to turn him over to someone else. If you had been standing around, the dance Bill and I did would probably have been somewhat comical. Luckily, it worked out okay.

We plan to turn One Stripe and Cricket in with Bill on July 1st, to begin our first breeding cycle. We hope they breed sometime in July to give us December babies. This will allow us to have plenty of milk through the winter. We tried this last summer, but Bill wasn't mature enough to handle this responsibility at the time. If our breeding plans are successful, Cricket will dry up around the end of August or early September. One Stripe has already been dried up. Since she is older, I wanted her body to have a break before she becomes pregnant again. I will continue milking Copper and Lady Bug until late December or early January when One Stripe and Cricket are in milk again.

We will breed Copper, Lady Bug, Patch and Easter in November. This will provide us with the larger supply of milk in the spring so we can begin making next year's cheese supply. Well, that's the plan anyway. We will see how it goes.

We still need to butcher our older wethers. We hope, cross your fingers, to get that done in the next week or so. It will be nice to have our own meat in the freezer again. I want to figure out how to make a very simple jerky from our ground chevron. Most of the recipes I have read have more ingredients than I want to use. If you know of a very simple recipe that does not use liquid smoke or any sweeteners, I would be interested in looking at it. I would like to use little more than salt and pepper, but I don't know if that would work or not. I need to do some more research on simple jerky recipes.

The over abundance of rain this spring and early summer has also caused an over abundance of worms this year. I have had to worm the goats more than usual. Even Pearl, our Great Pyrenees, has had difficulty with worms which she has never had before. The vet said the weather this year has caused a tremendous flush of worms for all of the animals he sees. It's something good to learn and be aware of as we continue to learn the nuances of our location. We have been here seven years and in that time we have had two years of serious heat and drought and two years of incredible rain and flooding.

We continue to see our goats as vital to our homestead. They provide us with milk which we make into kefir, butter and cheese. The by product of whey is then fed to the chickens and pigs. The dog and cats also benefit from the milk everyday. The goats provide us with meat and the other animals with nutrition through the organs, fat and scraps from our table. We enjoy our goats. They are a good farm animal. But more than that, every animal on our homestead is here for a reason. They all have jobs to perform, and if they don't meet the expectation or need that we have, we don't keep them. Regardless of how much we may like them or want them, if they don't perform adequately, or exhibit an undesirable behavior that we are unable to alter, then we don't keep them. Some we eat, some we sell, some we give away with full disclosure of why we are getting rid of them. 

Homesteading is our way of life. Soon we feel it will be our survival. We continue to increase our skills, so that hopefully, we can depend on what we know, what we have, and what we can do, to see us through the hard times that will soon be upon us all. We would encourage you to do the same.

Until next time - Fern
 

Milking Challenges, Horn Scurs & More Lore

Remember when I told you Copper has been a dream to train? And that I expected some challenges along the way? It's true. Every doe I have trained to milk has come up with some behavior somewhere along the way that had to be corrected. Cooper has been no exception.

After I had been milking Copper for a while, she got use to having her leg moved back and out to make room for the milk bucket. There have been several times she kicked at flies and caught her hoof on the edge of the pail, but only once did she end up with her foot in milk. That's a pretty good record for me and a new milker. The flies are really bad right now, but the does have figured out how to kick the flies and miss the bucket, usually. 

The problem Copper developed is a rather intense dislike of having the teat dip applied after I finished milking. The best way I have found to correct this problem is to hold the goat's leg way up in the air. I doubt if this position is very comfortable, but it is not painful. It is very awkward, and doesn't allow the goat to kick at all. The only thing they can do is kind of hop up and down on the remaining leg. It makes it very easy to apply the teat dip and totally eliminates any competition for cooperation. The first few times I did this it kind of scared Copper a little and probably confused her. It didn't take her long to realize that she had no choice, but to cooperate. Now it is not a problem.

The other behavior she has developed is yelling at the top of her lungs whenever she sees us. Unfortunately, she has learned this behavior from Ivory. Now both of them are going through some adjustment periods of being taught not to yell. Regular, quiet goat talk is one thing, but bellowing is just not in our acceptable range of noise levels. We will see how we fare with this behavior. Ivory is already sold and will be leaving here the end of September. If Copper doesn't calm back down then, like her mom One Stripe, she will also be finding a new home.

Bill, our new buck, is doing well. He is still low man on the totem pole with the older wethers, but he's doing fine. The only problem he is having is his horn scurs. The folks we bought him from had taken him to the vet several times to have his horns worked on, but he still has some scurs growing out. One of this horn buds is growing scurs out of both sides of the base. We are hoping these are the kinds of scurs that he will eventually knock off, kind of like Copper. She will grow a small rounded horn bud looking thing about one to two inches long. Then one day, she will have a small bloody spot where she has knocked it off again. I am hoping Bill will do the same thing. We will see.

In preparation for Frank's surgery, we tried letting the weaning kids back out into the herd after they had been separated for three weeks. Copper didn't let her babies nurse, but Ivory did. So, back to the drawing board on that one. The first year we kept does and kids and had to wean them in separate pastures, we kept them separated for six weeks and that worked fine. Last year we kept them separated for four weeks and that worked, too. Three weeks just didn't work. So, now we will keep them separated for about another three weeks and see how that goes. We were trying to get down to animals in two pastures, his and hers, instead of three, his, hers and kids.

The other goat thing we were wanting to accomplish is breeding Bill and One Stripe, but neither appears to be interested yet. At one point we thought One Stripe was going into heat, but nothing ever came of that. Since we are using three of our four pastures, and we only want One Stripe to breed, and not Copper or Ivory, we will put Bill and One Stripe in the fourth pasture during the day and return them to their usual pasture in the evening. This will only happen if all is well with Frank and we have the time to mess with them. So, our breeding schedule may be a little later than we originally planned, but that's okay, too. That's why they're called plans, they are subject to change or the whim of the planner.

This is a laid back time of year with the goats, and that is nice. I am still milking twice a day. We keep the morning milk for us, and the evening milk goes to Pearl and the chickens. We will keep more of it when we start making cheese. For now, this is a nice easy routine. There is always more to be learned, tried, discarded, tried again and figured out. Sometime it's at a convenient time, and sometimes it isn't. That's part of this thing called life. Isn't it great?

Until next time - Fern