Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

You needed ear plugs to be on our smallholding today - and the reason? Dear Pickle was in season but, unlike all our lucky pygmy goat girls, she did not have a billy goat to mate with her!!! She showed her frustration (as the first photo shows) by crying and bleating all day - only pausing to breathe - and unfortunately there was nothing we could do about it, other than to wait for her hormones to stop racing and for her to be back to normal. What was sweet was that whenever we went into the dairy goat paddock she came over for a cuddle - if she could talk we are sure she would have started pleading with us to find her a male billy goat immediately!
You may remember that last year none of our female goats showed any signs of coming into season until late Autumn which we explained by the lack of a male goat on the smallholding. This year, having Marmite around has definitely made a difference, as within just one week, seven out of our ten females have ALL had a season. Marmite (looking very chilled in the second photo) must smell really good (to them!!!).
We 'may' have found a dairy billy goat that we would like to use this year but we are still a little undecided as to which of our four dairy goats we want to get into kid!! There are lots of things to consider: the most important being the welfare of the animals. As you know, Cheddar and Gorge lost weight this year due to giving everything to raising their kids, and not enough into looking after themselves. Curds only has one working teat, although because she 'half' stole Cheddar's kids, they started suckling her and as written about on the 18th August, this caused her to produce milk. Amazingly, just one side of Curd's udder produces more than both sides of Pickle's so we can be confident that if we did allow her to have kids in the spring, she would definitely have enough milk for two!!
Did you know that even though goats only have 'two' sides to their udder, they are often called quarters?? And the reason: probably because a cow has 'four' parts to their udder and these are correctly called quarters, and so the same name is given to all milking mammals!! It is okay to call each side of the goats' udder a 'half' though - that is after all what it is!! Yet more smallholding maths - even if it is a little confusing!!!