My Mom's Page and Thoughts. (because I don't like her changing my stuff and this page will hopefully keep her from doing so, it is really weird when one is previewing and sees something they have never seen or heard before on their website which they have labored over all summer)
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Above left: Hazel consulting with Junior Sire, Ninja Above right: Hazel, post kidding.
Notes from Mom:
HEY! In my defense, I mostly go through and just correct spelling, and glaring grammatical errors, and maybe enlarge pictures and maybe post pictures that I have been after the girl to post. HOWEVER, she is right - 98% of this website is Hazel's brainchild and Hazel's work and my role varies from cheerleader to photographer to editor. And I AM giving up my computer, so my kid can steal that (and my cat), and most of the time, my chair...
In reality, I am so proud of my kid, and what she has done, that I'm sure she's sick of my bragging on her, but... My kid is super, and she really IS passionate about her goats.
Left: Athena's daughter Cybele, racing through the backyard.
In reality, I am so proud of my kid, and what she has done, that I'm sure she's sick of my bragging on her, but... My kid is super, and she really IS passionate about her goats.
Left: Athena's daughter Cybele, racing through the backyard.
Purpose of this page -
Right: Hazel introduces 'Blanca' to Athena while Sarina looks on. Sarina was the model for Blanca, and we used Blanca for our 4H club's demo at the Navajo County Fair.
My purpose in asking for a webpage link on Hazel's page, is really for other parents like me, who feel that it is important to let their kid find their own passion and follow it (thus getting dragged along into it).
Back in 2008, I was dimly aware of what a goat looked like, but if pressed, probably could not have told anyone the difference between a goat and a sheep. Then we met Norma, and Norma shared her love of goats with Hazel (being willing to house Hazel's first goat Annie), and Hazel became goat-crazy. Since then, we have been involved in goat births, goat deaths, sick goats, healthy goats, clipping goats, vaccinating goats, transporting goats, burying goats, milking goats and drawing blood from goats. If someone had told me, in 2007, that I would be head-over-heels in love with my kid's GOATS, I would have thought them mad. My husband and I have become lost in Hazel's whirlpool of goats, and now my husband, Mr. 'We will NOT have goats at our house', now milks goats, makes milk-stands, and feeds goats. Goats have changed Hazel's outlook on so many things, and she has had some rough times, some real ups and downs, with goats. She has decided that she will become an Exotic Animal Vet, because many vets up here won't see goats, and she now is called upon fairly regularly by other 'goat people' to help them with maintenance or care of their goats. She is the manager of her goat herd; our house is not the typical scenario of the kid's begging for the animal and the parents end up taking care of it. Here, I help Hazel out, but she is the one, at the end of the day, that initiates stall-cleaning, foot-trimming, milking chores, and does the so many other things that are necessary to take care of a high-maintenance animal like a dairy goat.
After Annie's death, we decided that we wanted to do the next set of goats at home - mostly because with Annie at Norma's, we never saw our daughter. She was at Norma's all the time. And it became evident that for Hazel, goats was not a passing fad. She was hooked, and we had the choices to not let her do goats, or to help her do it. If I had read what I think I will write below, before we REALLY got into goats, I think I might have had serious second thoughts. But, so far, I have not had any regrets.
FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK... your world with dairy goats ... I SALUTE YOU!
The Pros and Cons of Dairy Goats
Cons: Above: Hazel & Menolly & Blaze
COST: Goats will cost you in money and in time. Meat goats, or pet goats, or wethers, are the relatively maintenance-free variety of goats. Dairy goats are for the goat-masochists out there who are willing to arrange their schedules around their goats' needs.
Cost - Time: Dairy goats have to be milked twice a day, if you are going for production titles like 'Elite Doe Status' or 'Milking Stars' on your goats. It also makes more sense to have fewer goats produce more milk because they are fed well and milked twice a day, rather than milked just once a day. A gallon-a-day goat, when milked twice a day, will become a half-gallon-a-day goat when milked once a day, and you are still feeding a goat. We don't have the time and money to feed and milk 8 goats for four gallons of milk - we feed and milk four goats for our four gallons.
Before we got goats, I used to play on the computer a couple hours a day. Now, my computer time involves reading about goats, ordering stuff for goats, cropping photographs of goats, editing films of goats, and now, writing about goats. I can bore ANYONE, these days, with dubious details about goat breeding, gestation, skin conditions, and nutrition requirements and I have taught myself all sorts of tricks with art programs, on ease of handling goat images. Goats have impacted my life, time-wise, rather like having my first and only child did... I sometimes wonder what I did with all the time I think I must have had, before the goats came.
