Goats on the News

If you wanna see my babes on the news, click on this logo for the video:

They were here for an hour and a half today. My little girl got to interview with the ‘nice lady with the make-up.’ I didn’t say anything bad, but hopefully it comes across that way on camera. YIKES.

And now, I’d like to answer a few questions I’ve heard around the net:

1. How is having a goat ‘green’? Is Ivory just being smug?—No, Ivory is just trying to keep her goats. Extolling their virtues in a politically positive verbage is part of the plea. But as for the truth of the statement:

• They’re bred locally
• They eat locally produced hay, shrubs, and feed
• The poo goes on the garden, compost pile, or innocently disappears as lawn fertilizer
• They don’t require medications and vaccines except a yearly worming.
• They make milk, which contributes to the family eating organically and locally.
• Their old bedding (straw) makes excellent mulch.
• They can’t bite. Wait, that’s not ‘green’, just AWESOME.

Unfortunately, they are not, as hypothesized by many, to be lawn mowers. They eat weeds and foliage, but not grass. They forage, not graze.

Some feel the ‘green’ benefits may or may not be drastically reduced by goats’ tendency to toot methane, but I’ll leave it to someone else to measure goat flatulence and calculate it against all of the positives I just listed. However, for my purposes (keeping my pets), Lilly Goat beats the pants off Rover in the GREEN contest, toots or no toots.

2. How can you say that chickens are great housepets? They’re disgusting! I didn’t, and don’t talk about my babies like that. Just because I use the word PET doesn’t mean I let them in the house. Left to themselves in a 500 square foot pen, they are plenty clean enough for the kids to play with. But birds are birds and they poop WHEREVER, so no. No chickens in the house.

3. Could you eat them (goats and chickens)? Over my dead body, but yes. A wise farmer I know says to not ‘play with your food.’ Goats with names aren’t dinner. Mine have names.

4. When will they make milk? About a year from now, if I breed them in the fall. But their primary function is as pets.

5. This should be on a t-shirt! Tell me about it.

Viva la goat!

Ivory