Category Archives: Goat Ranch Life

Kidding 2.0

March 8, 2011 junden

Kidding season is moving fast. The first kids dropped on February 18th, a couple days before we expected them. Tulip surprised us first, with two beautiful boys.

And after a brief pause (where we hurried to get pens ready), we were off to the races. On Presidents’ Day, it seemed like kids were popping out everywhere. And since some of the human variety were visiting that day, it was extra exciting.

This was the day Rozena Quail had her babies. There was no way I was missing that! Rozena is an older goat and I worried for her. She happened to start kidding when there were lots of human kids visiting…a 4-H Group plus my niece and nephew and attending adults. A big audience.

I sat myself right down in the mud near her, but gave her plenty of space as she paced and bleated. She tried to push a couple of times, but it was clear she was having to work hard at it. Finally, she laid down on the grass right next to me, her back against me, and commenced to bellow and thrash. I ended up with my arms around her neck, trying to chant Kanzeon in my head, but never finishing the sutra completely before she’d distract me with he battling to have that kid. Finally, she threw her head back over me, bellowing hay breath into my face, and with P’s help, delivered an enormous boy.

I was sure she’d have triplets again, but it turned out that she just had a little girl left, and delivered that more easily. The little girl seemed weak; the boy got more of mom’s attention.

Throughout the day we got mamas and babies in pens, setting them up with food and water. Ben and Maddie turned out to be a big help, cheerfully carrying wet baby goats and leading moms to the pens.

We had a couple more days of that. We are very lucky this year; lots of healthy babies, healthy moms. I feel more useful, knowing what to do, knowing what to watch for. I tended to Rozena’s girl expecially. She continued to be weak and had some kind of eye infection. We syringed milk into her and got her nursing, fitfully.

A couple days after Rozena’s kids were born, I checked on her pen and was dismayed to find the big healthy boy limp on the floor of the pen. I milked Rozena quickly, got the syringe, forced milk into him. You can tell with the milk hits their system…they almost immediately start coming back if lack of nutrition is the problem. His eyes flickered and I had hope. But his head continued to loll. I did everything I could to try to convince him to come back into this world, but it quickly became clear that all I could do was hold him and let him go.

It may be that he was stepped on. It happens from time to time, and with a mama as big and pushy as Rozena, it’s certainly possible. Or perhaps something was just wrong. But now we had to redouble on the baby girl. If we lost her, we’d have a doe who would have to be hand milked every day until the milk line started up…at least five weeks away.

Our efforts were good, and as of this writing, little girl is doing great. Her eye is cleared up and she’s nursing furiously. Rozena also is doing well…last year, she lost weight rapidly and I was worried we’d lose her, but I’ve been feeding her up this year and she seems fit and healthy. I am pushing for her to be retired after her time on the milk line this year…or even before. I would miss her terribly, but she was ready for retirement last year. I gotta look out for my big bossy girlfriend.

Another goat I’ve been watching closely is Cypress. A very nervous goat, she had her first year on the milk line last year, and was always very timid. P. found her starting labor in the field, but couldn’t catch her. I tried to help, but all we got for our efforts was a goat, in labor and a bag hanging half out of her, running around the field, darting between us skillfully as she bleated and carried on. We sat in the grass for a while, watching her and trying to sneak up on her when she laid on her side and heaved. But then she’d jump up again, all progress thwarted. I was sure the baby was dying in the birth canal, and we would have left her if we hadn’t been worried that it was taking her so long and she might need help.

Finally, we chased her up to the barn; instead of going in, she went under. Under the barn is a terrible hiding spot, because all the manure falls thru the slats of the elevated floor. But she was near the edge, so I grabbed her two rear feet. She began dragging me, on my belly in the manure, her front feet flailing and kicking manure back into my face. Luckly, she’s small, and I finally got hold of her well enough to drag her out.

We got her to the garden, where she delivered a healthy girl kid. To my vast suprise. And that kid is the beauty queen of the year, I’m telling you. She’s beautiful. I need to get more pics.

I’ve been trying to make it up to Cypress ever since, bringing her little treats, spending time in her pen, petting her and getting her used to hands. I don’t think I’ll really tame her, but maybe I can make things easier on her for the next time.

Round two will start this week…the goats that were not on the milk line last year, for whatever reasons. Only nine of them, but the first 27 babies and their moms are certainly keeping us busy in the meantime.

