Song of the Month: A Marshmallow World

For our final "Song of the Month" for 2009, we give the song that haunts us here at the Herrington Manor. Dean Martin sloppily sings his way through "A Marshmallow World" from some holiday special from the early 1960s.

It is funny what constituted singing and production values back then :D

Of course, to round it out you could also watch this version with Dean and Sinatra from a few years earlier - the back-and-forth is worth it. Plus the dancing, we gotta have dancing (and yes, it is safe, they are heterosexual!).

Goats in the News: December 2009

Sorry for not posting more, but we have been consumed with the paddock expansion (fenced in 2 acres around the wetland). Fencing in November and December started out well and then got coooolllldddd.

Anyway, here are some articles that we liked from the past month.

1. Feeding Bucks - article from the current issue of Dairy Goat Journal. The goat owner-author here doesn't do things quite like we do, but she does detail other ideas and the pros and cons. A must read for anybody who keeps bucks.
2. Goats for Fun, Food and Profit - article from the current issue of Grit magazine (cover story!). More of a general view on all goat breeds, not much specific stuff, but still interesting to read about other goat folks.
3. Meet the Milk - this is a blog posting from our (famous!) friends Sharon and Eric. Those fabulous goat pics are some of ours - we miss them, but they are at an awesome farm now - and it is great to see how goat personalities play out with different farms. Funny!
4. Netherlands to cull 35,000 Goats - article from the BBC, they are trying to stop the spread of Q fever (a bacterial disease that moves from goats/sheep to humans). They are killing all the pregnant females and have banned pregnancy till next summer. Wow.
5. Goats Uncover Cemetery - who knows what that browsing will uncover :D

Song of the Month: A Horse in the Country

This is a Cowboy Junkies song from one of their less well-known albums (Black-Eyed Man, 1992). Basically a sad song about somebody in a dead end town, dead end life, and with change on her mind.

But for us, this is the song we sang while building the run-in shed. The song we sang while augering the fenceposts. Lining up the fenceposts. Hanging the fence. You get the idea.

Margo Timmins' voice is a thing of beauty. The arrangement is pretty good too, but we always come back to her voice. Wow. Plus on cold fall days, this is how our minds turn to winter's dark thoughts.

Two Views on a 6 C Rise in Temperature

Anyone who lives and works with living systems has to be paying at least some attention to the discussion of global climate change. This week a report from the Global Climate Report looked at the past decade's trend in carbon dioxide emissions.

In the past 10 years, the rate of CO2 release has increased by 29% - so not a 29% increase, but the year-to-year value is increasing 29%. This past year CO2 rose by 1.84 ppm (parts per million), but with this data, we would expect it to increase next year by 1.84 ppm x 1.29 = 2.38ppm next year.

Following this trend across the century, we end up with a 6 degree Celsius rise, according to the IPCC scenarios. 6 C is a lot of change - almost 10 degrees F. Definitely on the high end of the worst IPCC scenario.

2 Scientific Views of this study

1. It is difficult to establish a trend based on a single decade, especially with the inherent troubles with making a computer model of the whole atmosphere. More here on this view.
2. Any way you cut it, this points to the trouble with any rise in CO2 emissions - the trend shows that the greatest increases are taking place in the developing world (LDCs) as they industrialize their economies.

Which is right? Both, I think. We can't go "2012" on the data, yet we cannot allow the trend to continue. If a 2 C rise is the goal, then this trend shows we must cut our emissions even more aggressively.

Goat Humor!

Choosing For Breeding: Teat Size

This is from our Little Milkers website - it is one of four essays about heritability of traits in goats. Carol researched the genetics and actual heritability of major traits. This is the first of four articles summarizing the parts that are key to our breeding program this year.

The goal of any breeding program should be continuous improvement of traits - we should be seeking out the best possible matches for our does. That means not finding a buck, but picking the best buck to match against each individual doe. Not just rolling one buck into the pen, unless that buck is batting clean-up at the end of the season.

This week we have going back and forth about teat size - how big? Bigger teats are easier to milk because they contain more milk and so speed milking.

