Dealing with bucks, i may sound inhuman but in my book a good buck is a chained buck, great brush trimmers, acrage clearer, but always on a chain, with a halter, and a collar but the halter on a buck demands obedience. Although i only have 2 doe at the present i plan on trading a jersey cow for some alpine does. So will keep him busy soon. I hope. Another method I was going to try is cattle panels. You need 10 panels and set them up like two 16 x 32 foot rectangles side by side as the buck cleans one side he's move to the other and if you study it enough you can rotate every 4 to 5 weeks and always have the buck on fresh pasture. Near woods and being in the tick season thought I'd just point out a few things, every farm where deer or woods are present needs a small band of quinae fowl to clear the population, control it, or wiped it out, also walmart and pet stores sell a small hook that twists the tick off and holds it til you can kill it. Small change of subject, bot flies/warble grubs, for some funny reason since our summer was wet, very wet didn't seem to see any but warmer summers seem to have them. What I do since I'm diabetic and always have a supply if syringes if I see a warble grub near the surface on a goat or cow, I put about 10 units of alcohol in the syringe and inject it right up the bxtt of that grub, wait 3 min and with a tweezers just pull that gross bad boy out. The alcohol seems to stun him dead, and he then releases. If smashed in the host can cause poisoning, and infection, and if caught early won't travel to the innards of the host. You can use the same syringe all summer just clean with alcohol and store in clean containerThank you, great advice. She comes in heat about every three weeks so she has not been bred. Read a lot of reviews about the buck aprons and they seem to work all these months. Do not really know why we have two bucks so that might be something the family needs to talk about. We’re not breeders just starting a farm and I realize there are a lot of things I need to learn. Just curious, you had four and now 18, was all that from breeding? That makes me nervous. Do you keep your buck separate? I read all the time that the buck broke the fence and bred the does. Just wanted to try and think of a different solution that other countries have been doing for hundreds of years. I could be wrong, you have made me rethink some things.congrats on your kids, they are adorable.
Thank you everyone! This is all great information and a lot of information taken in. I would like to say that there is a difference between not being knowledgeable and being irresponsible. I want to be a good goat mama, so that is why I had the Buck Aprons made. Googling, you will find it seems like half the people that separate and half the people that don’t. I will be separating the Bucks!
So ok, I got around 80x50ish big goat pen. I made three pens within it. Dotti and Joli will have 30x50 pen including the big goat house (inside goat house is a 10x5 birthing pen) that is where Dotti has been sleeping for weeks. Then beside them is a 30x50 pen (common pen?) then on the other side of that a 20x50 pen will be for Jeb and Obi. I got one large Igloo dog house but I need to build them a shelter this weekend and I will move them in. The back of the common pen will open to 7 wooded acres, but need to finish fencing it by next spring. If nothing else will have at least 1-2 acres fenced by then.
All the goats are Boer goats with the exception that Dotti may have a little Nubian in her (facewise) but she has the Boer legs and body.
When I got her, the lady just looked at her and said she thought she was pregnant. The lady had 10 fenced acres (that was originally setup for horses before the goats) and about 15 does and 1 solid black Boer buck. He was beautiful. She let her goats run together year round.
I got Dotti July 6th so in a couple days I will be a 4 month goat owner. I got all the goats within that week. Her ligs come and go the last two weeks. In the morning times they are gone but by evening one is back and mushy. It takes me a minute or two to find it. Her pin bone area is all sunken in and I can feel her spine at the base of her tail. Her udder bag has gotten more milk but is not tight at all.
She started losing whitish thick discharge plug the last week of sept and then here and there around same time I felt her milk bag developing (about size of lemon then) but last three days she has yellowish thick discharge.
I feel baby or babies on both side of belly. On the right, the kicks are low. On the left, the kicks are high, like above the rumen. Either she has two or this is one big baby laying sideways and either way, I’m pretty nervous. I really hope she knows what to do. I think she cannot go too much longer so I’m really watching and paying attention to that udder. So that is where we are and I just want to say again that the bucks will be separated.
