Sharing Milk with Baby Goats

Episode 148
For the Love of Goats

Transcript – Sharing Milk with Baby Goats

For the love of goats, we are talking about everything goat, whether you’re a goat owner, a breeder, or just a fan of these wonderful creatures. We’ve got you covered. And now here’s Deborah Niemann,

Deborah Niemann  0:17  

Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s episode. I am really excited that this is our fifth anniversary week, and so we are doing three podcasts this week, and we are doing it with members of our Goats 365 community. And if you want to learn more about that, you can check out Goats365.com. One of the reasons that I ask them to be here is in case they have questions, so that we can address those during the podcast. 

The only thing I don’t love about podcasting is that it is such a one-way conversation, and so it’s hard for people to ask questions, and once the podcast is done, it’s out there in the world, and I can’t add anything to it. And so there have been a couple podcasts where I last really, truly lost a lot of sleep afterwards because I was really not happy that we had forgot to mention some things. So hopefully, with our Goats 365 members here, they will think of questions to address things that I didn’t so it will be a more thorough episode. 

So today we’re going to be talking about sharing milk with baby goats and when to start milking. So if you ask this question to 10 people, you’re going to get 10 different answers, and most people have one single answer, and unfortunately, a lot of times, the answer is something really inadequate, like two weeks or three weeks. Sometimes it’s two months. It’s really all over the board based on all sorts of different things. 

The reality is it depends. So if you’ve known me for a while, you know the answer to almost every question. Let’s just start at the very basic like, if your doe has a single, you need to start milking her on day one. I always tell people, you’re the twin that wasn’t born. So a good milk goat should be able to produce enough milk for twins. And if she has one kid and you don’t milk her, you are going to wind up with a super chunky monkey of a kid and a doe with a very low milk supply, and you’re going to be so disappointed. It’s simply because it’s a matter of supply and demand. Now that’s not unlimited. We’re going to get to that later when we talk about what happens if she has more than one kid, but if she’s only produced, if she’s only got one kid that needs milk, she’s only going to make enough milk to feed one kid. 

You know, she’s gonna have a huge udder in the very beginning, but her body’s going to adjust, because the body’s not going to keep making milk that is not being taken out of the body. That means that with the colostrum, you need to milk her out at six to 12 hours. I used to say 12 hours, until I learned that the body makes all of the colostrum before the kid is born. And so as the kid is taking colostrum, the body is already making mature milk, so the colostrum is starting to get diluted. So now I’m more inclined to say, Well, go ahead and milk her at six hours. 

You don’t necessarily have to milk her out if you don’t think the kid has been nursing a ton. Usually singles are. If the kid is not nursing on both sides, you absolutely have to milk her on that other side. I don’t quite understand why people are not clear on that fact, but if a kid is only nursing on one side, then you really, really need to be milking the other side. So I’ve always known that it’s a matter of supply and demand. I used to be a Board Certified Lactation Consultant back in the 90s, and so I understood human lactation really well, and most mammals have very similar mechanisms when it comes to producing milk, letting down milk and all that kind of stuff. And if you have a single kid and it’s only nursing on one side, then the other side could wind up with a really low milk supply. 

Like I said, I always knew this, but this really got driven home to me three years ago when we had a doe that had a C-section, and she had a problem with the anesthesia. She did not wake up for four hours. So she’s on the operating table. She’s knocked out. She’s laying on her side, and it’s getting late. And I said to my husband, you know, I’d really like to leave soon. And so we decided to milk her. Now, this is a goat unconscious, laying on her side, so it was challenging at best, to milk her. And so we fairly easily were able to milk the teat that was on the top, and we put a container underneath it, because that was a few inches off of the table. We milked it out completely, but the other teat was on the table – looking back on it, now I’m thinking we should have tried harder, like we should have moved her body to the edge of the table so that the teat was hanging off the table. But at the time, I didn’t realize that this was going to have an impact for her entire lactation. 

