Hello Everyone,

So last month I shared our happy events of our goat kids, Winter and Saber’s births. They have doubled in size and the two of them have become best buddies. It is fun to watch them play. Winter being the older of the two showed Saber in the early days how to bounce. Then next Winter showed Saber how to be a skateboarder off of the barn walls by hitting the wall as high up as he could go with all four feet and bounce off of it. So then monkey see monkey do and Saber would be right after him. Now they play who can jump over momma. Winter’s momma is much more tolerant and even lets Saber attempt to climb and jump over her.

The goats finally had their first day out of the barn this month after having some record high temperatures and melting a lot of the snow away. Even the adults were acting like kids as they would run in and out of the barn. There isn’t anything green yet for them to eat outside so for now they’ll just have the luxury of the barnyard to roam. Maybe by late April we’ll have enough green for us to set up some pasture areas again.

We did have one unfortunate event happen five days after Saber was born. Fiona, our two-year old doe who had never kidded before, went into labor in the wee hours of the morning on March 7th. Things didn’t go too well. By the time we went out for morning chores at 5:30am we found her baby stuck part way out and already deceased. One of the front hooves was mostly stuck up inside and I had to gently reach in to pull it out so that while Fiona pushed, I pulled to get the rest of the baby out. It was really sad. The baby was a buckling. Fiona is doing ok though. The first 24 hours were the roughest on her. She cried a lot. I started milking her right away though and that seemed to help get her past her grief. She has healed up well and now produces about a half a gallon of milk a day. This may end up being a blessing in disguise because we will be getting three registered Saanen goat kids from a ranch in Deer Park, Washington. They will be quite young, less than a month old, so we will need to bottle feed them. They won’t be here until likely May. For right now though, I am making chevre cheese and yogurt from our girls.

There has been controversial talk about goat milk versus cows’ milk and I want to give my observations about the product. Due to the dairy industry pushing cow’s milk products, you won’t see a lot of goat’s milk products on the market. At least not in North America. Also, goats typically milk less than a cow and any products on the market are usually twice as expensive. Goat’s milk does have a different flavor than cow’s milk. It also has less fat than cow’s milk. The cream in goat’s milk never fully separates like cow’s cream does but even if you were to use a separator on the goat’s milk you won’t get very much. It would be hardly worth trying to make butter from the little cream you would get. However, the one huge benefit goat’s milk has over cow’s milk is that it is less allergenic. Typically, people who have cow’s milk allergies will not have an allergic reaction to goat’s milk. Now, here’s the really sticky subject, pasteurization. Pasteurization is a heat-treatment process that destroys pathogenic microorganisms. It also destroys some heat-sensitive vitamins, enzymes, beneficial probiotics and alteration of taste and texture. Pasteurization is used in the dairy industry. You will also see in the dairy industry that everything is machine operated. All those milking machines have to be cleaned after every milking. Commercial dairies are pretty dirty and stinky set ups. It would be very easy to have harmful pathogenic microorganisms if things were not cleaned properly. I discussed the option of using a milking machine with the ranch that we are getting our registered goats from. They had a commercial milking machine. They said that any milk they get from using the milking machine they feed back to their animals, i.e. pigs and chickens. Any milk they use for their own use, they hand milk. Their reasoning for this is that the commercial milk machines, if not cleaned well enough, can easily become contaminated with bacteria. Hence why pasteurization is so important. However, hand milking, you are literally milking it into a clean pail, from a teat that you cleaned off prior to milking and then pouring the milk into two extremely fine filters. We have not had any issues whatsoever from drinking our milk or making it into chevre cheese. Our yogurt process does heat the milk up to boiling. Some of you may have thought that when Mark got sick back in December that it was due to drinking raw milk. At that time of the year, our one goat we had been milking during the summer, was dried up. We had dried her up before we went onto vacation in October. So, we were not drinking or using any raw milk or cheese products at that time. We still do not know how Mark got so sick but it was not from unpasteurized goat milk. I hope that clears up some concerns that some of you might have had.

The middle of March we had a fun event in White Bird called March Artisan Madness. The Salmon River art guild that I am a part of hosted the show. I had my bead work as well as the bird houses Mark built and I painted. It went fairly well though the weather wasn’t the best so we didn’t see as many folks turn out for it as in the past. I finished a hatband design just in time for the show. The pattern looks like snake skin.

It’s been a good month even with the loss of the goat kid. It could have always been worse. I am grateful our doe is safe and well and there is always next year. She’ll be bigger next year and maybe the labor will go smoother. Goats do their growing the first four years of their life. She’s also proving to be an easy milker with large teats. When you can get all four fingers around a teat, you know you’ve got a good milker.

Next newsletter I hope to share the hatching out of baby chicks we are going to start incubating soon.

Have a great April.

Many Blessings,

Joey