I feel lucky and gratefuli to be a part of it, happy to be on more solid footing with it this year. I feel like I know what to do for the goats, and I’m not afraid to take initiative or even sometimes to speak up about how we’re doing things. I have a lot to learn…I will admit, I haven’t even read any of the goat books I’ve had for over a year now! But I am grateful for my teachers, whether they have two legs or four.

Goat Ranch Life

Life Rolling Along

January 13, 2011 junden 5 Comments

The flurry of the holidays are over, but now the really expectant time of the year begins….baby goat season will be upon us in six or seven weeks. The mamas (or, more correctly, the does) have their shaggy winter coats and grow heavier in the pasture. I don’t interact with them every day, but visit them from time to time to reconnect. They have grown more wary; I’m not sure if that’s an effect of their pregnancy or if it’s just because I haven’t been associated with the grain bucket every morning.

I’ve been here for over a year now, and have memories of the cycle of seasons through the year. As exhausted as I became last spring, I can’t help but look forward to kidding season. P says February 20 is the day, but I’m still hoping for Valentine’s day kids. Remember last year when I was anxiously examining the privates of every goat for weeks before we had our first happy deliveries? I expect I probably will be again.

I’ve never been good on patience, and I am being tested on that again. This time, it’s with the gigantic bureaucracy of the US government. I applied for the Peace Corps in November, and even though it all moved rather rapidly, it’s felt like an exercise in sitting with the unknown future.

It was an interesting thought path in the decision to apply for the PC (which I’ll call it for now, to keep this from popping up too much in search engines). I’ve been reading, off and on, Peter Matthiessen In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, a devastating account of the continuing travesty of the treatment of Native Americans by we-the-people. A couple of references in the book to shamanism had me doing some casual research online, comparing Mongolian shamanism to Native American practices…and noticing the similarities in how those cultures have progressed. (In Mongolia, the Soviets moved in and “modernized” things…moving a nomadic culture off the land, severed their ties to wild nature and to their spiritual traditions, and moved them into urban areas where now rather than providing for themselves, they are simply poor. And, oh yes…drunk on vodka most of the time. Sound familiar?)

I have been crazy about the Mongolian Eagle Hunters for a long time. It is a dream of mine to see them in person some day. So while sitting at the computer, the thought pops into my head. “Why don’t I see if I can get the PC to send me to Mongolia?!”

It seemed like a silly idea at first, but I went off to the web site and started reading about it. My aunt was in the PC in it’s very early days; she served in Ethiopia. There is something about her outlook in life that I have always loved, and I found myself wondering if her PC experience had anything to do with that.

I found that you can’t choose where you will serve in the PC; you can suggest where you might like to go, but it’s very rare to be sent there. I found that most people who go to Mongolia have a background in teaching English as a second language, which I don’t have. But by the time I found that, I realized that everything about serving was sounding really good to me.

For a while now, I’ve been wrestling with the idea of doing good work in the world. I’m fortunate in that much of the work I do to earn a living is overall positive, but I don’t have a strong sense that it’s making a difference. I don’t have to do big things, but I do want to feel like I’m contributing to a greater good, even if it means working on bringing a better self forward in the world.

I also wrestle with the sheer mechanics of making a living. I’m pretty desperate to not go back into a full-time office environment and all that entails. I think it would literally kill me. I have enough trouble with the amount of time I spend in front of the computer now. But I haven’t really figured out yet how to make it all work. I’ve managed to keep health insurance, but I end up working almost a whole week every month just to pay for that, and the deductible is so high, I’m scared to use it. I love rural life, but auto milage adds up and I live in fear of car problems. (With good reason….I was able to get my car fixed last month relatively cheaply, given that a mechanic friend was very, very good to me. Even so, the yet-to-be-reimbursed tow and the repairs had me in a bind with January rent.) The situation on the ranch is iffy…it could be sold, and even though that would take time, who knows what I’d do then. And don’t even ask me about paying income tax. Taxes? April perhaps will be the cruelest month after all.

So the PC might buy me some time and space to keep figuring this out, while at the same time doing work I can believe in AND knocking me off my well-worn paths and opening my heart to something bigger and different. It would be an adventure of a lifetime, and those tax dollars would actually go towards keeping me sheltered, fed, working, and medically cared for while I did something generally positive.

