Goat Buck Pad


My lovely wife putting on the finishing touches

Male animals on the farm are a difficult proposition. They’re harder to manage, they’re stronger and they generally only have one thing on their mind. Yet you need them to make milk. If you don’t have babies you don’t have milk. So we needed some bucks to help us breed our ladies this fall for milk in the spring.

Enter Gozer and George. One is a Nubian (such as Bridget) and one is an Alpine (such as Mayday and Sabine, Queen of the Truck Roof). Both have excellent blood lines for milk production, which is a critical quality for our bucks. They are responsible for 50% of the genetics in our herd. Each doe has less of an impact than the bucks. Yet neither buck has produced kids, so we can’t be sure that their progeny will be up to par. But that’s the risk you take with bucks. No one wants to sell you their best buck, you almost always have to go with an unproven youngin’ from good blood lines.

 

 

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Copper Still Furnace - Tennessee Moonshine

First Foxfire book's image and explanation of an abandoned copper still furnace used for making moonshine

We enjoy our adult beverages out here on the farm, typically in the form of a cold beer after a long day. Every once in a while a margarita might show up, or a particular NY friend (you know who you are) might drop by with enough white wine to put down an army. Lots of the old-timers in our area talk about moonshine and how that’s the first alcohol they ever tasted and it was pretty much all they drank growing up. That was before they had electricity, running water, etc. Very cool stories.

One such story was told to us. The story goes as such:

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Transitioning to Farm Life - Social Isolation


After nearly five months I finally got the first batch of homebrew going. Here it is being dry-hopped

We got this request on Twitter about a week ago:

I would love to see a post about how you're adjusting to the long hours, hard work, and general transition to farm life. Also relative social isolation after leaving the city.

Succinctly answering the request is nearly impossible, but I’ll give it a shot. We get this type of question  a lot, so clearly it’s on people’s minds. It’s hard to write for both of us because we’re in different shoes, so I’ll write from my standpoint.

Over the past 4 months we went from living in a 700 sq ft apartment with no animals (or experience raising animals) to managing 85 acres with 2 cows, 4 pigs, 11 dairy goats (potentially going to 13 soon), 5 livestock guardian dogs, and close to 30 chickens and guineas. Only time will tell if we find success, but thus far it’s been quite a transition, involving a lot of long hours, hard work and isolation, as our reader suggests. We're not yet "full-time farmers" (as they're reverently referred around here), but it's a first step and maybe in a few years that will be the case.

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