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5 Best Dairy Goat Breeds for the Small Farm

Nigerian Dwarf    

The Nigerian Dwarf goat is a miniature breed, but also one that produces a lot of milk for it’s size. It is one of the top choices for those homesteading on a small piece of land. They can give from 1-2 quarts a day- which is pretty impressive considering they are only around 18 inches in height! Their milk is also one of the highest in butterfat which ranges anywhere from 6-10%. That means their milk is very creamy and makes delicious cheese, ice cream and yogurt. Because of their size they make great goats for kids as well as those in a more urban setting.

Nubian     

Nubians are a medium to large sized goat with adorable cute floppy ears. They come in a wide variety of colors and patterns and have the ability to produce up to 2 gallons a day, with the average being closer to 1 gallon a day. They have one of the highest butterfat contents of the standard dairy breeds at 4-5%. If you need a lot of milk and plan on making cheeses or soaps, Nubians can’t be beat. They can be a bit loud at times, I call ours crybabies, so they might not be right for those who live in subdivisions and make sure you neighbors won’t mind before bringing them home. Nubians are my personal favorites!

Alpine     

Alpines originated in France and are a steady, dependable goat. They are medium to large in size and are very consistent milk producers with one of the longest lactation cycles. They average over 1 gallon of milk per day with a 3.5% butterfat content. Alpines come in almost any color imaginable and are adaptable to almost any climate. The average size of an Alpine doe is 135 lbs.

LaMancha     

LaManchas are a medium sized goat that are most easily recognized by their lack of ears! They have a friendly, easy going temperament and are very hardy animals. LaManchas are good producers with an average of 1-2 gallons per day, with a butterfat content around 4%. Personally, I like floppy ears, but I have heard many LaMancha owners say that if you give them a chance you’ll fall in love and be hooked on them forever!

Saanen     

Saanens are the largest of the dairy breeds and are often considered the Holstein of the dairy goats. Saanens can produce a lot of milk- up to 3 gallons per day- with an average production closer to 1.5 gallons per day. While they do produce a lot of milk the butterfat content is low compared to some of the other breeds. At 2-3% butterfat the Saanen’s milk will not seem as creamy and will not produce as rich of cheese or yogurt. These girls are big, so you will need to make sure you have enough of a pasture for them to stretch their legs in and a fence strong enough to withstand a larger weight.  Saanens are usually all white in color and very mild mannered. This is the breed we started with- on a 1 acre lot in a subdivision!

Each breed is a little bit different. If you are very short on space or only need enough milk for fresh drinking, Nigerians might be the best way to go. If you need a large quantity of milk to make yogurt, buttermilk, cheese, soap or just to feed a large family you will probably want to go with one of the standard breeds. I would also suggest looking for quality animals as opposed to the first craigslist ad you see. You will be much happier if you purchase a quality goat with a strong milk lines.

This post has been linked to Tuesdays with a Twist, From the Farm, Clever Chicks Blog Hop, The Homestead Barn Hop, Homemade Monday, Thank Goodness It’s Monday, Modern Homesteaders Hop, Creative Home and Garden Hop,

© 2013 – 2014, Sarah Toney. All rights reserved.

via 5 Best Dairy Goat Breeds for the Small Farm – The Free Range Life.

02/10/2014 

Add a few of these items in your backpack or starter kit and you’ll never have to worry about crouching over a cold, smoldering pile of sticks again.

1. Lint.                                                                                                                                                       Start packing your dryer lint into a tupperware or shoebox. This stuff is a quick starter guranteed to light up dry kindling in a pinch. It’s free and, as long as you own a dryer, plentiful. Push this stuff inside of a cardboard toilet paper or gift wrap tube and you are good to go.

2. Cotton Balls & Vaseline.                                                                                                                      There are two simple methods to make this a 100% success. You can either melt the petroleum jelly in a pan over low heat, then soaking up the cotton with the liquid, and storing inside sandwich baggies, or simply daub the cotton into the greasy stuff and you are done. The cotton will burn for several minutes, long enough to light up your firewood.

3. Steel Wool.                                                                                                                                             Might be a little suprising, but this stuff is really good for firestarter, and it will ignite without even using a match. If you have two 9 volt batteries, simply place each battery on opposite sides of the wool and make contact. Voila.