5:30

Hindsight is fabulous, isn’t it, so we could not get a container under that bottom teat, so we didn’t milk her. 24 hours later, we come back to take her home. We take her home. We milk her and that goat’s production on that second side that did not get milk for the first 24 hours, for the entire lactation, for the whole three years she was in milk for almost three whole years for that entire lactation, that side that did not get milked in the first 24 hours wound up producing about 50% less milk than the side that we milked right at birth. And this is like a 10-year-old goat who had a long history of producing an equal amount of milk on both sides, so she basically served as her own control. You know, when you do a study, you see what happens with this group if we do something and what happens with this group if we do something different. And so here we had a goat that basically served as her own control. We milked one side at birth. The other side did not get milked for 24 hours, and the production was so horrendously less on that side that did not get milked for 24 hours. So I cannot stress the importance of milking when you’ve got a single. You really have to start milking on day one, otherwise you are not going to see the kind of production that you would see. And so if your doe doesn’t have the kind of production you were hoping for. It’s not her fault, you know, it’s just because there wasn’t the demand there from the first day. 

So if you milk out the colostrum, I store it in Ziploc bags, four ounces. And the reason I do four ounces is because we have Nigerians. The very first time I ever did this, I froze it in like a, you know, a cup or something. And the problem is, once you thaw it, you have to use it, and Nigerians are very small, and they’re only going to take two or three ounces at a time. So that’s why we freeze it in four-ounce increments. If you have minis, I would store it in six-ounce increments. If you have standard goats, I would store it in eight-ounce increments, because colostrum is liquid gold, and you just don’t want to waste it. And then you can milk her every 12 hours, every day, so you can work more. You can milk her morning and evening every day. Um, she’s got colostrum for about the first four days. That’s when it’s – they consider it mature milk after four days. Now, remember what I said earlier, and that is that the colostrum just starts getting diluted by the mature milk, and so that’s why you want to put on the bag. 

I put the name of the goat, I put the date, and then I also put the amount of the milk, and then I put the age of the colostrum. So like six hours, 12 hours, 18 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours, however long it was from birth to the time that you milk that colostrum out is what you want to put on that bag. And when I’m feeding a newborn that was just born, you know, within the last hour or two, I want to use the colostrum that was milked as close to birth as possible. Basically, I try to match up the age of the kid with the age of the colostrum. So when the kid is, like, 12 hours old. I’m giving the kid 12-hour colostrum, 24-hour kid, 24 hour colostrum. Basically, you get the idea. So what happens if she has twins? So of course, you want to watch the kids, make sure the kids are nursing equally on both sides. Again, if they have a preference, you want to milk out the side that looks like it has more milk in it. You’re not trying to milk her out completely, because these are twins or triplets, and so you want to let the kids get as much milk as or as much colostrum as possible. But if it’s lopsided, then remember that it’s only going to produce to match what is being demanded, and so you definitely want to milk out the side that is not being favored. 

And also work with the kids and try to get them to nurse on both sides equally. You can try to get the kids to take the colostrum in a bottle, but it’s probably not worth it. Most does freshen with a really big, full udder that just fills up their back end. And so they’ve got more than enough colostrum for even four or five kids, because there’s a lot in there. You know, there’s easily a quart in there for most does, possibly more. 

And if you consider the fact that a kid needs 20% of its body weight in the first 24 hours, and then, let’s say for easy math, a kid weighs three pounds – three times 16 ounces would be 48 ounces. So the kid weighs 48 ounces, which is almost 10 ounces. So that means a three-pound kid is going to need about 10 ounces of colostrum in the first 24 hours. Now remember, she’s starting to produce milk as the kids are nursing. So it’s usually not a problem to produce enough colostrum for multiple kids. Where it does start to become a challenge is over the course of that first week as the kids start to grow, and definitely by the time the kids are two weeks old. 

11:24

Our Nigerian dwarf kids double their weight in the first two weeks. So if they double their weight, that means that they’re doubling their consumption of milk. And now all of us said it, and this is where people get into trouble, because they think, Oh, she’s doing a great job feeding quads. After a week or two, one of the kids is starting to fall behind because the mom cannot produce enough for four, so ultimately, for Nigerians, they’re going to max out at 32 ounces a day. So that means that a doe would need to produce a gallon to feed four kids. And how did we come up with all these numbers? 

You know, I love to quote vet textbooks and research and stuff like that, but there is nothing about this in vet textbooks. I have not seen any studies published. So how did I figure this out? Well, originally, when we got started on our farm, it was me and our two daughters, and then they had the nerve to grow up and go to college and live their own lives. And I was at home with all of these goats and my husband. And so I told my husband he was going to have to learn how to help me if he wanted to continue to have goat cheese and yogurt and all those things that he’d grown to love over the years. 