Heritability is a genetic term that means "How easy is it to change a trait in the offspring?" This is a double-edged sword because we want to change the less-desirable traits (small udders, teats that point outward, etc) and then keep the more-desirable traits.

• Udder and teat location traits have moderate heritability (> 0.40)

• Teat dimensions have high heritability ( > 0.70)

  
  

Those heritability numbers above tell us that teats are conserved and these are less likely to change, the doe will control that closely. Moms will give their daughters their own teats, but they are less likely to pass on their udder. It could be smaller or larger, meaty or butter smooth, etc.

Tetris' udder - a vast improvement on her mom (teat size!)

So one of our goals this year is to boost teat size for 3 of our senior does - Wiggy will be getting the job to try that out. But like all things, it is not perfect. Wiggy did a great job with improving Mina's udder in our retained daughter Tetris. Same was true for Zelda on teat size.

But we cannot count on him to repeat this exactly with does - this is what makes breeding time exciting.

A Cautionary Tale of Genetic Engineering

NPR carried this story last week - researchers that added in a gene for resistance to a virus found something interesting.

The fear with genetic engineering is that there could be "genetic drift" - the genes spread from the target. So the project added a gene (that is commonly added to squash) to a wild squash.

1. The added gene showed resistance to the virus.
2. But those plants were healthier and therefore attracted more bacteria.
3. And ultimately fared worse because the bacteria ate them!

Not saying this is a nail in the coffin for any genetic engineering, but it does point to the fact that genetic engineering is no more of a silver bullet than conventional genetic breeding programs.

End of the Month Song: "The Doctor's Theme"

This is from the new "Doctor Who" - one of the most haunting solos, makes my skin go prickly to hear it. Just fabulous.

Plus it is nice and airy and melancholy, just like the end of October is.

Enjoy.

Harvesting Walnuts

So the previous owner planted 4 English walnut trees out front - probably cheap-y $1 saplings from the County Extension. Planted at least 2 years before we bought the land, so they got their first big years of growth when spring sprang for us in 2002.

Now, 7 years later, the nuts have finally started to fall. These walnut trees have had some hard years, the windstorms (and last winter's ice storm) have whacked most of the trees' upper branches more than once. But still they formed enough to get our first (small) crop of nuts.

Here's what we did with them:

More tips and resources

• U-Minnesota Cooperative Extension - "Harvesting Walnuts"
• NewHomestead blogpost about walnuts
• Finally, how to shell walnuts! (freezing and hammering)

Song of the Month: The Geeks Were Right

OK, this one is a bit more techie than our "down-home" bent in early song choices. It does mark the distinction between our "looking forward/looking back" thoughts as harvest comes to a (thankfully over) close and the day-to-day focus on Summer.

The Faint, "The Geeks Were Right"

First heard this as a background song as Adam processed evidence during an episode of CSI-NY, these are the 2nd verse lyrics that sold us on the song:

"Egghead boys with thin white legs

they got modified features with software brains
but thats what the girls like, the geeks were right

When I saw the future the Geeks were right"

Why Goats Shouldn't Have Horns?

OK, beyond the question of how the wire got bent down close enough to loop up one of the horns, how exactly did this work out?

1. Did the buck survive this?
2. Was this the oddest thing ever to happen to a goat? Nope - it's the flying sheep video from Monty Python!
3. How on Earth did they call this one in to 911? "Um, there's a goat in trouble. It is hooked by its horns up on a telephone line." "... right..."

Living in Upstate NY

What is it like to live in upstate NY? A very different world from most people's impression of the cosmo lifestyle of NYC, that is for sure! But what is it really like? Well, I think it is pretty much like living in central VT, most of NH (at least the northern 2/3) and all of Maine. What? You don't live there. Well, that's because few people (relatively speaking) do. So here is your postcard of the somewhat insane (and certainly surreal) world of Upstate NY.

These two videos are from Saturday Night Live's satires of our NY governor, David Paterson.

Video #1 - "I want somebody from upstate... somebody with a game-y arm or big gums and tiny teeth." "What do I have against New Jersey? Unfortunately, a southern border!"