The more I sat with the idea, the better it felt. Was I “pulling a geographic” – trying to escape my life for a fantasy of something else? I don’t think so. There is the mechanical making-a-living piece that perhaps I’m trying to “escape”, but I see this as more of a respectable solution to that instead of an escape from it. I’ve been sitting around for three years now with a feeling that I want to feel some purpose in life, and I’m not getting it on my own. It feels really good to think I can turn this over to a higher power and say, “OK. You decide how I can be of service and I am going to trust that it will be the right thing for me to be doing.”

So I talked to a recruiter. Got my application in. Convinced three wonderful people to write references for me. Got an interview. Then stalked my post office box (and my recruiter’s telephone) while waiting impatiently. Finally I got the nomination:

nominated to a/an Ag Extension assignment, going to the Africa region. Anticipated departure date is October 2011.

Exciting! I did some research online and found that the type of assignment and the departure date means it’s likely that the assignment is for one of three countries: Niger, Burkina Faso, or Rwanda. And the number of Ag Extension volunteers going to Niger has typically far exceeded the number sent to the other two countries. Of course, they could have a new program in a different country planned, or change some of the departure dates, so I would just drive myself crazy trying to “plan” to go to one of those places.

But this is all even more tenuous than it might sound here. My recruiter cautioned me that between nomination and the official invitation, assignments change up to 50% of the time. The official invitation happens only after passing medical and legal clearance (oh, hello IRS!), which I’m stumbing through now, and it is a huge pain in the ass, not to mention pocketbook. There seem to be an infinite number of things which could prevent me from going, not the least of which is my own ability to accept bureaucracy…possibly the greatest skill required for the whole venture.

Because the PC is a government agency, there’s a lot of data about it available on the web. I found that, out of 100 applicants, 65% get a nomination…that’s where I’m at. 42% (or 65% of those who get nominated) make it to receiving an invitation. 33% make it to trainee. 25% serve a year in-country, and 22% serve the entire 27-month term (3 months program and language training in-country, and 24 months of project service).

I’ve been trying to keep it quiet, but word has been getting out, so…well, I guess that’s one reason I haven’t been writing much here. But I may as well, because I miss writing here.

I must admit, however…there’s been another distraction. Over the holidays, I decided to go ahead and create a profile on a dating site. I’m honestly not sure of the wisdom of this, but I do miss that part of life. But maybe if I’m heading for a remote village in Africa, it would be better to get some of my ya-ya’s out now, you know? In some ways, maybe I am emotionally college-aged again, and it shows up in my interests in things like the Peace Corps and in dating. If I were really that age, I’d have no qualms about dating with the intention to go away for a couple of years. And I’m being honest about, and other important things, in my profile.

So far, the biggest results of this stupendously important decision has been a lot of learning about myself. And I am even more fucked up that I thought I was…surprising, given how incredibly intelligent I am <smile> Still, it’s been fun also. I’ve corresponded with some interesting guys I wouldn’t have met otherwise….a cowboy/pilot who lives a little too far away. An activist who splits his time between the US and his land and restoration project in South America and is WAY too far away. An artist who agrees he would be bad news for me, so we’ve let it drop. I’ve read messages from Nigerian scammers and other suspicious types. I’ve walked away from someone trying to argue that the 33% “enemy” percentage on our match in his very serious profile wasn’t a big deal (we vehemently disagree on “ethics”, “lifestyle”, “dating”, etc. so what’s the problem, right?).

So far, no actual dates, although it seems that once some logistical things work out, I might get to meet cowboy, who has taken to calling me “hippie girl”…he warns that there could be sparks and he might be right, but I’m not sure if it’s going to be from romance or from hippie girl cutting loose on a republican.

If nothing else, it could be a good story.

Goat Ranch Life

Recovering

October 4, 2010 junden 2 Comments

October means the approach of the Northern California rainy season. It was a year ago this month that I came to the goat ranch to talk about renting…the morning after the first big storm of the year. No one was here when I arrived; it seemed desolate. A large tarp on the yurt billowed and flapped in the wind; evidently put on in the wind and the rain as best they could, it gave the place a feeling of disaster. Something in me wanted to live here, but I worried about the situation.

Nonetheless, I’ve lived in this yurt for nine months now. During the first few weeks, I spent a lot of time on re-securing tarps and listening to loud flapping in the night; the tarps are required because the roof of the yurt has so many leaks. The first storms I weathered here were scary, but I soon experienced the stability of the yurt structure for myself and learned to trust it. After all, yurts originated on the wild and windy Mongolian steppe.

