Quarterly Herd Update: January 2023

Happy New Year to our wonderful goat sponsors!

It is now January, which means that we have officially entered 2023! It also means that our goats are more than halfway through their 5 month long pregnancies with only 2 months left to go.

The doe who is expected to deliver our first 2023 baby is Mary Anne, who is due on the 28th of February. The beginning of March should be an extremely busy time on the ranch for us, as we are expecting 27 of Mary Anne’s friends to deliver within the week following her delivery and another 10 in the two weeks following that! Each doe tends to have an average of two kids, with some having singles and others having triplets or even quadruplets, so we are expecting somewhere between 65 and 80 rambunctious little kids on the ranch by the end of March! 

It is in these last two months of gestation that the kids start to grow at an exponential rate, so we will slowly start increasing the doe’s feed intake as their due dates approach. Right now they are on a diet that consists mainly of hay, pasture forage (which they ignore if it is raining), and twice weekly graining to keep them trained to come up onto the milking stand. Once each doe is two weeks away from her delivery date she will start to receive her grain daily so that she can get an extra boost of calories in those crucial days before her delivery. 

While March will sneak up on us before we know it, these next two months are a time of calm before the storm when the humans and the animals on the ranch get a brief intermission between milking and kidding season.

For now the doe’s only job is to relax, stay healthy, and eat lots of food so they can grow big healthy babies (they happen to be very good at all of those tasks) and our job is to make it all possible for them.

Stay tuned to future updates on your doe’s impending delivery and thank you so much for all your support of our lovely herd!