We take herd health seriously here at JK Herd It All. To help make sure that all of our goats are healthy and happy, we do an annual biosecurity panel to test for the most common dangerous diseases. We’re not brave enough to draw blood on our own, so we have a friend or our vet pull it and we send it to WADDL. WADDL is one of the most trusted labs in the country for the accurate health testing of goats. Please note, though, that blood tests are not foolproof and may be prone to false positives AND false negatives. If we ever get a positive blood test, the next step would be a second blood one for CAE, a fecal for Johne’s, or an abscess test for CL. We’ve only ever had one goat with an abscess, though, and it was not in a CL location and was filled with translucent bloody fluid – we’re pretty sure it was from Heartbreaker ramming the poor guy with his horns. Goats are jerks!
Now that our herd has grown, the testing is very pricey (about $50 per goat altogether), so we plan to test EVERYONE at least 2-3 years in a row and then start doing it more intermittently – maybe the does one year and bucks the next, or a select few from each group, rotating each year.
The CAE panel is one of the most important health tests because a dam can transmit CAE to her kids via milk. We bought all of our goats from herds that either test or raise their goats on CAE prevention. Just to be safe, we are doing the test here every year, too, at least until we close our herd. After we have a few years of negative health tests under our belt, we will consider dam-raising our goat kids. Until then, we’ll keep bottle raising them!
Most people only test for CAE, but since we have so many cattle farms in our area, we also do the panel for Johne’s. Johne’s is spread through manure, including through hay that has been fertilized by infected cattle.
The CL blood test has debatable accuracy with a lot of false positives and negatives, but we do it anyway because it’s part of the panel through WADDL. If one of our goats ever develops an abscess, we will test that for CL, as well. That test is the only truly accurate one for CL.
We’re considering adding tests for Brucellosis and TB next year in 2024, once we have more does in milk. Those diseases aren’t very common in our area, but since we have brought in livestock from all over the country, we want to make sure all of our bases are covered! Both of those diseases can spread to humans through unpasteurized milk. Wisconsin doesn’t allow anyone to sell unpasteurized milk and also forbids the sale of ANY milk without extensive inspections and expensive licensing, so we only use it here for personal use. We drink it, cook with it, use it in our gardens, and give it to our animals. Because of this, we want to make sure we’re as safe as possible by testing our herd.
* Note that we skipped Vera – she’s heavily pregnant and was FREAKING out at being restrained and even shaved in the neck, so for her safety and that of her kids, we couldn’t draw blood on her. It’s a risk, but her breeder’s herd has always tested negative. We’ll test her in 2025 (or sooner if she shows any symptoms of being unwell).
A few of the yearlings are finally starting to look a little bit less derpy 🙌
… definitely not all of them yet, though 😅
May 13
It’s officially spring! We caught our first non-pet basement snake of the season, checking out our newly hatched chicks 😅
#snake #gartersnake #rurallife #farmlife
May 11
Every year, Ken falls hard for one single baby goat - this year, the honor goes to Tanwen, Avalon & Smoothie’s teeny doeling 😍
#goats #babygoats #goatkids #goatlife #dairygoats #bottlebabygoats #mininubian #mininubians
May 11
It’s like a daily Easter egg (and chicken) hunt over here 😅
#chickens #heritagebreeds #rarebreedchickens #broodyhen #chanteclerchicken #partridgechantecler #backyardflock
May 11
We FINALLY got somewhat decent pics of Honey’s udder! That blonde roan coat of hers does not work well with our LED milk parlor lighting, and her udder always looks a zillion times lower and sadder than it really is.
May 10
Swiftie says, “Meh?!”
We’re starting the agonizing process of sorting through our adults & yearlings to make space for toooo many keeper kids!
So far, we’re listing a bunch of Mini Nubians of all ages & both genders, as well as a super nice BUT half-horned 2yo Oberhasli buck.
We’ve still got a few Mini Nubian and Ober bottle babies up for grabs, too, and will tryyyy to get updated pics this weekend!
May 9
Some of our does need a bunch of extras added to their feed to regain condition after kidding, but then there’s our bestie Honey here - she popped out triplets and still looks like a bulldog!
May 7
Tell us about your big bale feeders for goats! Our first attempt lasted for about a week before these crazies broke it down 😅
#goats #dairygoats #goatlife #hay
May 6
The good news is, our last Welsummer rooster is still fertile! The bad news is, he and his hen have a super low hatch rate going on. This is the only chick out of 2 dozen eggs we incubated. SO we can tentatively offer small groups of chicks this year, but sorry, no hatching eggs!
Our group originally came from Deer Run farm a few years ago. Their eggs have speckles, but they’re also dark - even darker than our Marans eggs were! Which wasn’t saying a ton, they were around 4-6 on the Marans egg color chart.
#welsummerchicken #chickens #heritagebreed #hatchingeggs
May 5
We’ve got our little Boomerang back from her unfortunate situation and she’s definitely thinner and her voice is hoarse from crying, but she’s happily eating hay and drinking a ton of water now. We’ve got her in quarantine while we work out a really nice pet home for her, with someone more experienced with goats!
