Goats!

Dearest believer in the BOTL,

Have you ever awoken at the break of dawn, stepped out of bed, stretched your legs, and thought to yourself “I really wish I could hear some screaming right now”?  Oh man, you should get goats.

Goats serve an uncountable number of uses on the farm.  Really just two.  They eat poison ivy, and they make a delicious osso buco [Editor: At BOTL Farm, we have no expectations that our goats will learn to cook].

You may have seen the viral videos of screaming goats complementing Taylor Swift in her top 40 hit pop songs.  If you haven’t, hit up the googles for a chuckle or two.  If you have, you’ll understand why farmers begin their search for goats by looking for quiet breeds.  You might be surprised to learn that even the quiet breeds are…. really quite loud.

A good goat can eat a good fraction of its body weight in poisonous plants each day, is resistant to disease, and grows very large horns.  Like, at least 4 feet in length and curly.  We  wanted to get merino sheep [Editor: no, some of our wool-loving family members wanted us to], but since they are sheep and not goats, we decided on Kiko breed goats.  Kikos are known for being large, delicious, good eaters, independent, worm-resistant, and very pretty.  They are not quiet.

We built a custom isolation system in the back of our farm truck, which is actually a Honda Fit.  The back is the part where the rear seats fold down.  We went to pick up two Kiko goats, and the goat breeder noted this was not the worst goat transport setup he had ever seen.  That made us feel better.

We kept the goats together for the first sixteen weeks, until the male goat began peeing on his face… which, as we all know, is an obvious sign of goat foreplay.  Then it was time to separate the goats and pair the male with two ram lambs (we have sheep but we’ll tell you about that later) and the female goat with the rest of the sheep herd.

In the future, we hope to sell goat meat, but for now we’re raising our breeding stock and trying to encourage them to eat metric tons of plants that we don’t like but they seem to enjoy.

If you drive by BOTL Farm, roll down your windows to hear the distant screaming of our new goats at all hours of the day !