Wow! What a fall this has been!! I feel like I’ve been all over the place, yet I feel less stressed than I have in years. Things on the farm are going well, and I am starting into the last part of breeding season. The wether does have been in with the buck since the end of August, and it looks like the majority are bred. Now I won’t know for sure until we pull blood for the BioPryn test, which will happen this week. I will be testing all of the percentage wether does, and those who are not bred will be given additional time with the buck. Everything…

When it comes to breeding goats, my dairy herd is where I’ve really worked to gain more knowledge. Most of my background and training in college was in market animals, so my decision to get into dairy goats was a leap of faith head first into an industry I knew little about. I’m no longer as naive, and I’ve developed a much keener eye in knowing what to look for. However, there is a program that the American Dairy Goat Association offers that I knew I needed to participate in to really know how to improve my herd, and that is the Linear Appraisal (LA) program. LA allows producers to…

For some people, market goat wethers are a joke. They don’t understand what it takes to breed and raise a competitive wether, and the years it takes to build a program. For the last few years, I have a had a few wethers here and there, but they never seemed to make a mark. This year, that all changed. The first set of wethers I had were a set of triples out of a solid red 50% Boer doe, who has some fiber goat in her as well. She had her first of kids last year, a set of doe kids, and I loved them. This year she gave me…