Spring-time is here!

Time to tend to your flocks & gardens...

I have spent far too many posts on this blog on "Outside Issues". It is time to take my focus back to the Farm.

As I look out on my farm this idyllic Spring Day I see the grass is quickly growing in the pastures, little white and yellow flowers dot the hills and valleys, purple vetch grows upon hillsides giving them a illustrious splendor. It must be time to start the sprouts for our Garden already. March through May really is the best time of the year on our off-grid Homestead.

When I leave the Farm, everyone outside of my world is so caught up in the endless turmoil of the modern decay. I don't even know what is this stuff they talk about anymore. The latest hot new show on Netflix. The latest Celeb to pass, both literally and metaphorically. The latest atrocity, whether petty or truly disastrous, to eventually happen in the country or the world. It is not that because of my ignorance of these things that they do not happen, of course they still happen — But I'm blissfully unaware. Perhaps then some ignorance is bliss? Ignorance of things that do not affect me, will never affect me, have no bearing on my family nor my day-to-day life.

I sit on my hill perched atop a flame in my metal trough in steaming water. I play with my child and enjoy the hammock with my wife. Our Farm renews our strength and keeps us insulated from that outside plane. I am reading books faster than ever before. I have Book Reviews I want to write...

Soon we will have a lot more goats running around, the anticipation keeps building!

Why castrate a goat?
Sure, you could not castrate your goats but then you would have to manage your herd a little bit more. If you don't separate the males from the females then you're going to have unwanted pregnancies and I don't know about you but I like to have complete control over when my herd is giving birth.

We have a spring birthing and then for anyone who was missed in the spring, a fall birthing. We breed each of our goats once a year. Could you breed them more than once a year? You sure could, but in the long run your goats would experience a lot more wear and tear and have a premature death perhaps... I dunno, I stick with once a year per goat to stay safe. I may experiment a little bit in the future with three birthings every two years or something... Who knows...

There of course are many ways to castrate a goat. We've tried two different methods and we know which one we definitely prefer over the other.

You can castrate goats one easy way by doing what some call "banding". You're literally putting a rubber band type thing on the young buckling's testes. They experience some discomfort for a while and eventually the testes fall off but the benefit of this method is that at first they don't seem to realize what's going on and so they don't create much fuss. The downside is you probably want to give your goats a tetanus shot because they kind of have a wound at the end when the nuts fall off.

I've tried this method and I don't like it very much. I prefer to do a slightly trickier method and I believe that it's benefits are multi-faceted. The device is called the Burdizzo. It is a clamp, like some sort of vise grips, and you clamp it down on each of the two arteries going to both the left and right testes. You hold it there for 45 to 60 seconds and voila you're done. There is zero open wound so the neat part about this method is that when you actually sell your goats a lot of people can't tell whether they've been castrated or not and so you can tap into both markets because some people just see the shriveled up nuts and they're just not used to still seeing it there because 99% of people band. I always like being a little different than every one else, after all I'm a revolutionary goat farmer.

We castrate all of our male births each year at about 8 to 10 weeks old. I've heard some people having some issues if they did it earlier with the urinary tract not developing properly. We've never had any issues so we've stuck with what we've always done.

I have done some experimenting and I tend to think that an un-castrated male goat does grow a little faster. But then again some people say they can taste the difference in the meat and some people have a preference over one or the other. When the goats are 2 to 3 months old I usually put the ones I plan on selling, or having butchered, in a small pen and feeding them a goat ration I buy at the store. This is a bit more for fast growth and it lets me bring them to market when I choose to. I can hold off or I can accelerate. Agrarianism control.

Our main herd never gets this feed and all the mothers and goats that we keep are fed just hay grass and from the pasture and almond hulls. After a while you'll figure out what system works for you. Just go start doing it. I had zero farming experience when I started, now people think I am the Goat-Sage. Not only that, most of the advice you get from other people doesn't even apply to your unique situation. Farming is filled with conflicting advice. What worked for one farmer will not work for the other. Most of it is just common sense anyways...

Keep your livestock well fed, check on them from time to time, keep them protected from harsh weather, start with good genetics, get to know your supplier and your livestock tend to do pretty good... That is why I say, just go do it. Necessity really is the Mother of invention. As to why I picked goats, it was mostly because of Modern Economics. I mention it a little in this post.

If you want to take some good classes on Goats. Here is a class in Texas people say is good. Her website is the best Meat Goat website around. That said, I just learned as I went from watching you-tube videos... Some ask if we needed a barn. No, we still have no barn. Luckily the weather here is nice enough that we do not NEED a barn.

First you need to save up some capital so you can get your dream started...

You can do it!

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