So he started helping me that very next kidding season, I was running across the street in San Francisco at a conference, and I tripped on the curb and smashed my knee, and it was swollen up like a football. I had to walk on crutches or use a wheelchair if I was going any distance at all. I basically spent all day laying in bed with my leg up on pillows. For weeks I had bleeding into the bursa, and it was awful. That meant my husband had to handle kidding season by himself. Now, previously, his involvement in kidding season meant he might be walking through the barn on his way somewhere, and say, Hey, how’s it going? And I would say, great. She had triplets. And he would say, Cool. How many does? Because he knew that the does were what we always wanted, since we wanted milkers, and that was pretty much the extent of his knowledge. 

So all of a sudden he is totally in charge of everything. I’m laying in bed watching everything on the video monitor, and he comes in and Rosie had had twins, and he said, I don’t know if her kids are nursing, and because he hadn’t seen them nurse. And I said, Well, just feel their little tummy. It’s behind their ribs. It should feel like a little golf ball, because that’s what everyone had told me for you know, the whole time I had been raising goats, and I still see people say that, and now I realize how horribly inadequate that is. All that means is that the kid has nursed recently. The kid may not have nursed for six hours before that, but if it’s nursed recently, then it’s gonna feel like a little golf ball back there. Anyway, my husband had no idea what that meant or how that was supposed to feel, and he was getting really frustrated and worried because he didn’t want these baby goats to die on his watch. 

He’s an engineer, so what do engineers do when they need answers? They start collecting data. So that’s what he did. He started weighing the baby goats, and then asked me, like, so how much weight are they supposed to gain? I don’t know. I never heard anybody talk about weight gain. This was, like, 12 years ago. I never heard anybody talk about what baby goats are supposed to gain. So he created spreadsheets, and he started tracking the weight gain of every kid that we had, and we realized very quickly that if a doe was nursing more than three kids, somebody was falling behind, that most of the kids were gaining about four ounces a day, unless you had a little piggy in there who might gain five ounces or even more. But if that happened, then one of the siblings was going to be gaining even less. So that was when we realized just feeling the tummy does not give you any kind of objective information about if the kid is getting enough milk. 

We also realized that those kids that gained four ounces a day were not getting coccidiosis. The only ones that were getting coccidiosis were the kids that were only gaining two ounces a day, maybe three, and they were basically falling behind. The kids that were gaining four ounces a day would hit 20 pounds by 8 to 10 weeks. And at that age, there really is not a big difference between the males and the females. And in Nigerian dwarfs, this is a breed that is totally defined by its size. And so everybody, all of the mature goats, fall into a pretty small window. It’s not like humans, because people are like, Oh well, some babies gain weight faster than others. Yes, but with human beings, you know, my mother in law was five feet tall and half an inch. She always had to have that half-inch on there. Right when I was in college, I dated a guy who was six foot four. The difference in the size of humans is astronomical. I remember that six foot four guy. He married somebody who was five foot 10, and their kids, it’s like, it’s like they had a basketball team, you know, with their kids, because their kids were like, all very long and heavier and bigger than most kids. So people have a big variation in terms of what they gain, and that’s why there’s like, a big difference between the top and the bottom of the growth chart with humans, but with Nigerians, we’re pretty much shooting for about 20 and a half inches to 22 and a half inches for does, and an inch bigger for bucks. So you really shouldn’t have any small kids. The other thing that we discovered too is that with five kids, usually when our does have five kids, and we have had eight sets of quintuplets, so it’s kind of a lot of quintuplets. And I don’t even know how many quads, most of our multiples are still all around three pounds, they are all still averaging about three pounds. 

So every now and then we will have a multiple that’s like two to two and a half pounds. And the reality is that when those kids are given a bottle and basically get enough milk, they wind up gaining four ounces a day. It might take them a few days to get up to that four ounces, if they’re only two to two and a half pounds, because their tummy is going to be smaller than a kid that’s like three and a half or four pounds, but by two to three weeks, they’ve caught up to their bigger siblings. So we really don’t even see much of a difference in the weight gain. Even if kids are born a little bit smaller than their siblings, they do catch up. 

So let’s get back to the original question, which was, how do you share milk with kids? So the answer is definitely not something as simple as two weeks or two months or whatever. The answer is, it depends. 

