Our goat, Luna, is waddling around like a bowling ball on stilts. The past couple of years, our goat, Mocha, has looked absolutely massive in the second half of February, and birthing triplets to show for it, but this year Luna is entering her prime.  

Hi everyone, I’m Mae! Long time reader, first time writer, although I have been living here at Dancing Rabbit for 11 years now. I’m reaching out to invite you to participate in what has become a joyful, late winter tradition here at Dancing Rabbit: the raffle for naming baby goats born into our dairy co-op! 

I’m sure it has been mentioned in past newsletters that the dairy co-op runs a raffle for folks to win chances for naming a baby goat. As the kids are born, I run a random number generator online to pick the lucky person who gets to name them.  Our herd now includes goats with names like Plevna (thanks Alline!) and Ragnarok (thanks Cob!) Many others have gone to live at other farms, or complete their journey here. That’s a euphemism and while I won’t go into a huge amount of detail about where food comes from, I never talk about animals without talking about ethics. 

So in this newsletter I want to briefly cover a few things. One is what the dairy co-op does, and why it’s important. Next is how to support our project by entering the naming raffle, and finally what we plan to do with the money. (It’s a dishwasher!)

Raising animals is a joy, a privilege, and a huge responsibility. It would not be possible in this format for me to even list the chapters of my internal manifesto about what we owe animals, but it sure as heck is a better and more natural life than what the animals in a factory farm get. We rotationally graze goats and cows in a silvopasture system to sequester carbon and enhance biodiversity. One of the more radical things we commit to in the Dancing Rabbit dairy co-op is that mothers and babies stay together until the babies are weaned, and after weaning as well for many does and all the calves. We do not bottle feed unless absolutely necessary!  Currently this means hand milking opposite incredibly enthusiastic calves every morning, and it can be a real rodeo! 

It also means that we have generations of goats and cows who still sleep side by side; mothers with daughters, granddaughters and sisters. Another thing I’m proud of is that this year we will have kids from a new buck, Elton John, who is genetically polled. This is a trait I’ve been very excited to start working into our herd, because it is dominant, so statistically half of his babies should be born without horns and will never grow them. Again, there is a lot of complexity to the issue of horns, but we decided to move towards a hornless herd and started disbudding our doelings five years ago. I’m excited to move away from that practice, and I hope that we get a lot of polled kids this year!

We are expecting kids from six does this year, and no first-time moms, so I’m expecting, and hoping for, an uneventful kidding season. Generally goats have twins, but we’ve had plenty of triplets and singletons over the years, and quadruplets once! Our kidding season could be as long as six weeks, but it looks to me like several will birth in the first couple of weeks in March. There will be around 12 kids to name, and part of the fun for me is getting good pictures of each kid sent out to the list as soon as it's practical after they are born. Then I usually send another picture later when they are dry and the light is better. I try hard to be present for every birth because it never loses its magic for me, and I like to make sure all the kids nurse right away and the does pass the placenta.  

If all this real talk about raising goats is right up your alley, and you want to get in on the fun of kidding updates and maybe naming kids, here’s how: send $5 per raffle ticket to the dairy co-op’s Paypal address ([email protected]) and also email me at [email protected] so I can put you on the list. I guarantee I won’t email you after all the kids are born.

This tradition started as a fun way to involve the community in kidding season and people have responded with incredible enthusiasm and support over the years! So much so that this year, I’m hoping that we will be able to bring in around $800 to buy a high efficiency dishwasher. Another radical feature of the dairy co-op is that we reuse glass jars and plastic containers that would otherwise be recycled. Our kitchen is nearly zero waste, producing just one or two used milk filters every day and that’s it! No trash, even though we’re processing between four and nine gallons of milk into dairy products almost every day, all year long. Those jars and containers really do need to be super clean, though, so we’re now looking at bringing the very first dishwasher to Dancing Rabbit. Will our community let us do it? Probably. We’ll share it!

 

Mae Ferber is a guest writer this week, and we so appreciate hearing about what the dairy co-op is up to! There is nothing so sweet and uplifting as seeing the goat herd move down the gravel road to pasture, with little baby goats trailing along.