Cost - Labor: Milking isn't just popping the goat up there on the milking stand while the milk drains out of her into the bucket. Learning to milk, and milk efficiently and well, takes time. The doe has to be trained to get on the milk stand, her grain needs to be prepared. Further, the doe's udder needs to be wiped down with a sterilizing solution, her first milk needs to be stripped out and checked visually in a strip cup, and then the doe is milked out, the milk is filtered, weighed and amount recorded. Then the doe's udder is sprayed again, to protect her from bacterial incursions and potential mastitis. You have to wait for the doe to finish their grain (Hazel is a way fast milker!), and then you need to clean your milking stand and keep your parlor tidy. Then the milk has to go inside (excepting some for the LGDs) and be cooled to the right temperature, or pasteurized, bottled and put somewhere in the overcrowded 'fridge. We had to learn to make cheese just to maintain some refrigerator space. All the milking equipment then has to be cleaned and stored for the next milking time.
Cost - Labor, Continued... When everyone in the household has a full-time job or full-time school (plus band plus orchestra plus 4H), this requires a clear division of labor and a lot of willingness to cooperate. Anytime you have a large animal that eats vegetable matter, you will end up with a lot of waste, and a lot of opportunities to collect bedding and manure and remove them to the compost bin. This labor easily tales a couple hours each week. Happy dairy goats are social, friendly animals who also demand THEIR time - they want scratches and pets and to be played with. They love going on 'weed walks', and their fencing and enclosure needs to be scrupulously maintained so that they can't hurt themselves or get stuck in something. Goats require hoof-trimming and if you're concerned about zoonotic diseases, they need their blood drawn, packaged and sent off to numerous labs to have various tests done on them. Then, of course, there's the cheese-making, which is the bonus of having all that milk.
Cost - Money: Goats are not cheap. Good goats are REALLY not cheap. There's some very strong reasons behind getting good goats, rather than the backyard bargain goats, or 'free' goats routinely offered on Craigslist. There's saying in the horse world, that the price you pay for your horse is the least amount of money you'll end up paying for your horse. This holds true for goats as well. A dairy goat is an animal that is producing milk, presumably for human consumption. Dairy goats have zoonotic diseases, which are diseases that can be passed to humans. An internet search for 'raw milk' will bring up countless horror stories of kids who were rendered sick, permanent injured or who died of disease they got from raw milk. If you are planning on feeding raw milk to your family, then you have a massive responsibility to them or anyone who drinks that milk, to make sure your goats don't have any diseases. We test for Johnes ( a disease that causes wicked diarhea), Brucellosis (a bacteria that can infect humans), Q fever (a disease that can cause abortion and goats and humans), Toxiplasmosis (a bacteria that can also be gotten from cat feces, which is why pregnant women are told to never empty litter boxes - this one is bad news too), CL (a disease that causes bacterial abscesses in both goats and humans) and CAE (the goaty version of a communicable arthritis type disease).
My attitude is, if my kid is going to drink this milk, it's going to be VERY clean milk. It's cleanly handled, and we make sure Hazel has the udder wipes and the strip cup and the Fight Bac mastitis spray, and excellent milk filters and all stainless steel handling equipment, and that all that equipment is washed well and promptly, so that our milk is safe to drink. We don't consider this an option, so we test and retest annually. We don't have the money for hospital bills, or the time to be sick, so we opted to start with goats who didn't have any diseases, and we have made every effort to keep them that way. Likewise, our goats get any vaccinations that we can give them, to keep them safe from diseases: Tetanus and CD&T. As soon as Lysigin becomes available from Jeffers, we'll be giving that and J-vac as well, both mastitis vaccines. Healthy goats produce good milk, so we have spent almost as much money on medications for 'just in case', as we have, on the goats themselves. We have all sorts of emergency equipment on hand as well, and none of this comes cheap. Also, given the price of a single vet bill, it makes absolute sense to start with very healthy goats.
Cost: Feed. Goats do NOT 'just eat anything' - a good producing doe has to be fed quality food that is very high in calcium to support her milk production, and a variety of foods to suit her taste as a 'browser' (Goats prefer leaves over grass, and are often used to improve horse pastures, because the last thing they'll eat is a blade of grass, if anything else is on the menu). Ours are 'gourmet' goats have fresh grass hay, alfalfa hay, alfalfa pellets and clean straw to munch on, whenever. They are fed good grain, sunflower seeds, and are offered kelp, with free-choice baking soda and free choice goat minerals. The goats' straw needs to be changed regularly in small barns. If you are showing, there's the cost of keeping the goats somewhere that isn't home, getting the equipment and signage for your goats, and transporting them safely, and of course being there or arranging someone else to milk your goats.
Cost: Vet bills... 'Nuff said. We try to avoid them, and most goat owners become proficient handling basic issues. The best cure is prevention, so we throw a lot more money and time and effort and thought at keeping our goats safe, so we don't have to pay vet bills later.