4. Potato Chips.                                                                                                                                         Yes, the Fritos spread all over the picnic table from yesterdays cookout will do the trick. Actually, most any chip will do. Doritoes, Lays, Pringlesetc. Eat a couple to confirm they aren’t worth keeping and toss the rest onto your burn site and add some kindling.

5. Tape.                                                                                                                                                          Good old fashioned grey sticky duct tape. The same stuff you used to keep your wiper blade and side marker light attached to your truck. Roll it or wad it with a couple dabs of hand sanitizer to prime it. Avoid the non alcoholic sanitizer, that stuff won’t do a thing.

Now that’s a campfire.

TP

 Winter And The Media     (2/19/2014)

It’s been a long, long winter. I’ve moved all the furniture, cleaned everything twice and run thru every show on Netflix. It’s been the same kind of winter I remember as a kid, I just don’t feel like building snowmen and sledding down the slopes anymore. The snowfall has been about what I expect as are  the cold the wind and the ice. But to listen to the media, it’s been the one we won’t forget. The winter of ’14. The talking weatherpixie for our local affiliate likes to remind us of the calamity traveling across the Rockies towards us. We’re three days from the apocalypse. The artic blast  is rocketing down from Canada  and about to smother our pilot light at any moment. All weather news all day sets up a remote at the local Piggly Wiggly, grabbing the poor unfortunate slobs as they exit the store with the most important questions they’ll ever ask someone- “Do you have enough food on hand to outlast the storm?”  Schools and churches are being warned to prepare for the homeless and the unfortunate. The lost souls who will be turned away once the hospitals overflow. The StormTeam parks their tv truck along the freeway overpass and puts the 20 something reporterette in a snowsuit with a microphone, daubing her makeup in 20 degree temperatures between the sports and lottery segments. After 3 hours and about a dozen 90 second updates, there is barely a visible flake falling from the sky, and the poor girl is left to pump up the drama with the presumption that impending doom may or may not have missed us, but irregardless, stay tuned. By now, she is unable to pronounce the letter b or p. Her male counterpart has been roaming the streets looking for salt truck drivers, police and emergency management personell who will help build the anticipation of impending and never before seen disaster that awaits. He’ll arrive at some local bank parking lot that hasn’t been plowed of the 1 1/2″ of snow or yet salted, announces his remote as “ground zero” and continues to give alternating reports with the girl on the overpass, all the while managing to slip on the ice while on camera and bruise his tailbone. It’s the Revelation, the four horseman, the end of the world as we know it. Nature’s fury has come down upon us and we are powerless to fight back. Hopefully you are prepared. Hopefully, before the chaos and civil unrest that will undoubtedly erupt, you have been to the store for bread and milk. But, whatever you do, do not remove your hands from the sides of your tv set. Do not leave your living room. We will return right after these important messages from our sponsor.

GT

Cabin Fever   

Cabin fever , first recorded in 1918,for a claustrophobic reaction that takes place when a person or group is isolated and/or shut in a small space, with nothing to do for an extended period. Cabin fever describes the extreme irritability and restlessness a person may feel in these situations. 

I’m outside, warming up the 4 wheeler. It’s about 6 a.m., maybe 5 degrees above zero and dark. Everything is still, no movement other than my breath as it hovers in front of my face. Sounds ok I suppose, but it’s been 8 weeks straight of the same cold, wind, run to the truck, run back to the house, run to the mailbox, back to the house. Every few days, after a little more snow has fallen, I clear the drive and the walk down to the 2” sheet of ice that has been there since early December. Rock salt at these temperatures is worthless. I let the dogs out of the garage, and they gallop merrily down a trail to the pile of wood I split and carry back to the house for our stove. They don’t know any better, and I doubt they care; they just get to run, and sniff and do the morning rituals that dogs do. I don’t drive to an office or a timeclock somewhere, and for that I am thankful. I make my living from my home and the land around it. But I don’t think it matters what you do with your time by the middle of February; the sun is still low, the days are short, and the amount of time you spend inside of a house, a car, an office just seems to compact the world into the size of a closet. By now I’m counting the days until March. Surely by March we’ll be in the 50’s right? Daylight savings times must be about to end, I’m sure of it. I just need to hang on until March.

My mother told me once that cabin fever is about the same thing as living with my father after he retired. The kids were gone, yet the house had become smaller, inhabited by an all knowing, all seeing, omniscient presence known as Bill, who had nothing to do but stand next to, or behind my mother, and lend his years of wisdom to everything she did or needed to do. She took a part time job and saved the marriage, but I digress.

