This day was mostly dairy adventures. The goats were afraid of my flashlight but followed ok once I turned it off for the 6 am milking. The milking machine didn’t work at all, even though I had plenty of suction. I hypothesized that either it didn’t press on the teat enough because it was too big, or the goat was too scared or stressed to let down the milk. Milking by hand gave 250 ml plus all the spills, likely 300 ml total. She doesn’t seem to want to let down her milk even hand milking I would get a teat dry, wait a minute, and then there would be more there to milk again.
I milked again at 11-12 am and brought a goat kid to nurse her to see if he could get more milk than me. The mother accepted the baby right away, I
got 110 ml by hand milking. I left the baby to nurse afterward for 1 hour, then came back to see how the udder was. The udder was the same, so I think it was truly empty after that 110 ml I got by hand. The udder on this goat is small, I had alpine goats last year and there I could easily feel if the udder was full or not and got 1 litre and up on each milking.
What going on then? I think this goat is just a poor milking producer. I didn’t buy here when she was in milk so it was a shot in the dark. Just hard to believe that it was this bad. Other than perhaps some parasite problem (the goat looks fine otherwise) I can’t think of an alternative. This is too bad since I was planning on using this goat to test the milking machine. One other issue is that in my area most goats are not milked but kept as pets, so hard to find good dairy stock. I will likely have to buy another goat that is already in milk so I know that I am getting a real dairy animal, not a pet.
In other news, I did get another prototype of the fast fence built for testing and got some lumber for a portable livestock shelter. More about that later, but one of the problems with rotational intensive grazing is that if the animals need shelter, the shelter has to move with them. This can get very cumbersome, and I wasn’t able to find a good solution for sale. Another project for me. The high winds here make it a perfect test case, it needs to be stable in 100 kph wind, but also easy enough to move that you can do it daily, ideally without any heavy machinery.
Sun Aquasystems 