Cost: Space and shelter - Goats like space, and they need shelter and water and feed containers and water-bowls and water bowl de-icers and collars and they like to play on and scratch themselves against. If you don't happen to own a backhoe to create landscape features, you can venture into the realm of 'I hope the neighbors can't see this' as you stack up all kinds of objects, bricks, stones, spools, for your goats to play on.
Racing through the backyard!
PROs:
Family bonding, learning, fun - On the upside, and this is REALLY a huge upside... I do the goats with one of my favorite people in the world. Daily, my admiration for my daughter grows. Goats has been a venue for us to do something together, to share a goal and many laughs, and to still have something to talk about as my child heads into her teens, and I, into my mid-40s. Life is judged best by quality and not quantity; I would do the goats again in a heartbeat. For the goats, my daughter and I (and Dad and Arnold) renovated a trailer, did the ceiling, walls and flooring, painted the trailer, built fences, windbreaks and goat shelters. I got to teach my daughter a lot about design, about building, about running power tools, and we developed a lot of confidence in each other and our abilities. She is the person I depend on the most, with respect to any animal-related emergency, and I often defer to her judgement and common sense. Goats have helped her mature into an incredible, responsible, thoughtful and very appreciative person. '
Goats have not just been a chapter in our lives together, but a major plot device that has really enabled us to grow together as a family - they are a great deal of hard work that we all enjoy doing together. Next, Hazel and I are hoping to test our skills and abilities this summer, when we try to build a house for us, and a much larger barn and parlor, for Hazel's herd.
Family bonding, learning, fun - On the upside, and this is REALLY a huge upside... I do the goats with one of my favorite people in the world. Daily, my admiration for my daughter grows. Goats has been a venue for us to do something together, to share a goal and many laughs, and to still have something to talk about as my child heads into her teens, and I, into my mid-40s. Life is judged best by quality and not quantity; I would do the goats again in a heartbeat. For the goats, my daughter and I (and Dad and Arnold) renovated a trailer, did the ceiling, walls and flooring, painted the trailer, built fences, windbreaks and goat shelters. I got to teach my daughter a lot about design, about building, about running power tools, and we developed a lot of confidence in each other and our abilities. She is the person I depend on the most, with respect to any animal-related emergency, and I often defer to her judgement and common sense. Goats have helped her mature into an incredible, responsible, thoughtful and very appreciative person. '
Goats have not just been a chapter in our lives together, but a major plot device that has really enabled us to grow together as a family - they are a great deal of hard work that we all enjoy doing together. Next, Hazel and I are hoping to test our skills and abilities this summer, when we try to build a house for us, and a much larger barn and parlor, for Hazel's herd.
My favorite picture of the year. :)
Hazel with Menolly's kids, 2012.
4H Ten Commandments
I found this on the Purdue website. We live and die by these Ten Commandments:
Ten Commandments for 4-H Parents
1. Thou shalt not feed, train, and care for the animal, for thou
art trying to teach the child responsibility;
2. Thou shalt forgive a child for making mistakes in the show
ring, for thou hath made mistakes too;
3. Thou shalt not get mad when thy child forgets items in the
show box, for one day thou may forget the show box;
4. Thou shalt help the show management for they are doing
a job that thou would not want to do;
5. Thou shalt see that thy child is on time for all show
activities for thou would not want to wait on another;
6. Thou shalt be sure that thy child has the animals entered
and the registration papers in order by the designated
time;
7. Thou shalt teach the child that winning a blue ribbon is a
desirable goal, but making friends along the way is a more
worthy goal;
8. Thou shalt not complain about the judge for it is their
opinion that has been sought;
9. Thou shalt remember that livestock projects are teaching
projects, not necessarily money-making projects; and
10. Thou shalt remember that the livestock project is a family
project that shall be enjoyed and supported by the entire family.
Left & below: Hazel, cleaning out the goat trailer. ... Well, that's what she told me she was doing. :) Also pictured, Athena and Sarina.
Our Ebay Classifieds Ad...
Menolly, 2012.
Description Our goats are not for sale, but our 2012 crop of kids are!! http://witchhazeldairy.weebly.com/, then click on 'The Making of Kids'
Our prices this year, at Witch Hazel Dairy, are going to be lower than we anticipate for future years, because we are hoping to move this year's kids quickly into good homes (we will be in transition next year). For the 2012-2013 year, we will also have our goats Linear Appraised and will be on DHIR testing, so the increased data/work/cost will necessarily increase our kid prices.
