Here Come the Animals!

My son with a herd of Nigerian Dwarf Goats. He really loves them.

In fairness, the name of this blog should be 1,300 Feet of Fence. I named it before I was done fencing, and, well, I was 333 feet short.

It has almost been a year since we bought this place and began our homesteading adventure. The first year has been about repairing the house, though that still continues, and getting the land ready for animals and food production. We sectioned the land into family living, garden and orchard growing, and animals. It has been excruciating to wait an entire year to get the good stuff, but we have tried to take it slow and be totally prepared.

The land work involved several friends. My heartfelt thanks to Eric Francis, Dave Ragan and Mike Thompson for coming over, digging in and getting sweaty with me. Thanks also to my young paid farm hand, Justin the Rocket, who helped me stretch some of the most difficult sections of the fence, including parts where he had to squeeze between two trees and I, um, couldn't fit. My thanks, as well, to Judith Murray, fellow beekeeper, ex-colleague in journalism, and a person who is really generous with her time. Judith helped us paint a couple of sides of our house, and did a darn good job.

In the summer, the family finished painting the front and one side of the house. It now has a really nice red-barn look, and we are looking forward to finishing the painting in spring.

 In fall, I planted nine dwarf apple trees to begin our orchard.  In winter, I put the final touches on the fencing, creating a gate for the paddock and building houses for baby goats.

Now we area ready for everything. I have food, shelter and watering devices for the chickens, goats and livestock guardian dog. The place is about to be jumping with heartbeats.

As I write this, we are within a month of receiving two bottle-baby Nigerian Dwarf goats. A local goatherd, who, incidentally, is neither high on a hill nor lonely,  has about six does that are nearing the end of their pregnancies, and we hope to purchase from her the doelings that will become the core of our small dairy operation.

Daughter 1 with new doeling.

I don't know of anyone else in central Arkansas who raises Nigerians, which are known for having a very high butterfat content and tasting as good as or better than fresh cow's milk.

Nigerians are smaller than the average goat, but not as small as pygmy goats. They are bred for dairy, rather than for meat or fiber. We plan to start with our two babies, raise them to the age where they can be bred (a year or so) and then start milking the adult does after 18 months, when they have had their first litter of kids (more babies!). The little bucklings will be sold as pets, and some of the doelings will increase our herd, while others will help someone else start their own dairy.

Daughter 2 with the baby.

 We thought for a long time about going straight to an adult doe and milking right away, but we wanted to really learn about caring for goats before we dealt with the added issues surrounding milking and dairy operatons.

More thanks are in order for the goat mentorship I have received. My mentors are three wonderful ladies:

Pat House of north-central Arkansas told me a lot about how her goat farm is situated, and helped me understand how to raise livestock guardian dogs with my goats and chickens.

Linda Brittain of Cadron Creek Farm allowed me to visited her Nigerians with my family, and has answered countless questions. She has been my go-to mentor as I figure out how all this stuff works.

And Dianea Fay of Allen, Kansas, helped me decide whether to purchase a mature doe or, as I ultimately chose to do, work with baby doelings and take my time building torward dairy.

Perhaps even before the baby goats arrive, we will be driving up to north-central Arkansas to pick up our livestock guardian dog, who has already been named Gandalf, despite the fact that I have not even met the dog.

One of these beautiful LGD pups is ours!

 Gandalf is 75 percent Great Pyrenmes and 25 percent Anatolian Shepherd, and he is running around eating puppy chow right now, and getting the feel of his goat barn with his eight littermates. Both breeds were developed as livestock guardians, and most goat farmers I talk to use a cross of the two breeds to protect the herd. I gather that the Pyrennes are more likely to stay with the herd and guard them closely, and the Anatolian is more aggressive in its protection, looking to find trouble at the outskirts of the property. If we are matched with the puppy I am expecting, he is mostly white with two black ears and a random black spot on his head.

And then, of course, are the chickens. No farm is complete without laying hens! We drove all the way to a little town near Jackson, Mississippi to purchase an amazing chicken tractor made by a former plastics engineer.  He has been making them for many years, and has perfected the design. The tractor has a built-in watering system with an insulated tank for water, which gravity-feeds a set of chicken watering nipples through down-sloping PVC pipe. There is also a built-in feed hopper that sits outside the tractor. The hens have to eat through the fence, which keeps the food from falling on the soiled ground within their coup.

Chicken tractors are popular because you don't have to use litter inside of a building and clean it out periodically. Instead, you are moving a coup on wheels from spot to spot in your yard, offering up fresh grass and bugs to graze on, and eliminiating the chance for the birds to tear up any one area. On weekends and summer nights after Gandalf has grown, I'll let the hens range a bit and mess around with the goats. By using the tractor, the nutrient-rich litter is scattered along the ground, and the grass is protected from being stripped clear. Think of a long, heavy chicken wheelbarow, and you have the idea. Here are some pictures of the coup, which has corrugated PVC for roofing so the coup stays rrelatively light, and excessive heat does not transfer to the hens.

Here is the super-tractor, at the home of the man who made it for me. This is an amazing piece of engineering.

Alas, we have no chickens yet, because this is a bad time to find them. They are moulting, generally, and not laying, or at least not laying as much. Very few chickens are up for sale when it is cold. We plan to buy grown hens or pullets, which are young female birds that are about to start laying. There will be no roosters at Barn House Homestead. For that matter, there will be no male goats, either, except for a few weeks after birth. And when you get down to it, about 98 percent of the bees are girls, too. Girl power, here on the farm.

Beautiful Wyandotte at the State Fair.

My coup has room for eight birds, and we don't want to piecemeal this and get two here, two there, because chickens, especially when kept in close quarters, can be pretty mean to newcomers. So we are looking for a small flock of roughly eight birds. Our favorite breeds are the Buff Orpington, Easter Egger (not recognized as a breed yet), Barred Plymouth Rock, and Silver Laced Wyandotte. We would not look askance at a Rhode Island  Red, either. We might end up with two breeds, for all I know, but these are the birds we are looking for. In spring, locals will start offering birds again and we can launch our flock!