My Goal ​​

​​My goal for my registered stock is to produce type correct LaMancha goats with good milk ability that really put the milk in the pail as well a sustain long lactation's for years. Correct conformation is a must. The goats I breed need to have nicely sized teats with large orifices for quick hand milking. I want goats with strong frames but still retain a diary look about them.​

 

 

The life goal for my entire farm is to live nearly self sustainably and to start my own homestead in an energy passive house. I plan to raise of course Purebred LaManchas, milking Dexter Cattle, Anatolian or Kangal LDGs, and Buff Orpington, Australorp and Plymouth Rock chickens primarily for eggs but also meat. Food crops for personal consumption are also in the future.  

          How it Began

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My love for goats did not start at a young age. In fact when I was younger I believed like many people goats were dirty, stinky, tin can eating animals. That however all changed when I was twelve my aunt and uncle in North Carolina decided to start a goat dairy. My dad is a contractor so he and I traveled over there to stay for a few weeks so he could help put up the goat pens and milking parlor. The moment I went into the pen to play with then around four hundred goats I knew I had found my perfect animal. Everything just clicked and I knew this was what I wanted to do. Unfortunately for me I couldn’t get any goat kids that year to take home. They wanted to keep all the doelings for that year. Another year passed and I asked again if I could have two doelings. There was still not enough doelings to spare so I waited again another year and this time I got to pick out two little one week old doelings.

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I chose ignorantly a sickly little cou clair colored Alpine/Toggenburg kid and my dad picked out a Toggenburg marked kid with a white belly band. When I got them home they both immediately came down with bad scours. I did not know what to do so they also came down with polio due to lack of nutrition in the all stock replacement milk I was feeding them a few days later. Only a week into my goat ownership I lost my cou clair doeling who I had named flower to the polio and scours. My bad luck did not stop there. Around eight weeks later the one and only kid I had left who we had named Beep nearly died due to another strike of ignorance. My dad had left an open ladder setting out. Somehow Beep got her collar hung on it and was hanging by it when I found her. Her eyes were rolled back in her head and she was barely breathing. Once I got her off the ladder she started breathing good again and other than being a little out of sorts for the day she made it just fine.​

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When she turned five months old we decided she needed a friend. While driving down the road one day we saw a field full of goats so we pulled over and asked the elderly man who owned them if he would sell us a kid. Thirty dollars later we brought home a Nubian mixed doeling who we named Betty. They got along fine and that was the end of my bad luck until they turned ten months old. That was when Beep was attacked by one of our dogs. There was a cut artery in her face and I just knew she was going to die. There was blood squirting everywhere and pouring down my hand as we rushed her to the vet. Somehow during the twenty minuet drive with our frantic praying the bleeding stopped. The vet patched her back up the best he could with all the nerves that were also severed it took a while to get out of surgery. She was a mess after the surgery. The entire right side of her face excluding her ear was partially paralyzed for months but has since mostly healed.​

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After that my knowledge of goats has improved a great deal. Now three years later after the last strike of bad luck Beep has given birth to her first kids at four years old uneventfully. I no longer have Betty but do have other does. Many things have changed since then. I now live in a different state and am nineteen but my love for goats is ever growing. Maybe someday I can become a goat vet or perhaps a writer. You never know what tomorrow will throw at you so we’ll see where my life takes me next.