It’s goat breeding time on our little homestead! Today I’m going to share our breeding strategy with you. Enjoy, as we bring you along on this journey!
A little background: about 10 years ago, we sold most of our herd and moved to Nebraska from Iowa. We came over with 3 does. We had them for another 2 years or so and they all ended up dying. That was a very dark time in our homesteading journey and for a while I even thought our land was cursed. Before that, in Iowa, we had been keeping goats for about 5 or 6 years with no major problems.
Fast forward to today, and this is our 3rd year with this new herd and we just finished up our 1st year with everyone freshening. It’s been a long time since we’ve kept goats and I feel like I’m starting all over again. I don’t remember a lot of what we did before and there are some new things to learn that I’ve never done. So, if you’re new, know that I’m learning right along with you! Also, if you’ve been doing this for a while, please let us all know some things we could be doing better in the comments below. Thanks for being here!
I’m going to go through each doe and lay out our goat breeding strategy for her and the “why” behind it. We had problems with almost every single doe last year and I am wanting to mitigate these problems in the future.
I hope this is helpful for you to give you some things to think about with your herd, especially if you haven’t done this before. A lot of homesteading is trial and error, but if I can give you some more things to think about so there’s less trial, then that makes me happy!
We did keep all the kids on the mamas, milking once a day in the morning and locking up the kids at night. For the first 2 weeks, we didn’t take any milk and let the kids have all of it. Once the babies were weaned, we went to twice a day milking for the rest of the season.