Hello! Thank you to my friends for the invitation to join this group. I am Heather Fair from Wasilla, Alaska. My herd name is Fair Skies and I have a herd of about 30 Nigerian Dwarf dairy goats.
This year we have at least 9 does bred, with up to 9 more to breed very soon. The herd is still growing and we are adding some much anticipated does from another herd out of state in the spring.
I show and milk (on DHI), and in 2009 we participated in both ADGA Linear Appraisal and AGS Classification. I am also the Secretary, Webmaster, and Newsletter Editor for the Alaska Mini Goat Cache and one of two Western Directors for the American Nigerian Dwarf Dairy Goat Association (ANDDA).
My husband and I were both born and raised in Alaska and we have lived and traveled all over this great state. We have lived in southcentral Alaska for most of the last two decades and we do have other livestock. We live off-the-grid on a solar power system but you'd never know it if you didn't see the solar panel array out back. Everything in our house is "normal" and runs like any other... without the utility bills!
Today it is -10F and sunny and we are really enjoying the view.
Happy New Year all!
Heather Fair
All I Saw Farm
home of Fair Skies dairy goats
Wasilla, Alaska
http://FairSkiesAlaska.com
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Thanks for sharing all that info about your barn, winter kidding, AND your solar power system. We wanted to have our house off grid but didn't manage it because of cost. I still hope to do it someday.
One thing to note is that we do not go totally dark here for the winter. We still have at least 4 hours daylight at the darkest point of winter. If you go north of the Arctic Circle, you won't see the sun at all for a number of months.
We have really nice southern-exposure here with a good, clear shot at the horizon. LOTS of light means lots of power. It wouldn't work so well if we had the topography rolling uphill to the south or if we were surrounded by trees.
It's a little misleading to talk about costs for our area because everything here is so expensive. We did our system about 5 years ago. We bought the house with power nowhere near. The closest was an intertie about 1.5 miles from here (by air). To bring utility power to us, they would have to run it down the neighborhood road and then drop it at the corner of our field (not the closest to the house). To do that, they said it would be a 2-year wait, at minimum, they wouldn't give us solid costs, and they said it would probably cost about $125,000 just to get it there, plus the cost to bring it *across our field* in the most direct route to the house instead of along the outer border of the lot and down the driveway, plus the deposits and the minimum monthly payments in case we didn't use enough electricity to justify it. Yeah... not really an option. BUT, the property was heavily discounted because of this (and its condition at the time). So we decided on a solar array on an auto-tracker with a battery bank and generator back-up. Installed, it ran about $30,000, but we ended up doing the finish on it and the contractor frankly ripped us off. That's what you get when you are delving into "new" technology - not a lot of choices and disreputable people trying to take advantage of you. Still, it was a good deal for us, as you can well imagine. We'd like to add supplemental wind generation to the system and may well do that in a future year. We don't get a lot of wind here, surprisingly with the open fields, but we do get wind when the sun is down seasonally (usually November & February).
Deborah, although I did want late fall kids this year (and didn't get any darnit!), we really don't have a reason to kid so early in the year. We don't have a big 4H market for our kids at this time (where they need to be born near the first part of the year and transferred to the kids early on) and no one is really looking for kids or milkers until about March. It would be nice to have goats ready to go then (birthed in February or earlier so they are 8+ weeks old/fresh), but it's not really been worth it. In addition, our shows tend to be in late August (sometimes we have a few earlier ones, but pretty much the Fair is our big deal here). So if we kid in January, we have does that are 7 months fresh, vs. kidding in March and having does that are just 5 months fresh. Plus, we're still new to goats and we wanted to minimize our chances of making newbie mistakes compounded with the cold. Even the breeders that have more years under their belts, like Silveraurora, have a LOT of losses this time of year. Of course some of them just have a lot of losses period. To us, the risk is not worth the possible reward.
So, your goal is also not to kid when it's 0 out? This will be our eighth year with goats, and we hadn't experienced below-zero kidding until last year, and it's not something I want to do again. I was thinking maybe we were just missing something that would make it easier. But it doesn't sound like it.