Video #2 - On our current junior senator (Gillibrand) and her 100% NRA approval rating - "C'mon, Upstate is like 'Deliverance' with snow tires."

Muscovy Duck-apalooza

We started with Muscovy ducks last summer - got 6 ducklings from one of our local friends (not bad at $3 each, half the mail order price without the shipping!). Once they differentiated into drakes and hens, we kept one male and two females overwinter. The other three were packed into the freezer for winter and very careful consumption!

One of the hens became the roast duck centerpiece of Carol's birthday (recipe and pic here).

Now, we are one year into our duck project and here are the things we have learned.

1. Muscovy will sit chicken eggs, but because she will set 20-30 eggs in 3-5 layers, chicken eggs must be near the top or the hen will inadvertently suffocate the newly hatched chicks.
2. Muscovy ducklings are small enough to easily move through 4-inch goat fencing all the way up until 8 weeks old. Mom hen flies over the fence and the ducklings slip through it to follow her.
3. Ducks' poop is very wet - wetter than chickens - and so they need more clean bedding when they stay indoors. They actually will be sitting then stand to poop and sit down just slightly ahead of where they pooped.
4. Ducks are very messy with water - especially problematic with the hen and her 5 ducklings that live with the goats. Goats do NOT like dirty water at all. Ducks say, "Feh, water schmater."
5. Muscovy are pasture trimming monsters - they will eat greens all day long - sometimes they just sit down into it and nibble a circle around themselves.
6. Muscovy do fly - although their wings are not as strong or large as other ducks - but they love to roost! They are treefowl more than waterfowl. This leads to wonderful pictures like this one:

Song of the Month: Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall

This is a new feature for the blog - our idea here is what song most closely ties into the mood or theme of the month. We'll pick and post one at the end of each month.

July 2009 - "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" - Bob Dylan

Easy one to guess, right? July was one of the wettest months ever for Albany, NY, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center - my county received between 200-300% of the normal July precip total. Hard rain feel several times, but pretty much every day had some precip, even if it was light.

click here to see full size version

Dylan tells stories about the origin of this song (pre-Vietnam, even pre-Cuban Missile Crisis) and in typical Dylan fashion the song has lines and phrases that leave a lot of listener latitude on applying. He says that it is not specifically about a nuclear war, but just the End. Perhaps even he didn't want to nail it down for us, leave it to our febrile imaginations to adapt it for every dangerous moment.

In any case, here it is sung by Dylan in 1964:

And here it is sung by Edie Brickell and New Bohemians (our fav cover version)

Bucket Math

OK, I will admit that those two words in the title do not go together all that well - buckets are solid, tangible objects and math is abstract. For us, the number of buckets in rotation tells us something about where we are in the year.

To wit,

1. Winter - we keep 12 does, 4 bucks, and 20 chickens over the winter. The does get 3 buckets of hot water, bucks get 1 hot, and the chickens get 1 hot. So 5 buckets in the morning. Then 2 more in the evening with the evening hay. So we need only 7 buckets that day.
2. Spring - as the does get more and more preggers, the water goes up to 4 buckets in the morning, this is especially true on those odd days in April that are warm and humid. No evening buckets, so we stay at 6 buckets till kidding season.
3. Summer - with no pigs or turkeys, the chickens stick at 2 buckets (chicks + hens) for the day. The boys seem to need 1 1/4 buckets, so they now get 2 buckets. And the does + kids (12 does + 20-some kids) move up to 6-8 buckets, depending on how hot it is. Now we are up to 10-12 buckets.
4. Late Summer - today was the last pickup (aside from our buck Cody if a buyer picks him) of goats. We are back down to 12 goats in the doe area (7 seniors and 5 juniors) and 4 bucks in the back buck pen. We are back down to 10 buckets per day. Whew.

At the end of the day, we like to keep 2x the number of buckets, so one set is cleaned for the next morning.

