In July at Toluma, a new herd manager, Dylan became part of our team! As I mentioned before, in late May there were some complications with farm staff, and Hadley (the previous apprentice) had to step up as herd manager. Now with Dylan, who came in with lots of previous goat experience, the three of us had time for more daily projects – we could finally start getting to tasks that were impossible to do with just Hadley and me. One of the first things Dylan did when he arrived was set up an organized whiteboard in the barn, with daily & weekly checklists of things that needed to be done (from giving a certain goat certain medication to cleaning the water troughs). This was really nice because after milking in the mornings, I could go check the board and transition quickly into working on another project.

Also! I forgot to mention this, but one morning in mid-June, we found a newborn kid in the barn! She was the most precious, pure white baby. It turned out her mother, Eavesdrop, was among the dry herd, and had somehow gone unnoticed as pregnant (kidding had ended in March!). Eavesdrop also had pretty severe mastitis, so we ended up having to treat her specially, and bottle fed the babe for a few weeks. Eventually the baby became our little helper – she would jump around in the barn while we were cleaning, or dance around the mamas in the milk parlor.

The baby a few days after birth! Mom, Eavesdrop, in the background.

Bottle Feeding

Some other projects I worked on in late July were creating a “Pasture Inventory Sheet” GoogleDoc for the farm. Because we were trying to move towards MIG, it became clear that we needed to be doing a much better job with record keeping. The final document ended up including the following columns: Date In, Date Out, # Days on Field, Paddock, Pasture Name/Location, Season(s) of Use, Soil(s), Slope, Size, Stock #, Stocking Density, Notes, and Photo Point. Tamara had said that she wanted the herd managers to use this daily, but I don’t think they actually ended up using it. I think Dylan had a pretty ingrained system of handwriting his daily notes. Making the document was still useful for me to understand an ideal record keeping system. Over these weeks, I also took milk cultures from our mastitis girls, and brought them to the local vet for testing. The results showed that some of the girls who we considered as having mastitis, actually had very mild cases with somatic cell counts under the specific Masitis level. This was good news!