Gordon Longfoot

We're planning a meal worm habitat. Our roosters are eating too much of the layer feed and getting a high dosage of calcium. This can damage their kidneys. So I want to put together a feed with different things I can grow on the farm, and leave out the oyster shells.

Meal worms seem like a good option. I already found a #50 bag of oats to feed them. These will need to be ground up a little.

That's a great looking rooster.

My kids came home with 6 Bielefelders but three of them ended up being Cream Legbars. All hens.

Mylow Bear wrote:Yep, they look bred to me! I have lamanchas mostly, but have a couple ND crosses. The ND does look like lil blimps like that. You've got kids coming in the next monthish for sure. Have you had goats kid before? If not, watch for them to sudden udder growth, drooping tails, pawing at the ground then laying down. Sometimes experienced does get milk a lot sooner, but I've had first timers fill out less than 24 hours before (that was quite a thing to wake up to in the middle of the night!).

These will be our first goat kids, we had a sow give birth in September but we're still new to this.

The white goat had kids last year with a different owner. The other girl (Daisy) is her first time, she's just under 2 years old. We'll be cleaning out their stall on Friday and adding a clean layer of straw. Then we get to start watching for signs. I think the earliest breeding date is around August 20th, so I'm thinking we have till the second week on January, but we didn't mark a calendar when it happened so we're not really sure.

All of our kid bucks had horns removed but one of them had a stub growing back. I was planning to remove it with a wire saw, but he was butting heads with our adult buck in early November and now it's gone.

We noticed some bleeding when he knocked it off and sprayed him with Blu Kote for the next three days.

Here's some pictures of the does

Leigh Tate wrote:Gordon, welcome to the wonderful world of goats. And welcome to Permies! I've been keeping goats for about 15 years, so I can offer what I've experienced and observed. I've had the same thing happen to me, with the bucks breaking in to get to the girls! (Talk about a 3-ring circus).

If it was me, I would mark both possible breeding dates on the calendar and then both potential due dates. For Nigerian Dwarfs, gestation is about 145 days. Typically, they lose interest in the bucks once they're pregnant, but I've had does go into false heats three weeks after their first date with a buck, get a second date, and then deliver full term kids near the first due date. It must have something to do with hormones.

So I think it's best to be prepared. Keep a close watch on them when the first due date approaches (a range of 140 to 150 days would all be considered normal) and have your kidding supplies at the ready. Then enjoy those baby goats!

The smaller doe is looking pretty wide. She was a year old but the other doe is about 5 so she's bigger. We'll be ready for them at the end of December even if they come on the later due date.

I'll post a picture of them tomorrow.

Magnesium puts me right to sleep. It's not perfect, I need to be active during the day and get sunlight but if I do my part it works.

I picked up some LifePo4 100A's for $100 last month on Amazon. There not as nice as my 48V rack mount units but they work good enough for small projects. There's rack mounts for under $1k now too. I'm tempted to add another one to my main system.

We're temporarily setup with two strings of panels where one gets sun in the morning then the other in the afternoon. To me it's a waste of panels and I'll get more out of my system once I have a proper rack that gets sun all day long.

Welp, I let the buck in with the does today and they must be in heat now. I know it's a 3 week cycle and it's been about 3 weeks.

We used turkey manure in our garden this year. It's about the same as chicken manure but maybe slightly higher in nitrogen.

My friend filled a 5 gallon bucket with 6 month old droppings. Every few weeks I'd add a scoop to a bucket half full with water and let it sit for a few days before adding it to my plants. Our tomatoe and pepper plants were lush!