We try not to plan for kiddings too early or too late in the year for these reasons.
The down side to heaters, even if they're safely secured and don't start fires, is the goats become prone to respiratory illness when they go from breathing warm to cold air, especially the kids.
I've been to Suzanne's many times this time of year. It's never been 70F in any of her stalls in this weather, unless you're 12" or less from that radiant heater and even then, the air isn't heated as much as the animals thereunder are (due to the nature of a radiant heater). She does have the radiant heater suspended within a small box, maybe 4' tall. I have a similar set-up of small stalls about the same height, but deeper. This is where we kid and where we use heat lamps, when needed, but rarely in March & April (even though last year we had a cold snap and fresh snow after our first sets of kids). The tops hinge up so we can stand up to clean them, but most of the time we have too many supplies on top to take advantage without a lot of tidying up. ;)
The goats up here do remarkably well, mostly because they are used to it and generally very healthy. It is key to get those kids completely dry, though, and we help with that by being present for all the kiddings and rubbing the kids down with towels and disposable puppy pads while mom works on others (delivering or cleaning them up). When it's cold, I like to have that heat lamp on when they're born just to help them transition and dry. Then it goes off if they are doing ok and snuggling with mom after a good meal.
Yes, she mentioned the radiant heater, and said they could get her kidding stalls up to 70 degrees when it was 0 outside. The problem is that when it's so cold, the kids just do not dry after they're born, and I couldn't believe how fast their ears kept freezing. We kept feeling them about every five minutes, and they'd be frozen, so I guess we're lucky that we only lost one ear tip. I'm mostly concerned about kidding. We don't start until the end of February this year, but there's no guarantee that it won't still be quite cold -- just hoping it won't be below 0! I started lobbying for some kind of heater out there after last year, but my husband isn't buying it, so I'm just wondering what people do in other cold areas of the country.
No, we don't heat our stalls. Suzanne at SilverAurora doesn't really heat her's either. She has a big fan heater that she runs in the barn aisle and then last year she added a hanging radiant heater, but it's not like a climate-controlled area. We only use caged heat lamps on timers when needed and it's very rare. We bed deeply in straw with shavings underneath (straw only at kidding time or when it's really cold), we drop ceilings in the winter, we maximize southern exposure, we offer warm water at least twice daily, and we free-feed hay. Most healthy animals don't need much help, as long as they are dry and out of the wind and can snuggle for warmth. We do have a higher density of animals in our stalls in the winter for this reason. Our website has a setup page that might explain more.
And I just thought of another question for you as I nearly froze my hand off just letting my dog out to potty. I noticed on the Silver Aurora blog a few weeks ago, she did a barn tour and said that her kidding stalls are heated. Are yours? If so, how? Just curious since I've sworn off January kiddings until I figure out a way to never have to deal with a below-zero kidding again. We had a heat lamp, heating pad, and blow dryer all going, and one little kid still lost the tip of his ear to frost bite.
Replies
The down side to heaters, even if they're safely secured and don't start fires, is the goats become prone to respiratory illness when they go from breathing warm to cold air, especially the kids.
I've been to Suzanne's many times this time of year. It's never been 70F in any of her stalls in this weather, unless you're 12" or less from that radiant heater and even then, the air isn't heated as much as the animals thereunder are (due to the nature of a radiant heater). She does have the radiant heater suspended within a small box, maybe 4' tall. I have a similar set-up of small stalls about the same height, but deeper. This is where we kid and where we use heat lamps, when needed, but rarely in March & April (even though last year we had a cold snap and fresh snow after our first sets of kids). The tops hinge up so we can stand up to clean them, but most of the time we have too many supplies on top to take advantage without a lot of tidying up. ;)
The goats up here do remarkably well, mostly because they are used to it and generally very healthy. It is key to get those kids completely dry, though, and we help with that by being present for all the kiddings and rubbing the kids down with towels and disposable puppy pads while mom works on others (delivering or cleaning them up). When it's cold, I like to have that heat lamp on when they're born just to help them transition and dry. Then it goes off if they are doing ok and snuggling with mom after a good meal.
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