When you invest your hard earned money into good livestock, it only makes sense to protect them the best you can. Most people know to build good fences, and guard against predators, but will often ignore good basic livestock biosecurity measures. Biosecurity means guarding against introducing biological risks on your farm. Good management practices go…
Goat Keeping
Kidding in the Cold
Living in the northeast, most farms we know kid in the coldest months of winter. There are a lot of important reasons for this. Kids born during the winter are known to be healthier and hardier – the lack of active parasites in the soil, absence of humidity in the air, and lots of active…
Goat Bedding
Choosing the right goat bedding may seem pretty straight forward, but there are options out there. Clean, dry bedding is a big component of goat health. Dirty, wet bedding can contribute to respiratory infections, fungal infections such as ring worm, external parasites, and more. It is especially important to good udder health. Most of use…
The Story of Ztargate
When you’ve been through quite a few harsh Maine winters with your animals, you like to think you’re well prepared. We do everything we can to ensure our goats and our fowl are hale and hearty, and have all the resources they need to face the cold. But some things, you just can’t can’t prepare…
Dairy Goat Udder Health
When you have dairy goats, maintaining good udder health is the key to maintaining production and a healthy, happy doe. In order to be sure your doe’s udder is healthy and productive, there are a few key things to watch out for. Mastitis Mastitis is the number one threat to udder health, causing dairy producers…
Raising Goats: Selenium and Copper Deficiency
Once you begin the journey into raising goats, or even just researching raising goats, you will come across the fact that copper and selenium are an essential need in a goat’s diet for them to maintain their overall health. What a lot of goat beginners don’t realize is that the area of the country that…
Urinary Calculi in Goats: What You Need to Know
One of the leading causes of death in male goats is Urinary Calculi. It’s a painful, terrible way for a goat to die, and most owners don’t realize it’s an issue until it’s too late. If you keep bucks or wethers, it’s essential that you’re familiar with Urinary Calculi, and how to prevent it. What…
How to Show your Dairy Goat
So you think your goat is pretty fabulous and would rule the show ring. But where to start? Diving into the show world can be very intimidating if you’re just getting started and don’t have a good mentor to help prepare you. Registration and Tattoos Is your goat registered with the American Dairy Goat Association?…
Small Raw Dairy Farm: Our Story
It started with just two goats, as these things often do. A darling dam and daughter pair that seemed like a great deal and would give us a doe in milk for our family needs. Quickly we discovered that Totem (mom) didn’t want any part of being milked, and we weren’t willing to pursue it with…
Preparing Goats for Cold Weather
When Fall kicks off, it’s inevitable that people start worrying about their goats and how they’ll battle the cold. Living in Maine, we know cold winters. We know negative temperatures, and feet worth of snow dumping on us at any given time. But our goats always make it through, little worse for the wear….
ADGA DHIR Milk Testing
As we’ve gotten more serious about commitment to our goats and our breeding program, we’ve been participating in a variety of performance programs offered by the American Dairy Goat Association. As a herd who’d main focus is dairy production, one of the most useful programs we’ve participated in so far has been DHIR milk…
So You Want Dairy Goats
When livestock becomes a part of your self-sufficiency journey, having a dairy animal is usually a part of that plan. Having a reliable dairy producer on your homestead allows for a lot of food freedom. Dairy goats are great way to achieve this. As goat’s milk becomes more mainstream, more and more homesteaders and farmers are turning…