New Babies!

Ginger’s Baby Girl

Spiffy’s Boy #1

Spiffy’s Boy #2Â

Ginger is a first time mother and very attentive to her youguns’.   She gave birth around 6 PM February 5^th and she didn’t have much milk so we brought the babies in the house for the night. (Probably we were a little nervous since we lost Fawns babies a few nights earlier.)  The next morning, we re-introduced the babies to her, and now they are all doing great!
 
We don’t focus enough of our energy on goat care because our main emphasis has been on veggie and flower production.   Each season we lose several goats to parasites, probably because our entire herd was just about free and I hear that we should invest in “good quality” dairy goats, but I think it is because we are still learning about goats. We should be trimming their hooves regularly, but we only do this once a year during the winter, that is the season when we are not so involved in our other farm jobs.

Fawn, our best milk producer, had her two babies on a cold winter night and the babies didn’t make it very long.  Fawn has “undefined” udders and none of her babies have ever been able to find them unless we intervene and show the babies the udder a couple times.  In other kidding years, once we show the babies the udder a few times, the babies are so persistent that they are so well fed.  We happened to be in town for a few hours the night Fawn kidded, and by the time we returned to the farm, one baby was already dead.  We brought the live baby up to our house to feed it but it died before we could get any milk into it’s system.  Our neighbor said we probably shocked the baby by bringing into a warm house with the outdoor temperatures being in the lower teens.  We think she kidded early since one was most likely born dead, but we can’t be sure because we don’t know much about goats.  Before going to town that evening we checked her and she didn’t look as thought she would kid.   Now we are so nervous about going to town!