Now I don’t live in Alaska, or North Dakota or someplace where they have to drill a hole to fish in May. I’m in the lower 48, and I’ll admit, even in the depths of winter, I do watch the tv shows about Alaska. It is the hot state these days; there are so many variations to tune in-the wilderness shows, the reality shows, police, logging, gold, redneck programs. The upside is the absolute undiluted magnificents of a place like Alaska; the downside, which is usually never explained, and should be, is that the summer seasons are maybe three months, and you spend every waking minute of it preparing for the 9 months of winter. I can use a little optimism that spring is coming soon to pass the time, but even being positive can get old.

So now I’m back in the garage, unloading a cart full of wood, the dogs trailing behind me sounding as if they are in heels. They both lay down in short order and gnaw at the snow frozen around their paws, waiting for breakfast and some melted water in their dish. Life for them is about the now. I doubt they get too hung up in the notion of what is around the corner. Life is still good, God is great. I do need a little more than tea and sympathy to get by now and then. I’m thinking right about now, the sight of a few crocuses or tulips would do the trick.

GT

02/10/2014 

 
Five Quick and Easy Ways to Start Your Campfire       
Add a few of these items in your backpack or starter kit and you’ll never have to worry about crouching over a cold, smoldering pile of sticks again.

1. Lint.                                                                                                                                                       Start packing your dryer lint into a tupperware or shoebox. This stuff is a quick starter guranteed to light up dry kindling in a pinch. It’s free and, as long as you own a dryer, plentiful. Push this stuff inside of a cardboard toilet paper or gift wrap tube and you are good to go.

2. Cotton Balls & Vaseline.                                                                                                                      There are two simple methods to make this a 100% success. You can either melt the petroleum jelly in a pan over low heat, then soaking up the cotton with the liquid, and storing inside sandwich baggies, or simply daub the cotton into the greasy stuff and you are done. The cotton will burn for several minutes, long enough to light up your firewood.

3. Steel Wool.                                                                                                                                             Might be a little suprising, but this stuff is really good for firestarter, and it will ignite without even using a match. If you have two 9 volt batteries, simply place each battery on opposite sides of the wool and make contact. Voila.

4. Potato Chips.                                                                                                                                         Yes, the Fritos spread all over the picnic table from yesterdays cookout will do the trick. Actually, most any chip will do. Doritoes, Lays, Pringlesetc. Eat a couple to confirm they aren’t worth keeping and toss the rest onto your burn site and add some kindling.

5. Tape.                                                                                                                                                          Good old fashioned grey sticky duct tape. The same stuff you used to keep your wiper blade and side marker light attached to your truck. Roll it or wad it with a couple dabs of hand sanitizer to prime it. Avoid the non alcoholic sanitizer, that stuff won’t do a thing.

TP

“Go to sleep in your fireplace and you will sleep like a log.” Ellen DeGeneres

After running thru a 500 gallon tank of propane in about 45 days, I decided several years ago that I ought to be taking better advantage of the oak trees on my property. I clean up their droppings, stand beneath them and keep them company from time to time; they can return the favor. Year one I drug an old rusty Franklin wood stove out from under a pile of debris in the chicken coop. I had picked it up years earlier while cleaning out a house I had bought to remodel and rent out. Long, and heavy, I figured it would pay for itself in a shop or barn at some future point and help keep my wallet in my back pocket where it belonged. So after some course mutterings, I get the old iron widow maker into the house and over to the corner in our family room where I had already built the platform, fire and heat resistant walls,  piping etc. It looked pretty good hooked up and sitting on the pedestal, sort of like my old black lab. Well, maybe more like a gargoyle. Anyway, that moment was the high point for that old iron maiden. For the next two weeks it was a smoky, leaky, creaky, drafty, cranky and very inefficient (and somewhat unsafe) example of how not to heat your house. In order to prevent any further threats and ultimatums from my wife, that antique woodburning treasure took a short ride down to the auction house and is now someone else’s blessing.