So if it’s a single, you’re gonna start milking them on day one, so that mom will have a good milk supply. If she’s got twins. It really depends on the doe, and you need to be weighing the kids. We weigh the kids every day for the first two weeks, and if they’re hitting that four-ounce mark by the time they are two weeks of age, then they are probably going to keep doing that. Very rarely do we have – we’ve had one doe that had kids, she had triplets, and when the kids were like a month old, one of them started to fall behind. And I actually wound up selling that doe as a pet, because that was unacceptable to me. She was like a three-year-old, and a three-year-old should definitely be able to feed triplets, so the fact that she couldn’t produce enough to feed triplets – I didn’t want to sell her to anybody as a breeding animal, because I know most people aren’t going to be weighing them like I am and keeping an eye on them, and then you’re going to wind up, if she can’t make enough to feed triplets, she’s going to wind up with one of the kids falling behind, which is what happened in that case. So we sold her and her daughter as pets without papers to someone who I knew she bought wethers from me before, and so I knew she was never going to breed them, because she’s had like pet goats for like 20 years. 

So remember earlier I said that if you have a single you can milk every 12 hours. So if you want to milk every 12 hours without separating the kid, you can do that. And that’s generally what we do for the first week, because the kid is small. It’s got a small tummy. After the first week, if you just want to milk once a day, you can do that. You separate the kid overnight. So we put the kid in a wire dog crate, in the pen with mom, so that the kid is right there, next to mom, and it’s not stressed by being separated. And the reason it’s a wire dog crate is because if you put a plastic one in there, a lot of does will jump on it and they’re going to end up breaking it. So we’ve just kind of learned the hard way that we don’t want to put a plastic dog crate in there, because it’s a very expensive lesson to learn when Mom is jumping on it all the time. It’s not meant to have a 60 pound animal standing or laying on top of it. 

So you put the kid in a dog crate overnight, milk it in the morning, start with like an eight hour separation the first night, and then 10 hours, and then 12 hours, and then you can just do 12 hours every night. We have gone back and forth between milking twice a day without separating the kid, versus separating the kid overnight and milking in the morning. And pretty much the 24-hour milk yield is always the same. So whatever works for you. You know, if it’s easier for you to milk once a day, then separate the kid overnight; if you’d rather milk twice a day, that’s totally fine. And you can even, like, do your own experiment. If you find that you get more milk from the doe by doing one of those things, then you know, I would do that if getting more milk is your goal. And when you have a single you are milking her out completely every time. Because remember, you’re the twin that wasn’t born. If that kid had a twin sibling, it would be nursing as much as it possibly could, and it would be taking as much milk as it possibly could. So that’s who that’s who you are. You’re the twin that wasn’t born. 

Now, back to the does that have two or three kids. If those kids are gaining, you know, like, if they, if she’s got twins, and they’re gaining five or six ounces a day, and you want to separate them overnight, that’s fine. You can totally do that. See what kind of weight gain the kid has when you do that. Probably, if the kid’s really young, you’re probably not going to be able to do that more than like every other day, but in that situation, you would want to continue to weigh the kids even after they’re two weeks old to make sure that they’re still getting enough milk. 

One of the things that we also found is that once goats start to get older, they might not do as well. So like you might have had, you might have a goat that was just this fabulous milker in her prime. You know, she was three or four years old. She had the fattest triplets in the barn. Now she’s nine years old, and she’s got a single and so you think, Oh, all right, I’m gonna separate her every night. And you see that that kid is only gaining four ounces when it’s with her 24 hours a day, and you’re not milking and then if you do milk her, the kid only gains two ounces a day. Okay, that goat clearly cannot make enough milk to feed more than a single kid at that point. So that’s why my answer is always It depends, because if you’ve got an older goat, then maybe she can’t produce like she did when she was in her prime. So that’s another thing to keep in mind. 

23:39

It’s really all a matter of just paying attention to the kids and seeing how the kids are gaining weight. Once they’re 20 pounds, then it’s fair game. I can totally separate them every single night if I want to but I don’t have to if I don’t want to. So we never wean wethers or does, as long as they’re on our farm. So if a wether isn’t sold yet, he keeps nursing as long as he’s here. If we’re keeping a doe, you know, on our farm as a replacement breeding doe, milker, then she continues to stay with her mom and can nurse as long as she wants. 

