A Farm Becoming

Well. We bought the land. Claimed it as our own. Hauled all our junk here. Now it’s time to make it a farm. Granted, we have had chickens since 6 weeks before we even moved, but a chicken hardly a farm makes. I own two goats, but neither is in my possession yet. My husband’s sister, her fiancé, and his parents gave the first, Lucy, to me for my birthday in August. She is an Angora goat, primarily kept for their production of mohair. The picture to the left is what I was given.

Pretty cute, huh? Her breeder, who lives about 2 hours away, has agreed to keep her until I’m ready for her.

Among other things, I had to find another goat to keep her company. That second goat is Tierra, a Nubian milk goat I have purchased from my new Goat Mentor, Casey. She lives on John’s Island and has put herself at my mercy for questioning any time of the night or day. Here’s a picture of Tierra.

This photo was taken right after giving birth to quadruplets (!!!) and she had yet to gain some extra weight back. You can tell.

Before I even consider the goats’ arrival, I must figure out a way to keep the little boogers penned. Time to work on the fencing. I found some awesome-possum portable electric goat netting that supposedly can be set up and taken down in less than 15 minutes. It comes in 164 foot rolls, and you just unroll it, step the posts into the ground, and plug it into an electric fence charger. I’ll spare you all the gory details, but this is a time of great confusion for me. I don’t know the first thing about fencing, let alone electric fencing. I might as well be trying to build a space ship to send to the moon. After much research on the Internet, though, I think I pretty well have the concept figured out. Plug electric charger unit into wall. Attach an insulated wire to grounding port, run that out the window of the house to a 4 foot metal rod rammed into the ground by my dear husband, attach with a specialized clamp from the hardware store. Attach another insulated wire to live port and run out said window to little metal clip on end of electric fence. Can it really be that easy? I thought surely not, but it was. I called into the Swap Shop on the local radio station looking for a fence charger, and immediately received a call from a guy who’d sell me one, with a roll of wire and a few fence posts for $30. Sweet! I scavenged the insulated wire from what the previous owners of our property had laced in the chain link for an invisible fence for their dog. You should have seen me out there crawling around in the bushes with a pair of wire cutters, the chickens underfoot and chasing the wire as I pulled it out of the fence. Everything is more interesting with chickens involved.

Ok, so fencing is up, now we need some sort of shelter for the goats. They don’t like the rain, so anything that’ll keep ‘em dry will also keep ‘em happy. Thank goodness they don’t care if it’s pretty. One of the things that really caught my attention when we first looked at this property was that in one corner of the huge yard there was a 15x15 foot concrete pad with posts already set in it. Apparently it was an unfinished dog pen.

We were able to scavenge some (very) old privacy fencing and tacked it up around the perimeter. My mother came out to help build the “goat barn,” and we ended up fashioning a lean-to structure with old 2x4’s (my wonderful brother Michael donated these to the farm) and some cheap blue tarps from Wal-Mart. Add some straw and you got a cozy little structure that even Ayden loves. We got ambitious and even made an overhang area to put the milk stanchion
under so I can still milk when it’s raining.

You can see the lean-to to the left of where Tierra is standing. This picture was actually taken the day she arrived, but more about that later. ;)

I also built a milking stanchion (by myself!) with some wood stolen by moonlight from our alcoholic-crack-head-neighbor. Long story. A stanchion is what you put them up on while you milk them. Their head gets locked in while they’re eating to keep them still while you do what needs to be done. As a general rule, as long as they have some grain in front of them they’ll let you do just about anything to them. It still amazes me, but every time I go out to milk Tierra she’s up on the stanchion ready to go before I even get her food poured into her bowl. Its her favorite time of day.

This is a picture of the almost finished stanchion, with my furry helper, Ambrose. I swear I can’t do anything around her without a critter or two underfoot.



This was Ayden’s contribution to the construction of the goat’s shelter. Lots and lots of nails. He’d find a tiny little hole and tap tap tap tap tap a nail into it till it stuck. The beams looked like porcupines by the time he was done.

For the record, I know this whole setup looks pretty ghetto. Something we always heard a lot in massage school was “Form follows function.” Nowhere does it say anything about fashion. Everything used on this farm must first and foremost be functional. We do plan on completely overhauling the “goat barn” and turning it into a proper structure with 2 separate stalls and a milking parlor, but it came down to if I wanted goats NOW, we had to make due with what we could scavenge. Tierra is due to kid February 5^th of next year (she came to me as a bred doe), and I have every intention of having the goat barn done by then so she has a cozy stall to kid in. So, bear with us.