This is how the infrastructure creeps up - all the small things that are almost impossible to account for ahead of time. Adding an extra doe or buck has a cost (their price) and then the estimating the other costs becomes fun. One more doe needs - an annual CD&T, feed, hay, minerals, sundry medical supplies and her annual blood testing. Those are the costs that are really hard to nail down - blood testing is easy, but feed and hay depend on the goat's size and age, the weather's effect on the pasture, and how many babies she is or may be nursing.

Bucket math is the guide - becoming a good guesser is the point of the game.

May is the longest month - and words of wisdom

Well, it is... at least May is the longest month on our farm. We get the harmonic convergence of three different time pressures:

1. goat kidding season - 23 kids in 23 days in 12 kiddings
2. gardening begins for our zone 4 garden - 80 tomatoes, 180 peppers, popcorn, sweet corn, blah blah blah - took four days to weed it, seed it, and plant it.
3. everything else green really begins growing like mad - the orchard needed some work after the deer put the smackdown on it, the ornamentals always need work, and let's not forget the fence expansion (more later on that one).

But we managed to expand the garden out front again (added another 600 sf of raised beds with the help of a Mantis mini-tiller). And planted another wind-row of hemlocks (200' of the buggers, hope the woody adelgid lays off 'em for a bit).

So now it is mid-June and we look back and say, "What on Earth did we do all last month? Or last week for that matter! Where do the days go?"

This is followed by much gnashing of teeth and rending of lists.

After 10 years of doing it on and off (farming with animals), we have come to these important (and self-obvious) words of wisdom

1. There is no such thing as "nothing to do", just things that "can be put off for the afternoon." A corollary to this says something like "there are no days off", but that may be too depressing to imagine.
2. Having a "to-do" list is a self-propagating beast - just having it will allow it to procreate and lengthen with almost no input from you. Writing it on a scroll that continues to roll down is probably your best bet, that way you won't run out of room to write it out.
3. There is almost always a tipping point in farming - beyond that one you have increased the complexity and interactions so that your outputs (and inputs) will increase dramatically. Usually it is worth it - for us it was branching out into goats 3 years ago. Their management now is the focus of our animal-side of the farm. They produce kids, milk, and mulch and consume our creativity (planning breedings, choosing goats, diagnosing symptoms!).
4. No matter what you do, it can never be perfect. Or maybe even look orderly on a day-to-day basis. It is always work, "uphill, both ways." But oh, is it worth it.
   

Goat Birth Story: Foggy Foggy Nights

Now Zelda's breeding never should have happened.

Zelda is a Celeste x Wiggy daughter - Wiggy was supposed to give more attachments to Celeste's pretty solid frame and decent udder. For even more udder atatachments tho, we looked around and our friend Ann-Marie bought a buck we wanted but couldn't bring ourselves to invest in - Piddlin Acres Maestro. Maestro gave fore-udder extension, gave more capacity and made some very solid does. We traded stud service with Ann-Marie and waited for heat.

She came into heat on December 6th.

Now, the afternoon of the 6th was dark - sun was setting around 5pm. Snow was melting on the ground on a milder than average December day - so there was moistness in the air that was just this side of San Fran in the winter. Damp and cold.

As Zelda set out, it should have been no more than a 30 minute drive to Ann-Marie's. The fog was so thick that headlights bounced back after only a few feet - highbeams were useless. Nobody was on the road - so our top speed was 15mph. 15.

A harrowing 75 minutes later, Ann-Marie and her brother were standing at the end of their driveway, waving flashlights like airport workers landing an airplane - without them, Zelda may still be driving around Grafton!

The kicker - 21 days later, Zelda acted like she was in heat again. Gil-galad mounted her, nuzzled her, followed her. All the classic symptoms pointed to a real heat. Which meant that the 3 good mountings from Maestro failed. Sigh. "Next year," we said. "We'll try again next year with Maestro."

Then Zelda suddenly came into labor- a couple of hours later, she had a new baby. A girl. A Maestro daughter - everything we hoped for too. An elegant, fine-boned, very feminine daughter - a definite improvement on Zelda.

Now we wait for her daughter's udder next year to see what Maestro brought.