The reason that we do that is because we found that if we weaned goats, which we did in the beginning, because, like in the beginning, we were just copying what we saw other people doing. And you see most people weaning their kids. Back then, most people were weaning the kids at two months. Some people still do that, but, but we quit doing it, because we found that when we would separate the kids after about three days, the mom’s milk supply would start to go down, and that seemed ridiculous to us. It’s like we got to do twice as much work now because we just took the kids away, so now we have to milk you twice a day, but you’re not producing as much milk, so we’re really not getting that much more milk, and now we’re tied to twice a day milking. So part of the beauty of not weaning the kids is that it gives you a lot more freedom. So you only have to milk them once a day. You separate the kids overnight and milk the does in the morning, and you don’t have to milk them in the evening then, because they’ve just spent all day with the kids. And if you want to go on a cheese making binge, you can, you can separate the kids for two or three days straight. Um, because remember I said we didn’t. We don’t usually see a decrease until after about three days. So you know, you could keep them separated until you start to see a reduction, and then put the kids back in there. 

The reason this happens is because of hormones. So when the does are nursing kids, they release hormones that they don’t release when we are milking them. So if you’ve ever felt like a goat was holding back, like I know there’s still milk in this udder and I can’t get it out. It’s because they actually did this research in Europe, I want to say Switzerland. They found that the does released oxytocin when the kids nursed, but not when people milk them. And oxytocin is responsible for the milk ejection reflex, so it’s not directly related to production, but remember, it’s supply and demand. So if oxytocin causes the milk ejection reflex to be stronger, that means the goat is going to release more milk, and the more milk that comes out of her body, the more her body is going to work to make more milk. So it indirectly does affect the amount of milk that the goat produces, even though it doesn’t it’s not directly responsible for production. 

So Angie asked in the chat, when do they need to be bottle fed? Basically, if they’re not gaining enough weight, so I know you have Nigerians, so if they’re not gaining four ounces a day, then you either need to supplement, or sometimes it is just easier to take them off of mom entirely and bottle feed them 100% there are some kids that I don’t know if it’s that they love nursing so much or they just get too confused if you are trying to give them a bottle every now and then, or I should even say they get confused if you’re trying to give them a bottle twice a day, because the bottle nipple is very different than nursing for mom. 

So I had some incredibly frustrating experiences in the early years when we had quads. Because the first two times we had quads, I asked in the Yahoo groups, which is where everybody was back then, you know, can a doe feed quads? And everybody was like, Oh, yeah. Total, no problem, of course, yeah. And that wasn’t true, like those of you who were who heard Coco’s story a couple days ago, no, Coco was one of was in the first set of quads we had, and she almost died when she was two weeks old because her mom could not produce enough milk for quads. 

The next year, we had another doe have quads, and I foolishly went into the Yahoo groups again and asked people, and everybody was like, Oh yeah, totally like. And I stupidly tried to let this doe raise quads, and unfortunately, that time, one of them actually died, because we could not get enough milk into her with the bottle. And so I probably should have tried tube feeding her. But, you know, again, hindsight is 2020, and I was back when I was brand new. That was like our third kidding season. So that’s why now we weigh the kids. If a doe has more than three, now we just bottle feed whatever she has more than three. So if she has quads, we bottle-feed one. If she has quintuplets, we bottle-feed two. Last year, it was super frustrating. I had a doe give birth to quads, and then I got injured and had to the emergency room. And so all four kids nursed on mom, and we were fighting with those kids like as expected, like they, you know, they weren’t all gaining weight well. And so we were fighting with them like crazy, trying to get somebody to take a bottle. And it’s not always. So if you wind up in a situation where a kid needs to be bottle fed, you know, like a doe has quads, and you realize that somebody’s falling behind, the one falling behind may not be your best bottle baby candidate. Sometimes the biggest one is your best bottle baby candidate, because it’s a piggy and so that’s the one that like you pick up and you stick a bottle in its mouth, and it just goes to town. So I don’t really care who takes a bottle. If I somebody needs to be switched to a bottle in a set of quads, I’m happy to give any of them a bottle so that mom just has to raise three. 

Marjorie asks if I could discuss hybrid dam raising. I know there are people who say they do that. I would say, go ask those people how they do it without losing their mind. Maybe I just don’t have the patience for it. But no, There’s no way. We actually were on milk tests for eight years, and so this is why I say with such authority that 90% of dam raised kids will act like you are going to try to poison them if you try to give them a bottle. So I really don’t know how anybody you know. 

