I have been milking my 2 FF 2x a day since Dec or so.They freshened in Sept.They are both bred again for another Sept freshening.I will be drying them off in the end of June.Right now they are producing as well as they have been all along.Maybe even more.I get a combined 29-32 fluid oz each a.m and each p.m.I think it is pretty evenly split.( i.e. one is not just producing a little and the other cranking it out.)Anyway I am thinking for the weeks of June I would like to drop them to 1 milking a day.Do I just cold turkey and do it?Or is there a recommended technique?What will I likely see with milk production?How quickly will it drop?And along these lines how do people dry off their does.What to look for etc.Thanks in advance for advice.
You need to be a member of Nigerian Dwarf Dairy Goats to add comments!
Replies
When I dried off my herd in December we dropped to one milking a day cold turkey. Then after a couple of weeks we stopped the daily milking as well. I would feel the does' udders daily and if they seemed extremely full and tight I would milk just enough to take the pressure off. It worked for me, although there are probably other ways to go about it too.
Because they're bred they would likely start producing less a couple of months before freshening anyways so you may just end up working with their own production cycle to dry them off. I know Deborah has said that she keeps milking until she's only getting about a cup at a time once a day as the goats dry themselves off and then she just stops completely.