Vitamin Sandwiches

We give the milking does a 'vitamin sandwich' each morning. Our whole family takes vitamins and minerals and the milk goats seem to do better when they have a supplement, too. Their vitamin sandwich is just a regular multi-vitamin and an Ester C vitamin that have been crushed, put on a piece of bread, and mixed with a little bit of molasses. Three of the four does will eat a sandwich. Janice, who came from a real dairy, won't. We are trying to train her to eat sandwiches, too. Right now the only thing she will eat besides grain and hay is raisins. At least she has a treat that she likes.

We like to feed them sandwiches because we can put anything on a sandwich mixed with a bit of molasses and they will eat it. That makes it much easier to feed them other supplements or medications if they need it.

Here is how we do it...

Everything is ready to go. Only 3 pieces of bread since Janice won't eat a sandwich. We mix her crushed vitamins with her grain. She eats it just fine that way. You can see the mortar and pestle, Ester C, multi-vitamins, molasses, and the 4 sets of vitamins.

I put the molasses on the bread to let it soak in just a bit while I crush the pills.

Here are the pills all crushed and ready to go onto the molasses.

Crushed vitamins ready to be mixed with molasses
and then folded into sandwiches.

The piece of bread on the right is all mixed and ready to go. The small container on the right has two sandwiches ready to feed.
You can see the small container that holds the powder for Janice.

This would not work if we were running a large, commercial dairy because it would be too time consuming to make all the sandwiches every morning. Most dairies drench (force feed a liquid) their goats because it is faster. But since we are just a small hobby farm, sandwiches work well for us. Vet2Be loves his dairy goats and he likes to give them as much nutritional care as we can manage. I guess that makes the dairy goats spoiled, but since they are well behaved in the field, on the milk stand, and around people, we don't mind spoiling them a bit!

Mother's Day Flowers

A bit late posting, but here is a photo of the beautiful Mother's Day Flowers I got this year. The roses are from my daughter who is a teacher, the carnations are from Hubby.

Carnations from Hubby. They are 3 weeks old and still look beautiful! (He brought them home a week before Mother's Day.)

Roses from Teacher daughter and her husband.
They are a week old and still look and smell wonderful!

More Chicks

A good friend had some chicken eggs hatched. She crossed a purebred Arucana rooster with Rhode Island Red hens. The Arucana chickens lay blue eggs, but they don't lay very well. The Rhodies lay brown eggs and lay very well. The cross should lay blue-green eggs (hopefully more blue than green) and should lay fairly well.

This Arucana/Rhode Island Red chick was born on Monday night.
S/he's got 3 sisters (we hope they are sisters!)

Vet2Be and I went to a class about genetics a few years ago and learned that the first generation cross between two breeds will produce better than the purebred animal would. So, if you cross two milk goats, or two fleece sheep, or two chickens the resulting children should produce a better product (milk, fleece, or eggs) than the parents. These hens (we hope they are hens) should lay well and have some beautiful eggs. I love opening the box of eggs and seeing different colors in it! Green, brown, and white. It brings a smile to my face to see all the colors!

So we got 4 straight run chicks! Straight run means that we have no idea if they are hens or roosters. The roosters will go back to the friends house because she processes roosters and old hens for dog food. We like that because we feel the life of the animal was put to good use to feed someone else.

Here are the four new chicks in their temporary brooder.
They will be moved to the barn sometime today.

The chicks are peeping in the house right now because we have other 'birds' in the plastic totes in the barn. We also have house cats, so this is how we solved the problem of keeping the new chicks safe.

Here is the makeshift 'brooder'

Since we have cats, we also needed a way to keep them out of the box. I cut a piece of screening and laid it over the top of the box. I secured the corners with binder clips. They hold the screen closed as well as give the makeshift lid a bit of weight. The binder clips make it very easy to get into the box to feed and water the chicks. The chicks also have plenty of air with the screen on top, too.

The makeshift brooder has an old heating pad underneath one end. It is set at the lowest setting. The new heating pads all have a 'safety feature'... they shut off after 10 minutes or so. That won't work for a brood box, the chicks (or whatever type of poultry we are raising) need a constant source of heat. If you want to try this, make sure you use an old heating pad that doesn't turn off after 10 minutes with a good electrical cord.

We have two Ameraucana chicks that are about a month old, and these four mixed breed chicks so we should have some good colored egg layers sometime this fall. Chickens will usually be 20 weeks old before they lay. In our experience, they have been closer to 24 weeks before they start to lay eggs.

No, chickens do not need a rooster in order to lay eggs. There is no nutritional difference between colored eggs and white eggs, they just look fun in the box. Home-grown eggs do taste much better, must be all the bugs the chickens get to eat :o)

Buddy is getting better!

Buddy, the little kid goat that was full of coccidia, is doing much better. This morning he received his last shot of PenG. He still falls over a bit, but I'm sure over the next few days he will become stronger! Very few wobbles and falling over today.

We also decided that we would have to dose everyone individually instead of in their drinking water. Supposedly you can add the Corid (amprolium) to their only water source and they will drink it. But these animals are all on pasture so they won't drink the nasty tasting water. They get the water they need from the fresh grass and weeds. The goats are easy to dose, just put a syringe with 5ml of Corid in their mouth and squirt. They hate it, but they can't spit it out because it isn't a big enough dose. The kids are the same, but they get a 1ml dose. The baby lambs are easy to dose, too, we just give them 1ml in their morning feeding bottle.