All our breeding goats hail ultimately from proven dairy or show herds (Black Mesa (http://www.blackmesaranchonline.com/animals/goat_lineage/Lineage%20Intro/goats_lineage.htm) - and M's Sagebrush Acres (http://sagebrushacres.com/). Our herd sire, 2 year old Black Mesa Magic Nebula, has been invited into the ADGA sire development program; his litter-mate sister just got her Superior Genetics and Elite Doe status. We also offer 2011/spring 2012 stud service to Nebula for $75 to APPROVED does (which involves a clean bloodtest of six different dieases that we know our goats do NOT have), with discounts for kids who are already enrolled in 4H for a goat project. If Nebula earns his Superior Genetics title, chances are that price will go up too! Nebula has a marvelous temperment, is moon-spotty and carries the recessive black gene.
Our senior does are both Zapata daughters. Sarina is elegance personified, with a gorgeous udder. Athena is tall and lanky, with presence - we figure her boys will be huge. She was a gallon-a-day 2 year old first-freshener! Their milk has been described, by avowed goat-milk drinkers, as 'the best I have ever tasted'. One of our Junior does - Menolly - has Superior Genetics on both parents and her Mom is an 11 star milker. The other Junior doe - Robin - has Superior Genetics, Champion grandmothers on both sides - we are expecting GREAT things from these girls. - Come visit our website for more details on Hazel's herd! http://witchhazeldairy.weebly.com/
All our Nubians are G6S normal. If you don't know what the G6S defect is and you are considering Nubians, you might want to research that (http://www.goatworld.com/articles/g6s.shtml)-- succinctly it is like the goat version of Tay Sachs. Genetic testing is not cheap (about $46 through Texas A&M) and it's MUCH easier (and cheaper) to start with goats of known G6S status.
Our baby goats will be bottle babies and started on leash training. They will be dehorned, tattooed and will come with the ADGA papers you need to register them - our prices are a screaming deal for someone wanting to start goats THE RIGHT WAY (http://www.blackmesaranchonline.com/animals/goat101/getting_started-text.htm). We have all parents on site and we observe biosecurity measures. All our goats were blood-tested in September 2011 and were free of CL, CAE, and the zoonotic diseases (can be passed to humans) Brucellosis, Johnes, Q fever and Toxiplasmosis. Our does will be vaccinated against two types of mastitis during their pregnancy.
When we got into goats at our own home, we decided to do it 'right'. The initial money that we have spent getting great goats and doing the testing and buying the quality feed has really been worth it - we know our goats are healthy, they do not carry diseases that we could get through drinking their milk, they come from proven stock, and it's just as expensive to feed a poor producing goat as it is a great-producing goat. We have not regretted going with purebred, papered, high-quality, blue-blood goats, and would encourage anyone else thinking about goats to seriously consider the 'known' versus the 'free' or 'garage sale' goat who is usually an 'unknown'. The heartbreak of sudden death, or kids with genetic defects, and the expense of vet bills to correct problems... Really outweighs the initial cost of getting a quality animal in the first place.
Yes, indeedy, Witch Hazel Dairy is a 4H project GONE WILD! :) If you are interested in our kids or have questions, please contact Hazel, the CEO and chief bottle-washer. (Ad written by Mom :) )
Above, Hazel's G6S 4H demonstration. Below left, Hazel at the 4th of July parade with Blaze. Below right, Robin's helping Hazel and Jorge with cleaning out the goat pen.
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Very helpful links...
THINGS I WISH I KNEW along the way... AND THINGS I AM SO GLAD SOMEONE TOLD ME...
For starters, I'd recommend this to anyone considering getting goats: http://www.blackmesaranchonline.com/animals/goat101/getting_started-text.htm - We own the hard-copy of this and I still refer to it constantly. Other good books are out there, and we've read a lot of them. The internet websites are very helpful, but need to be taken with a grain of salt, sometimes, and I always cross-reference one site against another.
Above and below: Sarina, the most gorgeous Nubian doe on the planet. Bred by M's Sagebrush Acres.
If you are getting Nubian goats, you must read: http://www.goatworld.com/articles/g6s.shtml - And make sure that you ONLY get goats from breeders who at least use G6S normal bucks. Save yourself heartache.
Parasite Primer: http://www.barnonemeatgoats.com/worms.html
Gestation Calculator: http://www.gestationcalculator.com/other/goat-pregnancy-calculator
Plants poisonous to livestock, by Cornell: http://www.ansci.cornell.edu/plants/php/plants.php?action=display&ispecies=horses
Goat Med Page: http://www.goatbeat.net/health_dosagechart.html
Vet Serve, Caprine Supply, Jeffers and Hoegger are great folks to work with.
Great website for New Zealanders, on goats: http://www.lifestyleblock.co.nz/goats.html They have a great list of plants poisonous to goats. If you are a gardener AND a goat-keeper, get in the habit of researching every new plant you put in the garden for goat toxicity.
A new one, really good: GoatDairyLibrary.org - wow.
The Trying to Photograph Menolly series...
FINALLY! :)
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Other fun photos...
Above: My mom and Sarina at the fair.
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