"United we bargain, divided we beg."

Friday, February 18, 2011

Who Can Resist These Goats??




Last year was a very good year for selling baby goats. I sold seven out of eight babies, for a mean average of $160 apiece. That's a great price for goats around here. I made $1,100, which easily paid for hay and feed, and even vet bills, making all of our milk and meat essentially free - except for the labor involved, of course.

This year, I haven't got even one phone call regarding my adorable spotty Nubian babies, even though I dropped the price considerably from last year's. I have seen goats - purebred goats!- advertised at less than $50 on Craigslist. I won't sell mine that cheaply. They are worth more to me as meat. Although, to be honest, I have no desire to put six or eight goats in the freezer. We'd never eat them all! I like goat meat, in fact when well done it's superior to lamb, in my opinion, but I still don't like it as much as I like beef or pork.

Plus, if all my does are feeding triplets, if I can't sell off even a few of them, then I won't have very much milk, now will I? And milk, my friends, is the whole point of goats. I guess I'd rather sell a baby for $50 than kill a baby that doesn't even have 10 pounds of meat on her yet and is heart-wrenchingly adorable to boot. Well, it's early yet. Iris' babies have several weeks of enticing cuteness left in them. And Django and Flopsy have yet to give birth.

I am also not having any luck finding someone who wants to trade bucks with me. I can't use Cloud again next year; I need new blood. But so far, the two people who responded to my ad were unsuitable - one guy wanted a registered buck, and the other guy wanted to trade me a one month old crossbreed for Cloud, a proven purebred.

Why can't they invent a mammal that gives milk without needing to give birth first, the way chickens lay eggs without breeding?

3 comments:

Periwinkle Farm said...

dont give up on the babies yet i am sure you will find them a home they are sooo cute: ) Just re post them every week so they will be seen thats what i had to do with my last batch of baby bunnies last year. $50?? I hope you find a new buck!

Garden Lily said...

If your ad is online, you might want to check that it was successfully posted, and not removed or encountering some other technical issue. They are so adorable, I'd want to give them a good home!

Sandy said...

I sure wish we lived closer. I need a good little buckling and those babies are adorable!!!!