That brings me to the United States Stove Company. I saw one of their products in the local farm store, did my due diligence online and decided their model 2000 would suit me just fine. Our house is a ranch style with 1500′ on the main level and another 1400′ of livable space in the finished, walkout basement. It is a rather long house with a stairway open on one side and located in the center of the house. The stove is heavy at 275 lbs but not as awkward as old smokey that it replaced. I unpacked it from the box, hooked up the blower and the flu (about 10 minutes) and  I was good to go. The 2000 model will put out almost 90000 btus with a 100 cfm blower to help push the heat around the house. US Stove considers this plate steel unit to be their mid sized model. The specs say it will accept up to a 21′ log; I’m pretty sure I’ve found a way to get something longer than that in the firebox a time or two. This is the third winter that I’ve used the US Stove 2000. Yes, the picture posted above shows ash and dust on the unit. It isn’t a showroom dealer photo; it is of my woodburner as it is being used.  I figured now was a better time to write a review since 3 years after the fact, I can say with certainty what I like and don’t like about this stove. First off, if you let it, it will run you out of your house. Screaming.  On a typical 35 degree day, with a slight breeze, we can keep the house at 70 on the main level. Downstairs may be 7-8 degrees warmer. In zero/sub zero temps, 65-67 is about the norm upstairs. Mind you, that is from a stove located in the corner of one end of the house in the lower level. Personally, there is something to being able to walk around your house in January in your underwear and a t shirt. I’m home several days during the week working out of my office, and my wife is home as well. As a result, I haven’t flipped the furnace on in 3 years. Of course what works for us probably isn’t ideal for the family in Minnesota that works 9-5 and is gone all the time. The stove drafts well, and the burn times can easily be controlled by the flu. The fan speed is adjustable and controlled by a knob. We usually have a cast iron kettle on top of the stove and filled with water to help with the dry winter air. Oak is the main dish on the menu, although hickory and walnut are served up on occasion. The air washed glass in front is clear and is cleaned occasionally and very easily using fine steel wool. I typically will put the last log in sometime around 9, close the flu and head to bed. I’m up by 5 and can most times simply reignite the coals in short order. What doesn’t work about the stove, for me, are mostly minor issues and likely just preference. There is an ash tray below the fire box for cleaning out the stove. I have found it to be cumbersome and tedious. It is much quicker for me to simply use a small metal scoop to empty the ash directly from the stove into a pail. The location of the blower fan is at the back and lower half of the stove. If you are intending to use the stove as a fireplace insert, you will find it very difficult to access. Likewise, while I have the specified distance between the stove and the wall, it is awkward to reach around the back of the unit and adjust the blower speed while so close to a very hot stove. I have an oven glove that I use on one hand to support myself against the stove while I reach in back.

I’m not a professional product reviewer. I am a consumer who knows what they like, or not, and why. There may be better stoves out there for similar money. I paid $599. The stove paid for it self in 60 days. The remaining winter I saved enough to pay for the cost of the install, the mantel, etc. I happy with US Stove and would buy another if I need one. But I don’t.

T Pharris

“For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.” Henry David Thoreau

Thankfully the snowstorm that massed over the northeastern coast isn’t as bad as the media played it up to be. What was predicted to be 3′ or more of snowfall over a 12 hour period, has for the most part, been much less. The 80 mph winds never came to be. As of this morning, primary roads are clear enough for travel and mass transit in the city of New York has resumed. I suppose there is a benefit to the sensationalized reporting in that when people expect the worst, they tend to prepare for the worst.  I recall an Uncle that told me as a kid that if you do, you will always be disappointed. There is great fear in the unknown and storms are no exception. Myself, since sometime around y2k I have found myself to be somewhat cynical about the world around me. The media seemingly becomes a field of whackamoles, popping up in perpetual news cycles, trying to wring the last drops of juice from the turnip of a news story, adding a little water if needed to make more, until the next scoop comes along. Egg heads on one channel debating whether the next decade will be submerged in global warming, global cooling or climate repurposing while on the next channel they consider that aliens may have had something to do with the missing Malaysian airliner. Last night I sat in a dark living room and listened to minute by minute reports of the coming “Snowpocalypse”; a different news reporter every segment saying basically the same thing in a different octave. “The approaching white hammer” “The jackpot of snow” made me smile as I pictured some producer huddled with a writer scraping the barrels of newspeak between commercials for Liptor and Allstate. Thank God that the storm was only what it was. Thank God people were spared what was predicted. I hope the television media will survive. I’m sorry if the weatherman looked a little foolish. I know I’ll still try and tune in as much as I can. I’d just like to save a little of the drama for Hollywood.