We’re chugging along through our busiest goat season to date, with not a ton of time for much else!
We’ve been trying SO hard to schedule buck collection so that we can sell off some of our stinky guys and had finally found a couple companies willing to come to our place. BUT our neighbors have kids and we don’t want to offend anyone, so we asked them whether they’d be okay with it.
That opened a whole unexpected can of worms – they most definitely are not okay with it and I guess after almost 5 years of us working to build an elite performance herd, they want us to sell them off altogether because they don’t want to live near a farm. Even though we’re surrounded by farms on 3/4 sides and a natural bug & snake-filled bog on the 4th. And a super upscale grain co-op weigh station, commercial storage units & huge garages all around us. And they’ve personally bought eggs from us a number of times & asked us about hiring their son to milk last summer (which we unfortunately couldn’t do because we’ve spent all our money on fertility stuff).
We’re in no way, shape, or form anywhere near being a commercial farm & have stayed well within the animal unit limits for Rural Residential zoning. We do have an LLC, but it’s registered to our PO box. A complete sell-off is definitely not happening, but we have been trying to downsize all year and will try harder now, in an effort to keep the peace!
We’ve had a group of 5 Mini Nubian does up for grabs for a while, and have steadily been lowering the price. Last week, this attracted a couple flippers, who caused ridiculous amounts of drama in a FB group when we tried to nicely extract ourselves from conversation with them. A bunch of super kind friends and customers jumped in to defend us, which was really, really nice to see!
We try so hard to spoil our critters and just don’t understand when some people see them as nothing beyond cheap commodities. I always publicly brush it off as “different markets,” but it really gives me the ick. Especially when a lot of these people call themselves Christians – I don’t go around spouting Biblical stuff, but to the religious folks out there, please remember that God calls us to be good stewards of the animals he generously created for us. Yes, they’re livestock. Yes, they’re sometimes culled or eaten. But we should be treating them with respect and thanks at every turn.
Anyway, off that pedestal!
After talking with both buck collectors and a gal we met during Linear Appraisal, we are officially scheduled to have some of our boys collected at her place! We won’t be able to fit all of them PLUS jump does in our little trailer, but we’ll do our best 8 or so. This might unfortunately prevent us from selling the ones we can’t have collected yet, but it is what it is!
