Today I worked on the fences again and sorted out issues with the drive pulley. So many little things to adjust to get it to the point where I’m happy to use it. I think I’m close. I did a test and put up a square 200 ft perimeter fence in my yard, and then took it all back down in about 4 min. The fence worked well, I think I’m almost at the point where it’s as fast as just walking the distance. I’m still going to get some fences to other people for testing (if you want to test one, send me a message). The only potential trouble I can see is weight, it weighs about 14 lbs, or 6.3 kg. That’s pretty much dominated by the fence posts, it has 14 fence posts and I can’t make them much lighter without sacrificing durability. I also found that for welding polyurethane belts lower temperatures work much better. I didn’t have a way to measure temperature, but a 2-3 second blast on an old saw blade with a blow torch was perfect for melting the ends and then I was able to butt weld by pressing them together, no jig needed.
Over the weekend I continued to milk the goat and had a slight increase in milk, today was
6 am – 380ml
5 pm – 320-330 ml
I also found this chart, which somewhat supports my hypothesis of some Nigerian dwarfs not being bred for milking. The low range is 1/10 of the high range, this more dynamic range than for any other breed of goat.
This is part of the reason why I’m interested in goat dairy though, there is a lot of room for improvement, and it’s the right size for a family farm. My ultimate goal is to develop all the equipment needed for a family farm that feeds just 10 other families. I envision something like a CSA where customers buy yearly memberships and then get year-round fruits and vegetables, but also dairy, meat, eggs, and maybe nuts or grains. By buying directly from the farm you get a fresh local product without the overhead of all the distributors. But by the nature of it being small scale, you’d never have many cows for dairy. That’s a problem because it’s very difficult to manage a herd and breed for better performance if you only have a few animals. Goats are smaller though so a herd of 10-20 does is reasonable, and that allows you to keep a buck and manage that herd. It still requires knowing about how to do that, but that’s maybe something that could be in a software package where you just add in your herd performance measurements.
Sun Aquasystems 