CROOKED CREEK FARM

Hi All,

A cold winter here in Maine as usual. Back to frozen water buckets thawing in the middle of the kitchen floor, the  tv monitor, and baby monitors are on listening for new arrivils in the barn alll day, alll night. LOL  We have 12 new kids that have been born since the end of December. They are all doing great ( at least they were at feed up time.) It is amazing watching them gain and grow in these unpredictable temps that we experience here. Tough little critters for sure.  Out of the twelve we are bottle feeding two triplet does to help take the load off of the moms. We are fortunate enough to have a dairy goat owner as a neighbor who has been helping us by supplying nice rich goat milk for them. They are both spoiled of course but that is not a bad exchange for the nice healthy  siblings that the moms are able to well care for.

At birthing we noticed that the two moms with the triplets were not producing enough colostrum  / milk to start the kids. We tried time and again to get the little kids nursing to no avail.  Out came the tube. They were all started by tubing them with dehydrated colostrum day one, and one little doe was tubed well into the second day before she finaly got on to her mothers udder. We worried big time that any of them might lose the sucking instinct which has been known to happen. Any way it all worked out and everyone is doing well.

We now have colostrum in the freezer from one of the does who had an abundance of it and will be prepared  if we should run into this problem again.  Boer goats only provide milk enough for their kids they are not like the milking breeds. We watch the kids carefully and if they seem hungry we often take one (in the event of Triplets)off the doe  and put it on the bottle. Three can be a crowd in this breed. 

Our new kids always get 1/2 cc of BoSe (selenium) because we are in a selenium deficient area, They have their navels dipped with iodine and the Moms are wormed  the next day after giving birth and again 10 days later with ivermectin injectable given orally.

A GOOD TIME WAS HAD BY ALL..LOL   Ready for the next group.