I am buying 2 doelings soon. Doe #1 is 8 weeks old #2 is only 2 weeks old. The breeder thought it would be OK for me to bring them both home when #2 is 5 or 6 weeks (#1 will then be 14 weeks). If I do this the breeder will give me a few days worth of goat milk for the transition and then she reccomends that I bottle feed #2 whole cows milk 2X per dayuntil she is 8 weeks old. She said that because #2 will be eating hay & grain by then the milk will not be so important. I will be hapy to do the bottle feeding for a couple of weeks but wondering if from experience any of you can tell me if this plan will be in any way harmful to the younger doe? These doe kids nurse from their moms until 2 weeks of age, after that they are bottle fed and penned w/other kids. It is a closed herd tested neg for CAE.
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Yes, I've been paying attention to the Michael Schmidt issue. Not necessarily following closely, but I'm aware of it.
We have separate fridges for raw milk (we have a bulk milk tank cooler, but sometimes end up with a bit of raw milk in mason jars) and pasteurized products in our processing building. When the federal inspector was out I mentioned that we do occasionally put pasteurized milk for the bottle-fed kids in the raw milk fridge (I have a tendency to volunteer unnecessary information). He immediately went twitchy and jumpy and it wasn't until he understood that the kids I was talking about were goat kids that he calmed down. It was kind of funny. He was on a goat farm after all.
Holy smokes! That's a lot of milk- haha! I'm here looking forward to my abundance from two does. By the way, are you aware of the whole raw milk issue and Michael Schmidt in Ontario? I just posted a blog on it...it's really upsetting for me because I'm a big raw milk/food freedom advocate. http://realfoodfamily.com/miscellaneous/the-raw-milk-issue-and-why-...
Hi Roz, I make and sell goat cheese commercially. Our facility is inspected both provincially (I'm Canadian) and federally, and both jurisdictions require that I use pasteurized milk for the type of cheese that I make. I'm only doing unaged, soft chevre right now. If I expand into aged cheeses I could use raw milk as long as I aged the cheese for a minimum of 90 days. I'm not sure I'll ever get into aged cheese on a commercial scale though.
We're very small-scale so our pasteurizer has a 200L capacity and it needs to be at least half-full to run properly so I require 100L of milk (~26 US gallons) to run it.
I had a doe that let her kids nurse for a full 11 months before she decided they'd had enough. Crazy goats.
And just to prove the exception to the rule, I was bottle-feeding a couple of kids that I have penned separately in the same barn as the rest of the does, and their mother who is well over a year old came over and looked through the gate to see what I was up to. I let her sniff the bottle, and even though she was completely dam-raised on our farm she started sucking that thing down. I took it away and she was a pain in the butt for a few days, wanting the bottle every time I went into the barn with it but she got over it soon enough.
These twins are my first bottle-fed kids, but all of them will be bottle-fed next year. I have a minimum volume of milk required to run our pasteurizer so I'm going to have to milk the does, pasteurize it, and feed it back to the kids, using the rest for cheese (no minimum volume required for cheese-making). I don't think this is best for the kids, but it's required to keep us from going bankrupt. Gotta find a balance somehow.
I guess by weaning, I'm seeing the dams doing more walking away when kids nurse, and plus the kids are eating on their own, on top of nursing, so they don't do it AS often that I see... but I'm only observing other people's goats at this point.
I do not like bottle babies. The ones I hesitantly sold were returned to me (for other reasons, but the reason they came to everyones attention was they screamed constantly) and they came back sickly with digestive problems and bad manners. I spent 3 months and tons of money to just give them away as pets, and they were some of my nicest kids to begin with. No one likes a goat that bites and jumps on you at 6 months old. I do have one dam that has so many kids I have to supplement with a bottle or they can't get enough and I start at 2 weeks by putting them up for the night and offering them fresh goat milk before letting them in to mom. I do the separating for all of them at 2 weeks anyway, so they are pretty content. If one refuses the bottle I just don't worry about it and make sure it gets mom for a bit. I also sell a couple from that dam as pets (usually the boys) as bottle babies, but I would not reccomend a production doe ever be raised on store milk, and prefer dam raised. My girls that I keep get mom as long as she wants them, and I never have health problems with them.
I always have people comment on how friendly my goats are, and they are always shocked that we dam raise. We spend 5 hours a day in the pen playing and working with the dams and kids. By about 2 months much less time is needed, but we put in a lot so the babies are the best, and we try to discourage any bad behavior while keeping in mind these are babies (like biting your hair; I don't like it, so I don't put my hair in reach, lol!). Never had a single person come back complaining about an unfriendly kid that we dam raised :-)
I doubt it. It's usually tough to get a kid to take a bottle after about a month, maybe six weeks. They're so accustomed to chewing on anything other than mom that they try to chew on the nipple.
And I forgot to mention in my earlier post that you don't usually see dams weaning kids by three months. I still have a couple of February doelings that nurse. One of my la mancha does preferred being milked to letting kids nurse after they were about a month old, which was actually quite frustrating. And I have had a couple of ND does that refused to let a remaining twin nurse when the other one was sold. They all have their own ideas about how the world should work!
I let kids go between two and three months. Most people let them go at two months, but I find the longer they get mom's milk, the healthier they are, so I like to keep them longer.
