Generally, I milk at the 12 hour mark. 8:30 in the morning, 8:30 in the evening, but coming up in the next few weeks, I might need to trim an hour in the morning, or go "over" and milk a bit later in the evening... how will this effect my does and their production, etc.?
ETA: The need to milk later or earlier would be for example like today: I chaperoned a field trip for my youngest, and we had to be out of the house by 8:00am, so I milked at 7:00 and then milked at my normal hour this evening; 8:30pm. There will be a few evenings in particular, where I would milk in the mornings, and then might not be able to milk until 9:30 or ten that night.
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I too, love that conformation. Thanks, I can live with that easier. Sometimes that's the best I can do!
YAY!! I love it when my gut is trusty. That's what I had planned to do.
We haven't noticed any problems when we've had to milk a couple hours earlier or later than usual. If we see it coming, we might milk a little later than normal for the previous milking so that the change is more gradual. For example, if you normally milk at 8:30 and 8:30, and you know you won't be home until 10:30 tomorrow night, you could milk at 9:30 tomorrow morning, so they go 13 hours twice rather than 14 hours once. I have no idea if that helps the goats, but it makes me feel better. :) And there have been times when our regular milkings were 11 and 13 hours apart rather than 12 hours, and the goats were fine. Since we dam-raise, however, I am not talking about goats that are at peak production; they are always a few months fresh when we do that.
I think that also sounds like a reasonable idea, Rachel. Thanks so much for that info Marin! Very interesting indeed. I would love to hear what has happened with others!
Thanks, Marin!! I don't foresee my gaps being more than 13 - 14 hours (which translates to being 2 hours 'late' at the most) I could also potentially shorten the overall gap time by milking later in the mornings when I know I'll be milking late... so say, at 9:30 instead of 8:30... that would spread the "late" time out at the front AND the back, instead of in one chunk. However, that would also spread it out over more days... but that might be the key... to try to spread it out as thinly as possible.
I can speak a bit about our situation last year.
We milk our goats on a 5am/6pm schedule. It's what works best for us, and I don't know if they'd produce more if it was a 12 hour schedule. Last June my son was born. We hired a doula for extra birthing support, and the plan was for my husband to leave to milk goats if it had to be done, but (not surprisingly) he couldn't bring himself to leave when it actually came down to it and the morning milking ended up being really late. Like 6 hours late. Things were back to routine after that one late one though. We noticed a small drop in milk production that didn't really rebound, but it wasn't particularly significant. The goats had kidded around March so they were 3 months into lactation.
Then in November we had a really bad winter storm. We were able to feed/water the goats, but there was no way to get them to the milking room so, once again, milking ended up being several hours late. Looking back on it now I guess we could have hand-milked all 22 of them in the barn, but we didn't know the storm was going to drag on for as long as it did. That time it hit their supply really hard. It dropped by about 40% and never rebounded. The goats were much farther into lactation and we assume that's what made the difference.
So, although we had much longer gaps than you're talking about, I would *guess* that there might be a very small impact on your supply, but not enough to worry about.
Yea, I just can't see that being a real big problem! If you were doing DHIR or something it might be more of an issue, causing some fluctuations maybe. But as far as making a big enough difference in production or danger to the doe, I don't think so. IMO! Like I said, it will be interesting to see what the pros say!
I should have clarified too, it would be a day here and there, once in a while, not on a two to three day stretch...
Rachel, it will be interesting to see what our pros say, but I wouldn't think that an hour would make a lot of difference!