September marks the end of our farm’s 7th year in existence and keeping with tradition, we capture the highs and lows experienced in this yearly anniversary posting. Overall this was a much better year than last due to the impact COVID placed on all of us. The good news is that our dairy business has really taken off with demand often exceeding supply. Our two retail stores, Cliff’s Market and McIntyre Farms consume a large supply of our milk and cheese with the rest going to our loyal, recurring farm customers. Unlike in years past, we did not have to dispose of any milk thanks to the continuous demand !!! The bad news was kids sales which has been a low point for the majority of goat breeders this year. Anticipating a bad year, we intentionally scaled back on breedings to limit the number of kids born and made the decision to milk a number of our older does through rather than breeding them. This gave us the added benefit of having a recurring milk supply throughout the winter months when goat milk is hard to find. This year we will do the same and increase the number of does milking through to maintain a sufficient milk supply for our customer base.
Our herd continues to mature from the bottle babies that jump-started us back in 2016 to a herd size of ~45 today. In addition to the goats, the farm still has the 4 llamas that provide excellent predator control, Scarlett and Bella, the farm’s standard poodles, Estelle, the barn cat that keeps the mouse population in check, APPI our 9 yo Appaloosa Gelding and the 2 newest (horse) additions, Tophat, a 13 yo Paint Quarter Horse and Blaze, a 9 yo Norwegian Fjord. Lots of mouths to feed and care for !!!
This coming year we will breed 20 does and milk through 11-12 does. We will again leverage our existing 5 herd sires in addition to our newest herd sire, Kastdemur’s Roatan. We plan to AI 5 does with some really exciting semen recently acquired. And we plan to collect all our bucks this year, making their semen available to other breeders. We’ve had a number of requests for buck semen the past 2 years and never found the time to collect them.
2023 was another great year in the show ring. We scaled back a bit on shows attended due to the National Show being held this year in Oregon that committed us to a week long stay. We still were able to participate in 5 shows garnering 22 class wins, 7 Grand Champions, 6 Reserve Grand Champions, 3 Best in Breed and 2 Best in Show placings.
For the first year since we started the farm, hiring and retaining good farm help has not been an issue. Having a stable workforce is such a blessing and allows us to accomplish other tasks that help to grow the farm. May this trend continue in the coming years.
We are fortunate and thankful in so many ways for all the friends and mentors we’ve made along the way. Without their support, we’d never have made it this far. Onward to another prosperous year !!!