I had never heard of people selling dam-raised kids at six weeks before I started this forum, but at the ADGA conference a vet was saying that if people have a background with puppies, they are usually weaned at six weeks, so a lot of people assume that age works for goats also -- but of course, experienced breeders know it does not. I've never heard of an experienced, responsible breeder only giving a kid milk for six weeks, whether it was dam-raised or bottle-fed.
And Adrienne's post reminded me that the ONLY kid I ever had returned was a bottle baby that would not stop screaming when the humans left her. She screamed all night long, and the people only had a few acres, which means she kept everyone awake, including the neighbors. They said the dam-raised wether that they bought with her was as quiet as a mouse.
Replies
Yes, I've been paying attention to the Michael Schmidt issue. Not necessarily following closely, but I'm aware of it.
We have separate fridges for raw milk (we have a bulk milk tank cooler, but sometimes end up with a bit of raw milk in mason jars) and pasteurized products in our processing building. When the federal inspector was out I mentioned that we do occasionally put pasteurized milk for the bottle-fed kids in the raw milk fridge (I have a tendency to volunteer unnecessary information). He immediately went twitchy and jumpy and it wasn't until he understood that the kids I was talking about were goat kids that he calmed down. It was kind of funny. He was on a goat farm after all.
Hi Roz, I make and sell goat cheese commercially. Our facility is inspected both provincially (I'm Canadian) and federally, and both jurisdictions require that I use pasteurized milk for the type of cheese that I make. I'm only doing unaged, soft chevre right now. If I expand into aged cheeses I could use raw milk as long as I aged the cheese for a minimum of 90 days. I'm not sure I'll ever get into aged cheese on a commercial scale though.
We're very small-scale so our pasteurizer has a 200L capacity and it needs to be at least half-full to run properly so I require 100L of milk (~26 US gallons) to run it.
I had a doe that let her kids nurse for a full 11 months before she decided they'd had enough. Crazy goats.
And just to prove the exception to the rule, I was bottle-feeding a couple of kids that I have penned separately in the same barn as the rest of the does, and their mother who is well over a year old came over and looked through the gate to see what I was up to. I let her sniff the bottle, and even though she was completely dam-raised on our farm she started sucking that thing down. I took it away and she was a pain in the butt for a few days, wanting the bottle every time I went into the barn with it but she got over it soon enough.
These twins are my first bottle-fed kids, but all of them will be bottle-fed next year. I have a minimum volume of milk required to run our pasteurizer so I'm going to have to milk the does, pasteurize it, and feed it back to the kids, using the rest for cheese (no minimum volume required for cheese-making). I don't think this is best for the kids, but it's required to keep us from going bankrupt. Gotta find a balance somehow.
I guess by weaning, I'm seeing the dams doing more walking away when kids nurse, and plus the kids are eating on their own, on top of nursing, so they don't do it AS often that I see... but I'm only observing other people's goats at this point.
I do not like bottle babies. The ones I hesitantly sold were returned to me (for other reasons, but the reason they came to everyones attention was they screamed constantly) and they came back sickly with digestive problems and bad manners. I spent 3 months and tons of money to just give them away as pets, and they were some of my nicest kids to begin with. No one likes a goat that bites and jumps on you at 6 months old. I do have one dam that has so many kids I have to supplement with a bottle or they can't get enough and I start at 2 weeks by putting them up for the night and offering them fresh goat milk before letting them in to mom. I do the separating for all of them at 2 weeks anyway, so they are pretty content. If one refuses the bottle I just don't worry about it and make sure it gets mom for a bit. I also sell a couple from that dam as pets (usually the boys) as bottle babies, but I would not reccomend a production doe ever be raised on store milk, and prefer dam raised. My girls that I keep get mom as long as she wants them, and I never have health problems with them.
I always have people comment on how friendly my goats are, and they are always shocked that we dam raise. We spend 5 hours a day in the pen playing and working with the dams and kids. By about 2 months much less time is needed, but we put in a lot so the babies are the best, and we try to discourage any bad behavior while keeping in mind these are babies (like biting your hair; I don't like it, so I don't put my hair in reach, lol!). Never had a single person come back complaining about an unfriendly kid that we dam raised :-)
I doubt it. It's usually tough to get a kid to take a bottle after about a month, maybe six weeks. They're so accustomed to chewing on anything other than mom that they try to chew on the nipple.
And I forgot to mention in my earlier post that you don't usually see dams weaning kids by three months. I still have a couple of February doelings that nurse. One of my la mancha does preferred being milked to letting kids nurse after they were about a month old, which was actually quite frustrating. And I have had a couple of ND does that refused to let a remaining twin nurse when the other one was sold. They all have their own ideas about how the world should work!
I let kids go between two and three months. Most people let them go at two months, but I find the longer they get mom's milk, the healthier they are, so I like to keep them longer.
I had never heard of people selling dam-raised kids at six weeks before I started this forum, but at the ADGA conference a vet was saying that if people have a background with puppies, they are usually weaned at six weeks, so a lot of people assume that age works for goats also -- but of course, experienced breeders know it does not. I've never heard of an experienced, responsible breeder only giving a kid milk for six weeks, whether it was dam-raised or bottle-fed.
And Adrienne's post reminded me that the ONLY kid I ever had returned was a bottle baby that would not stop screaming when the humans left her. She screamed all night long, and the people only had a few acres, which means she kept everyone awake, including the neighbors. They said the dam-raised wether that they bought with her was as quiet as a mouse.
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