#goats #petgoats #mininubian #hopefulhappyending
May 4
Okay, gather ‘round the milk can, it’s time for real talk after some drama today!
We’re touchy and exhausted after driving 10+ hours and spending $2500 last week to try to save the life of a doeling we had planned to sell for maybe $250, and then driving another 5 hours crazy late last night for her necropsy.
We will fight to the death to provide the critters we raise the best lives and/or endings that we can.
The drama today involved a different doeling. This is being resolved now, thanks to the help of some very kind folks who helped to restore our faith in humanity, so we deleted it.
BUT this is a friendly reminder: if you purchase a goat from us and it doesn’t work out, please let us know and give us the chance to buy them back - the right of first refusal/buyback is in the Terms of Sale that we provide with each non-market goat. By buying anything from us, you are agreeing to our terms that can be found on our site & our OpenHerd profile.
We don’t guarantee that we’ll always be able to take a goat back, but we’ll try! Especially if it has only been a couple days and if they’re still in quarantine.
Sorry, we unfortunately can’t do the same with poultry - certain goat diseases are scary, but most bird ones are way, way worse, and we can’t risk our flocks like that.
May 1
We finally broke down and bought a Reolink so that we can stare at the goat kids remotely, without worrying about draining batteries like we did with Arlo. Our Arlo cameras are still awesome in places without electricity, though!
#securitycamera #reolink #goats #babygoats #goatlife
Apr 29
Despite everyone’s best efforts and last weekend’s extended stay at UW Madison, Raindrop’s poor doeling just couldn’t pull through whatever was going on with her. RIP Thru the Rain, aka “Pants” 😭
Apr 27
Two blue-eyed doelings for Green Gables Amazing Black Petunia and Mosaic’s Smooth Criminal *B!
One has dark brown moonspots that will most likely lighten over time and the other is almost solid black. It looks like both might be polled.
2025 Tally So Far: 16 Bucks, 19 does!
Just one doe left to kid in a couple weeks - Windscape JB Last Call!
Apr 26
Everyone is all, “spots, spots, spots!” But Honey & Denarius’ little chocolate girl sure is cute 😍
#goats #dairygoats #mininubian #goatkid #babygoat
Apr 25
Seriously though, baby geese are THE best! At least until they learn how fun it is to eat hair 😅
Apr 24
It’s hard to tell in this pic, but this right here is something we’ve waited 2 years for - two pipped Pilgrim Goose eggs! Most years, we grab and incubate all eggs, but last year, we let the geese try to hatch their own, and both groups picked terrible nesting spots & ended up with zero goslings.
Apologies to those on our goose eggs waitlists - now that it’s warm enough to safely ship, they stopped laying. But we’re incubating somewhere around 30 eggs, which will hopefully give us at least a few goslings! Pilgrims are notorious for fertility issues - ours usually have around a 75% hatch rate, which is considered really, really good 🤞🙏🤞
#hatchingeggs #geese #domesticgeese #waterfowl #pilgrimgeese #pilgrimgoose #heritagebreeds #rarebreeds
Apr 24
Our emergency that we mentioned last week was related to two doelings that we skipped posting yesterday - they both came down with digestive issues right as we humans were also fighting food poisoning or stomach flu or whatever it was!
Some people consider animals completely disposable and will immediately hard cull them if they prove to be a little complicated or cost more than a couple bucks to treat. We just can’t do that - maybe it’s from growing up with ultra-sensitive exotics and horses, but we feel that it’s our responsibility to do everything in our power to give every single critter in our care the best possible chance at life. If we didn’t, what kind of stewards would we be?
SO, after our regular vet (who is amazing btw) was at a loss, we packed up the doelings and drove the 3 hours down to UW Madison’s large animal hospital.
Over the past few days, they did a zillion different tests and scans and, as we all suspected/hoped, one doeling just had a bit of coccidiosis - there were zero oocysts on any of the fecals taken by us, our vet, or UW, and she was still acting off after courses of both Baycox and Albon, but she’s recovering now after ultra high doses of ponazuril.
Our other girl was more complicated - she had some sort of intestinal obstruction, but thankfully, it seems to have passed now! She’s still not fully better yet, but she’s getting there and both girls were cleared to come back home today 💜
Apr 22
We finally got updated pics of all but two of the older doelings! We’ll provide an update about those two later.
Some more or less cooperated, others not so much 😅 We’ll add deets to these pics on FB - some will be up for grabs!
#goats #dairygoats #kiddingseason #babygoats #goatkids #mininubian #oberhasligoats #guernseygoats
Apr 20
These two at 12 hours of age are already ridiculous troublemakers, trying their best to jailbreak and visit the doe herd 😅
We normally pull all kids at birth and heat treat/pasteurize everything, but we’ve got an unexpected emergency and can’t feed these babies as often as they need it today, so we’re letting Kirlia take care of them until we can step back in. Hopefully they’ll stimulate her to increase her production, too!
#goats #dairygoats #oberhasligoats #babygoats #babygoat
Apr 18
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