I know there are people out there that say, Oh, we separate the kids every night and give the babies a bottle in the morning to make them friendly. Well, first of all, you don’t need to do that. That is a massive waste of time. So if you’ve got time to do that, that’s lovely. I don’t have time to do that. And you don’t need to do that to have friendly kids. Kids are friendly if you just spend time with them. So instead of milking a goat, putting it into a bottle, having to wash all of your milking equipment, having to wash all of your bottles and fight with these kids and get milk all over yourself while you’re fighting with the kids to take the bottle, just go out there and sit down and play with the baby goat. 

So years ago, we had when we had LaManchas, one of our LaManchas died two days after her kids were born. So she and she had had triplets, and I, at that point, had discovered that a lot of bottle babies are insanely bratty. Some people say they’re friendly. I say they’re bratty. I’m not a fan of bottle babies, and so to avoid having these bratty LaMancha triplets, I wanted them to be sure they were living with goats, so that they knew there were goats and acted like goats. So I put them with another La Mancha and her triplets. So it was this one La Mancha with six babies in there. And three times a day I would go in there to give the three orphans their bottle, and the three dam raise. kids were climbing all over me the whole time I was sitting there giving the bottles to the other triplets, and they were pulling on my hair, and, you know, climbing on me. And nobody like if I had walked in there and just sat down on the ground and asked a total stranger, tell me which three are bottle fed, you couldn’t have done it. They all acted friendly, because they all saw me three times a day for like, 10 or 15 minutes as I was giving the bottle to the three kids that needed the bottle. 

So there’s no reason to put yourself through all of the extra work of milking a goat and feeding that milk to the kids in the bottle. When we were on milk test, we had about 50 or 60 kids. And if you dam raise and your on milk test, you have to separate the kids from the moms for 24 hours once a month. And during that 24 hours, we would try to give the kids a bottle. I have tried to give a bottle to hundreds of dam raised kids, and the vast majority of them would fight tooth and nail. And that’s why, actually why we quit milk testing four years after my daughters left because it basically – that was how milk test day was just the most exhausting day of the whole month, because in addition to doing the milk test, it also meant that I was going to be out there multiple times a day trying to get all these dam raised kids to take a bottle. And that’s also why we actually quit testing any doe that had a kid under three weeks of age, because you cannot do a milk test before four days, because remember earlier I said that there’s colostrum in there, so it’s not considered completely mature milk until five days.

 We had a doe who had given birth five days before the milk test, and we’re like, oh, okay, great. Well, I’m a by-the-book person. She kidded five days ago. We’re gonna do the milk test today, and so we will be milk testing her. Her twins would not take a bottle for 24 hours. So this is why anybody who tells you they’ll take a bottle if they get hungry enough, is just crazy. Well, first of all, I can tell you, I have had kids die from starvation because they wouldn’t take a bottle when I was newer and didn’t know all the things that I learned the hard way, which is why I share this stuff, so that other people don’t have to learn things the hard way and have kids die to learn that they will not take a bottle just because they’re hungry enough. 

That was why we quit milk testing, because it was just so exhausting and we didn’t want to do – we just did not want to do that anymore. I would be covered with milk. I would have a towel on me. 90% of the kids, we couldn’t get anything into them.

Angie asks, Should we be freezing all the milk we get for the first five days and label the bag with the amount and time it was taken? 

I don’t really save anything after three days. It is technically it’s not mature milk, but I just don’t think there’s enough colostrum in it at that point after three days. So what is that seven? Is that 72 hours, and then that’s always going to be the last stuff that I use too, is the stuff that was milked out later, and it should be good for at least five years. Dr van San said that they’ve studied, they’ve checked the antibodies in it. The research went out five years and that it was still good. So you can, you can continue to use it for up to five years. 

And yes, you label the bag with the name of the doe, the date, the amount and the age of the colostrum, like, how many hours after birth was the colostrum milked out? Yeah, and Marjorie says playing with babies sounds like a much better alternative to fighting with bottles. Yeah, it is. We used to have a lot of interns in our farm, and I will never forget the bartender from France. He played. He spent so much time playing with those babies. They were they acted like bottle babies, like they were just as annoying as bottle babies, because he was out there so much playing with them. So it’s totally possible to have very friendly babies without ever giving them a bottle. 

