My friends and family know how much I love animals. I’ve worked with livestock in the past: shearing sheep and processing both fowl and ungulates. When we started talking about the farm just under a year ago (whoa), one of the most prevalent questions was “Will you have animals?!” The answer was always yes, we’d like to… but not this year. It seemed completely unrealistic to start out with livestock our first year in Montana, first year on this land, and first year farming on our own. Yet, here we are only a few months into the season and we’ve adopted two kids. Lucinda and Leonard (Lucy and Leo) are the beginning of a small milking herd we hope to establish over the next few years. This summer, we’ll acquire another doeling to overwinter with Lucy. If you know someone looking to get rid of their baby goats, let us know. I’m particularly interested in La Mancha goats, the ones without ears, but I’m flexible. By the time winter comes along, if we haven’t become overly attached to Leo, which is a distinct possibility, we’ll slaughter him. But we try not to talk about that.

Lucy (with the collar), Leo, and Coda get acquainted.

Lucy (left) and Leo (right).

Lucy and Leo are the kids of Blaze, Ploughshare Farm’s best milker. They are 4 month old French Alpine dairy goats, known for their excellent temperament and cold hardiness. Currently they are mowing down some of the brush in the chicken enclosure. We’ve had only one escape so far and they were incredibly agreeable, following us back to the gate without question or wild hairs. In the meantime, we’re trying to keep up with the vegetables that are growing almost as fast as the weeds out there. If only we could train the kids to eat the weeds and leave our crops…

You may think to yourself that there’s no way these big goats can fit through that little door… you are wrong.

We seem to have a growing menagerie of black and white animals.

There will be a Bootstrap! post about the kids soon. I’ll link it when it’s up.