After your girl gives birth when do you start to milk and how often. Do you always need to continue milking after the baby no longer needs to nurse or will the mother dry out on her own. I work full time and will need to find time in my schedule to do so but not sure on the frequency as I have read different answers.
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There are a lot of people who only milk once a day with no problems, however most of those that I know personally do so in the am. While the kids are on you might not get much at night if the babies have been on all day. Although it might not be typical, if you have separate pens you might be able to separate kids and moms in the day time and leave them on all night instead of the other way around... but I have never tried that. If I did I think I would wait until the kids were familiar with solid foods.
The colostrum should be fine in the freezer for about a year. I use storage bags that can freeze flat, and I mark them like this:
Indiana Colostrum
2/2/11
Day 1 -6oz
Day 1 will contain more colostrum than day 10 so I know which bag I need to defrost first in an emergency. At the next kidding I will save whatever new colostrum I can get in the 14 days and then toss any unused colostrum from the previous kidding.
Hope that is helpful!
So, it sounds like you should let the kids nurse. If the kids are nursing you probably won't "have" to milk her at all for the first two months, as long as she has two or more kids. If a doe has three or four, I don't usually bother trying to milk them before the kids are 6-8 weeks old. If she has a single, the "best" thing to do is to start separating overnight by 5-7 days and milk first thing in the morning. Otherwise, you wind up with a chunky kid and a doe with a low milk supply because she's only feeding one. You are also more likely to have a lopsided udder, although I've had plenty of singles that nursed evenly on both sides. This year (after 9 years) is the first time I've had a goat with a lopsided udder who had two kids on her, so it's quite uncommon -- less than 1%. Last year was the first time I've had a goat with a single who wound up with a lopsided udder.
Until you sell the kids, you still don't have to milk every day. You can just separate them overnight whenever it's convenient for you to milk in the morning. Right now, all of our does have kids on them, so we only separate overnight once or twice a week. After kids start going to their new homes in April/May, we'll have to start milking on a regular basis. It's really not a good idea to go to once a day milking until you're getting less than two cups per milking. We usually go to once a day when we're getting 1 cup per milking. Then usually within a few days, you're only getting one cup for that single milking, so as you can see, you're usually working on drying up at that point. When you're getting only one cup once a day, you can usually stop, and the goat won't bag up at that point. She'll just dry up within a week or two.
Adrienne said:
Deborah Niemann-Boehle said:
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