Angie said, so if the milk was placed in the fridge when it is too when is it too late to freeze? I only freeze the first milking. I was going to give the rest to my human kids. 

So I don’t know if you’re asking because you have milk in the fridge now, that’s like, a week old or something. I would definitely not freeze that because I because they haven’t done any research on that. And so basically, we’re telling people what to do in the future. And so in the future, when you milk out colostrum, go ahead and put it in the Ziploc bags and freeze it right away. 

Sean said, if you have a great milker and her milk production goes down because you let her raise a single kid and you did not keep up her production by milking her while she raised her single kid, how long does the production take to come back up? If ever 

It doesn’t. That’s like the goat that I was talking about that had the C-section, like we did not milk one side for 24 hours, and she was she wound up. We wound up milking her for three years because she was 10 years old and had a C section so she should never be bred again. So we just kept milking her for three years, and the side that we did not milk in the first 24 hours had 50% less for the whole lactation. So you can’t make up for not milking them enough early on unfortunately. You might be able to increase it a little bit, but it’s never going to be as productive as it would have been if you had been milking her from the beginning. Yeah. 

The other thing about that too is the issue of potential lopsidedness. When we were showing our goats in the early 2000s nobody else at the shows was dam raising. And people asked us, How can you dam raise and show don’t the kids ruin the udders? And I said, No. And I thought, Oh, we must just have really brilliant baby goats. And the reality was, we had just gotten lucky the first time we had more than 10 does in milk. My daughters started complaining about having too many goats to milk, and so we had a doe that had a single, and we didn’t start milking her, and when her kid was a week old, she was walking away from me, and I glanced down, and it looked like she had one teat right in the middle of her udder.

I freaked because that is very anatomically incorrect. There are supposed to be two teats, one on each side. It’s supposed to be symmetrical, not like a balloon with one teat hanging down from the middle. So I go running up to her, and I start feeling all around her udder and I realize that the other teat was flat against her abdomen. So basically, that kid had never nursed on one side, and one side completely dried up. So she just had one teat, that was it. And so we wound up keeping her for another freshening because I wanted to see what happened. Like, I wanted to see, like, how bad is this gonna be in terms of lopsidedness? And it was really bad, like, it was just so awful. And so that was another one of those goats that I just, I wound up selling her to a pet home without papers, because I didn’t want her to wind up in the hands of some poor little 4-Her that was gonna take her into the show ring and get last place, because she was so horribly lopsided. Yeah, it’s super important to keep an eye on them when they’ve only got a single and make sure that you’re keeping both sides equally milked out. 

Denise said, I heard that kids only absorb the antibodies for the first 24 hours. Is that true?

40:25

Partially. So kids are born with what they refer to as an open gut, and so they have to get enough colostrum within that first 24 hours, otherwise you’re just going to be in for a world of sickness and problems with those kids, because ruminants, which goats are ruminants, because of the nature of the ruminant placenta, they don’t have really great maternal transfer of antibodies through the placenta, so that’s why they absolutely have to have colostrum. They need 20% of their body weight in colostrum in the first 24 hours, or they are going to be very sickly if they survive at all. Sometimes people do these dripping wet buckling sales, and the kids may not have gotten enough colostrum before they’re sold. So that is something to be aware of. If you are buying a kid that’s very, very young, like just within the first couple days, make sure you’re buying it from somebody that you trust, that they actually got the colostrum in it within that first 24 hours. 

It’s not if you just said, Can kids only absorb antibodies for the first 24 hours? No, that is not true at all, because there’s antibodies in the milk, and that’s why the kids, you know, kids get lots of mom’s milk, they’re going to be healthier because they’re getting antibodies in the milk forever, but the gut is no longer open, and it’s too late to try and play catch up, you know, like if, if the kid did not get colostrum in that first 24 hours. It’s too late to try and play catch up to try and get colostrum into them. So it’s an oversimplification to say that they only absorb antibodies in the first 24 hours, because it’s not entirely untrue, but it’s also not really true, like it’s just, it’s more complicated than that. So I hope that makes sense. 

That’s it for today’s show. This week, we are celebrating our fifth anniversary of the podcast by bringing you a total of three episodes with members of Goats 365. As we enter our sixth year, we are moving back to weekly episodes, while also including more case studies and personal stories of goats and the people who love them. Want to join our goats. 365 community visit goats. 365.com to learn more.