Goat Birth Story: Atari The Surpriser

So, we went with pen breeding this past December for 9 of the does - all to Gil-Galad. The Great Pig Escape of 2008 wrecked our plans of two breeding groups, spread out by 4 to 6 weeks to make it easier to keep up with the births. The pigs thrashed that goat paddock and we couldn't keep the buck/doe group over there, no pasture!

So on December 5th, we rolled him into the "herd of 9" and waited for those does to come into heat. Those first few days were a bit crazy - several does acted like they were in heat a single day and we were trying hard to keep up with who Gillie was hanging close to.

Imagine our surprise when Atari ("Faline" is her herd nickname) went first - 5 days before we thought she should be due - and a full five days before anybody else! Even those we thought bred on the very first day.

How surprising was it? Carol was sure somebody was going to birth... Erica was first up and was acting all weird. Moody. Anxious. Checked on them at 9:10am... no active laboring... went inside to shower and dress the girls. Back out at 9:30am and there is Atari cleaning up a pretty little doeling!

The girls named her solo doeling "Caramel Cupcake." Don't ask :D

Scything My Way Back to You, Babe

I love this video - this woman is going to show you how to scythe a tough meadow. Wow. This is a beautiful example of what you can do with the appropriate tool.

Plus she gets a workout and doesn't spend a bit of energy in the process. Gotta figure there was lot less energy spent making the scythe plus accessories... and it works just as well. Better if you figure the scythed grass could be used as bedding instead of being chopped into 4 inch pieces and left on the meadow.

Pig pasture... here we come!

The Pregnant Goat Code of Honor

This was stolen from a top secret goat double agent - she was passing it around to all the does in the barn. Learn from our mistakes, these are their strategies to drive goatkeepers MAD!

Doe Code of Honor

The doe's secret code of honor is as old as goats themselves and is the species best kept secret. No doe shall ever kid before its time. (Its time being determined by the following factors):

1 - No kid shall be born until total chaos has been reached by all involved. Your owner's house must be a wreck, their family hungry and desperate for clean clothes, and their social life nonexistent.

2 - Human birth helpers must reach the babbling fool status before you kid out. Bloodshot eyes, tangled hair and the inability to form a sentence mean the time is getting close.

3 - Punish them for technology. For every bell, beeper, camera or whistle they attach to you, kidding must be delayed by at least one day for each item. If they use an audio monitor, one good yell per hour will keep things interesting.

4 - Practice procrastination proactively. If you hear the words, "She's nowhere near ready. She'll be fine while we're away for the weekend," Wait until they load the car, then begin pushing!

5 - Owner stress must be at an all time high! If you are in the care of someone else, ten to fifteen phone calls a day is a sign you're getting close.

6 - Timing timing timing. When you hear the words "I can't take it anymore!" wait at least three more days.

7 -You must keep this waiting game interesting. False alarms are mandatory! Little teasers such as looking at your stomach, pushing your food around in the bucket and then walking away from it, and nesting, are always good for a rise. Be creative and find new things to do to keep the adrenaline pumping in those who wait.

8 - Remember your friends' honor and shame. The honor of all goats is now in your hands. Use this time to avenge all of your barn mates. Think about your friend who had to wear that silly costume in front of those people. Hang onto that baby for another day. OH, they made him do tricks too! Three more days seems fair. Late feedings, the dreaded diet, bad haircuts, those awful wormings can also be avenged at this time.

9 - Let the weather be your guide. If you have fulfilled all of the above and are still not sure when to have the kids, listen to the weather forecast on the radio that has been so generously provided by those who wait. Severe storm warning is what you're waiting for. In the heart of the storm jump into action! The power could go out and you could have the last laugh. You have a good chance of those who wait missing the whole thing while searching for a flashlight that works!

10 - Make the most of your interrupted nights. Beg for food each time someone comes into the barn to check you. Your barn mates will love you as the extra goodies fall their way too.

Remember, this code of honor was designed to remind humans of how truly special goats are. Do your best to reward those who wait with a beautiful doeling to carry on the Doe Code of Honor for the next generation of those who wait