Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Obviously you haven't done the experiment. 

Obviously I have.  Not voluntarily prehaps but I've done it several times and 
not just with goats.  A good friend is the poster child goatatericist, 
thoroughly eaten up with it.  She keeps some 35 goats on three acres and 
almost all 
of that is dense forrest.  That's an extreme example, I know, but obviously 
she must import nearly all the food the goats eat and manage all the problems 
that intense concentration demands.  Several times over the past 25 years she 
has shown up at our farm with the goat that was going to be the salvation of 
our 
herd, improve the blood line, with all goatiana bells and whistles going.  A 
goat that was giving eight pounds (yes, the everlasting 'pounds') of milk a 
day within a week would drop to two, then dry up, when it ceased to have the 
concentrated diet.  Several of them sickened.  One great, wonderful bloodline 
billygoat starved itself to death when the rest of the goats would go off 
browsing and he'd stand there and baaa for the feed bucket.  Oh, yes indeed, 
I've 
done the experiment and seen it done many more times by others.




> I don't suppose you have all that many goats.

Of course I don't.  This is after all a homestead.  A subsistence homestead 
on an economic model to be as self contained as possible.  Right now I have 
eight goats.  I don't think I've ever had more than eighteen, and that due to 
being behind in selling or slaughtering them, it's far too many for the 
homesteads paradigm and need.  By the way, the number of goats I have is just 
about the 
same as proposed by Rob, whose question started this thread.

Goats aren't intended in this homestead model to provide cash, although they 
do a little incidentally.  I'm not in the goat business.  Most of the cash 
for 
this household comes from my woodwork.  To that end I have a collection of 
tools and methods and biases that is condusive to marketing some pretty 
sepcialized items.  I don't confuse the work I do in my shop as a commercial 
venture 
with the woodwork that needs done around the farmstead.  It simply does not 
obtain.  If someone asked about doing homestead carpentry or even bodging or 
coopering or such, I would not regale them with all the minutia of the tools, 
glues, finishes, wood selection etc that I use in order to do commercially 
viable 
artisan woodwork.  It would be boorish, boring, and would give them a false 
idea of what's actually needed on a farmstead.

A commercial industrial kitchen does not offer a subsistence farmstead's 
kitchen any useable insights, a garment factory doesn't really have anything 
to 
contribute to the homesteaders sewing skills, civil engineering experience 
with 
interstate highways does not help with fixing the potholes in a farmstead 
dirt 
road.  In fact, it would tend to send one off in unproductive directions.


A good example of this is Top Bar Hives.  I converted to them to keep from 
having to store the gooey spent supers and frames over the winter and keep 
such 
tight vigilence agaisnt wax moths.  Professional beekeepers do the same sort 
of garment ripping and heaping of ashes that goatatericist do at the thought 
of 
TBHs.  And in a way they are right, if you are managing 500 hives you simply 
can't do it.  To much hand work involved.  But for a homestead with eight 
hives, TBHs offer several advantages.  One advantage they don't offer is more 
honey.  The yield is good, adequate, more than needed but not as much as with 
framed supers.   The knowledge of a beekeeper who has years of experience 
managing 
an apiary on a mechanized commercial basis has little to contribute to the 
management of a subsistence farm's few hives.

The same is true with goats.  Unless a person is in the goat business, which 
is a fine thing but entirely different from the role of goats on an 
integrated 
farmstead, experience with a great number of goats at once simply doesn't 
obtain.  In fact, it tends to lead one's thinking in unproductive directions.


>  so I
> suspect you don't keep the pint-a-day milkers around.
> 

Of course I don't.   I eat them.  

It all depends on what the goal, principle, .... let's say paradigm of the 
homestead is.  And it isn't a matter of this is right and that is wrong.  You 
do 
one thing, you get one result.  You do something else, you get a different 
result.  The homestead's paradigm will be determined by what result you get.  
The paradim of this homestead is to provide a living (defined as food, 
housing, 
heating and cooking fuel, and clothes) with as little traffic in the overall 
cash (or debt!) economy as possible.  If you will, a 'direct use' economy.  
The 
cash part of our economy, the necessity to traffic with the Great Babylon 
with Caesar's coin,. is dealt with separately.  As we like to say, we 'render 
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.'

That's not everyone's paradigm.  Sometimes the homesteader defines 
homesteading as expanding one or more aspects of small-holding into a cash 
business.  
Once that is done, one enters a different reality and an entirely different 
set 
of principles applies.

So what one would have to do to manage, say 100 goats, does not obtain to 
what is good practice with two or three goats kept for their direct use 
contribution to a homestead.  Being surrounded by a sea of goats doesn't make 
one more 
knowledgeable about goats any more than working for Kraft Foods would make 
someone better able to make jam on a homestead cookstove from the berries 
hand 
picked behind the barn.

In the sort of paradigm we follow and advocate for those so inclined, SOME 
milk and SOME meat for NO cash input outweights MORE milk and MORE meat for 
SOME 
cash input.  That is why I speak up when imperical principles on such things 
as goats are laid down by the goatiana experts.  You can have fine goats for 
many years with very little expenditure and without feeling as if there are 
great dark mysteries about goats that you will never understand.