The meats are stinkin' up the house and they need to be moved out to one side of the turkey house. However, Debbie the goat is in there right now. Its the barnyard shuffle.
Debbie is being sequestered because we are trying to "dry her out." That's goat speak for getting her to stop making milk. Its actually kinda hard. There are a couple different theories. One is to just stop milking "cold turkey." But that kinda seems mean... and some people think it can lead to mastisis.
Another approach is to gradually dry her off by milking less. Since milk production is an "on demand" process... if you milk less then your lady goat should produce less milk. Sounds about right to me. And it worked for Nibbles. I stopped milking Nibbles at night a while ago. Then I only milked her a little bit in the morning and left most of her milk. After about a week her udder wasn't refilling at all. Then I only milked a little bit every other day. Then I just stopped.
We're working on milking Debbie less which is thats why she's in the turkey house. We especially need to keep her separated Dahlia, her doeling from this spring, so she won't try and nurse of Debbie.
Technically you can milk a goat up until six weeks before she has her babies. But we don't believe in doing that. First because milking is only fun on a nice spring day, not when its -30* with the windchill. Also we just think that its too hard on her system. We'd like her to concentrate on growing her babies not producing milk. Finally, we don't have to keep feeding her the best quality hay if we dry her out. At some point she just won't produce enough milk to justify expensive, best quality hay. She's at that point so its time to shut her down.
But Debbie had better hurry up and dry out. Those meat chickens are getting stinkier by the day.
Anybody else got chickens in their basement?
Happy Tuesday everyone!
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