The llama, huarizo, lamb, and buck are harder. So we had to put them on the dry-lot and give them dry hay and a single source of medicated water. Hopefully all will go well and we will be rid of coccidia for the rest of the year.

Top Bar Hives

Hubby wants to build some top bar hives to see how they will do compared to the standard Langstroth hives so I've been gathering videos and information to see what a top bar hive is.

Here is a selection of YouTube videos that have been helpful as we start to think about new hives.

I showed the videos to a friend on Wednesday and she was so excited! We are planning on getting together (and inviting a few other families) and building top bar hives on an upcoming Saturday. It will all be an experiment since we have no experience with top bar hives.

Videos
Bee Harvest (8 minutes 39 seconds)
Queen Bee (6 minutes 21 seconds)
Bee Being Born (53 seconds)
Queen Bee Laying Eggs (1 minute 50 seconds)
Catching a Swarm, installing in an observation hive (7 minutes 8 seconds)
How To Build a Simple Top Bar Hive (5 minutes 58 seconds)

Here are some sites that have plans and FAQ's.
Bush Bees
Leonard Burton
The Beardsley's in Florida (good pictures of a TBH being built, they will send you simple plans if you email them)
Top Bar Hive Beekeeping
Bee Blog
Making and using a honey press

This post contains my 'notes' about top bar hives. I haven't searched all the sites yet, and we haven't decided exactly what style to build our top bar hive. However, these sites may be helpful as you start your own search.

I'll post pictures of ours when we build one, and post as we follow the experiment along.

Worming goats

This was recently posted on HobbyFarmers, a nice yahoo group (listed in the sidebar) that has been helpful to us. The author kindly consented to let me post here.

Thanks Teresa!

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Re: De wormers for goats (from HobbyFarmers@yahoogroups.com)
Posted by: "Teresa Barr-Jones"
Tue May 12, 2009 4:21 pm (PDT)

We have successfully used the following wormers on our full-size Nubian dairy goats:

Cydectin (oral sheep drench, given as directed for sheep)
Ivermectin (injectable given orally @ 1 cc to 55 pounds)
Prohibit (Levamisole, given as directed for sheep)
SafeGuard Goat (given as directed on bottle)

A great reference for goat wormers is available at the Fias Co Farm website: http://fiascofarm.com/goats/wormers.htm

Disclaimer: I am not a vet and my comments are not meant to challenge or replace a vet's advice.

Hope this helps. :)
-----
Teresa Barr-Jones
Galloping Winds Ranch
http://www.GallopingWindsRanch.com
Images with Flair - Website Design & Support
http://www.ImagesWithFlair.net

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We are not vets, either, so don't base your decisions on what we use, find a good vet to give you a recommendation.

When we worm our goats we use SafeGuard Paste (labeled for horses) at the weight recommendations on the label. There is no milk withdrawl when using SafeGuard Paste. We also use Ivomec (labeled for horses, too) at the recommended dosages on the label. Our vet told us that the milk withdrawl for Ivomec is 5 days. We use SafeGuard Paste right after the does kid in the spring and the Ivomec in the late summer.

We don't have too many problems with worms in our area because it is so dry here. Wetter areas of the country have to worm more often, heavier doses, and use different wormers. If you have your animals on 'dry lot' (no pasture), your worming routine will vary from ours, too. The best way to check what wormer you should use and how often to use it is to run a fecal exam. You can also have your vet run fecal tests.

Molly at Fias Co Farm has a great tutorial on running fecals. You can find it here.

Weston A. Price Foundation

Although we are not 'health food nuts' we do like to be a little careful about what we eat. We do eat white sugar, white flour, and other goodies, we just don't do it in bulk. We like to eat fresh fruits and vegies, we like home grown beef and lamb and turkey, we like eating eggs from our own chickens and ducks, and we like goat's milk to drink, cook with, and to make cheese out of. We also love chocolate chip cookies, angel food cake, and hamburgers!

The Weston A. Price Foundation site was recommended to us as an unbiased site relating to raw milk. When I went to the page I was surprised at the amount of information that it contained. I haven't searched through all of it, but they do use scientific research and papers to support their findings. Since Dad is a Ph.D. Chemist, we rely on scientific research when we have a question about a topic. Anecdotal evidence is nice, especially if we are getting it from the person that has had the experience, but in general, we like to have more information than anecdotal evidence provides.

The Weston A. Price Foundation's home page says,
"The Weston A. Price Foundation is a nonprofit, tax-exempt charity founded in 1999 to disseminate the research of nutrition pioneer Dr. Weston Price, whose studies of isolated nonindustrialized peoples established the parameters of human health and determined the optimum characteristics of human diets. Dr. Price's research demonstrated that humans achieve perfect physical form and perfect health generation after generation only when they consume nutrient-dense whole foods and the vital fat-soluble activators found exclusively in animal fats.

The Foundation is dedicated to restoring nutrient-dense foods to the human diet through education, research and activism. It supports a number of movements that contribute to this objective including accurate nutrition instruction, organic and biodynamic farming, pasture-feeding of livestock, community-supported farms, honest and informative labeling, prepared parenting and nurturing therapies. Specific goals include establishment of universal access to clean, certified raw milk and a ban on the use of soy formula for infants."

The have a webiste tour that is located here.

Take a peek, you might find some interesting information there!