Yurts have a lattice framework for the wall supports. The beams from the ceiling are connected at the top of the wall by a steel cable that circles the yurt. The other end of the beams are connected to a center ring at the top. A traditional yurt “skeleton” operates on a system of opposing forces that create a very strong yet portable structure. The resulting shape is also extremely stable in high winds. My yurt (well, really my landlord’s yurt) was hand-made by a local who used it for a while, then sold and moved it to the ranch a few years ago. It’s 22′ in diameter (379 square feet).

Here’s a time-lapse video of a Mongolia yurt, or “ger” as they are called there, being set up. The basic structure of my yurt is essentially the same:

Modern western yurts are usually different than their Mongolian cousins in a few ways. The materials are different, usually vinyl or canvas instead of the traditional layers of felt and sheepskin. The heating source (a wood-burning stove in my case) is usually found on one side and vented through the side wall; in Mongolia, the stove is found in the center and vented out the top center ring.

Here’s a time-lapse video of the setup of a manufactured yurt from Pacific Yurts:

The interior wall of my yurt is different from others in a very significant way. When you step into a typical yurt, you’ll notice the lattice framework of the walls right away. yurtlattice But the wall of my yurt has an extra layer of bamboo screening installed over the lattice framework. In between the bamboo screening and the lattice is a layer of sheep wool from a local ranch. This acts as insulation in the walls. Of course, most of my temperature fluctuations happen via the uninsulated roof, but the wall insulation helps. It also means that I have the pleasant texture of bamboo to look at; to me, the one drawback to yurts is that the lattice walls can make me feel a little caged. In the photo to the right, you can see the lattice wall of my yurt in the window opening, and with the bamboo screening of the interior wall. For comparison, check out the swanky photo gallery from Pacific Yurts.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this yurt and how to better prepare it for this coming winter. Tarps deteriorate in sun and wind, so it was clear that we needed to re-cover the top with a new tarp. I really wanted to use a tarp from Billboard Tarp Warehouse; they sell recycled billboards, made out of a heavier and more durable material than regular tarps. But my landlord deemed the cost too high. So I just got another heavy-duty silver tarp. I was able to find a 30’x30’s square tarp…big enough to cover everything, but no annoying overhang like the old rectangular tarp that was quickly being shredded.

So yesterday, a wonderful group of friends came to help put the new tarp on. You would think I’d be accustomed to asking for help after the past year, but it’s still tough for my prideful self. Fortunately, I have great people in my life who make that easier on me. Especially my brother Tony…he is always there for me. I’m grateful to all of them, both for their efforts, the delicious treats they brought with them, and (perhaps most of all) for their sense of humor.

Everything went great. Our team quickly got the tarp in place over the roof…the hard part was over.

We spent the rest of the morning and afternoon getting everything tied down securely. I’m very happy with how snug it all feels. I have better access to my windows, and am surprised that it feels much more quiet inside…the roof is definitely moving around less. After a few sunny days, I’ll go over it again and tighten down any places that might have stretched or settled, but I can tell already that this is a big improvement.

I’m looking forward to spending another winter in this big round space. The energy of living within a circle is very good for me; I feel that it is a very healing space. The soaring ceiling is especially calming for me, because I tend to be claustrophobic. Most of all, I love that I can hear everything happening outside…the birds and other critters are my companions here. Storms are dramatic and I feel their energy sweeping around my cozy circle home. I love living in a yurt.

Recently, I’ve caught myself a few times telling people, “I’m happier than I’ve ever been.” It astonishes me to hear it coming out of my own mouth, because just a year ago, I was more miserable and sad than I’d ever been. And I laugh when I realize I’m saying this while happily living under a $129 tarp.

Life doesn’t always go the way that I think I want it to go, but more and more I find that if I take a breath and surrender to what life really is, it ends up being better than I could have imagined. I am deeply grateful for my cozy re-covered home, and even more for all of the incredible loving people in my life, near and far. And, dear readers, for you. Thank you for coming along!

Goat Ranch Life

The Bodega Fire

September 26, 2010 junden 2 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, on the way home from Sebastopol, I was stuck in a long train of traffic behind a pickup with a fifth wheel. Not uncommon on the weekends, when the tourist hordes are out in force on my roads. But this time my anxiety was compounded by the smoke I could see in the distance. With every curve in the road, it seemed to be in a different direction. But as we got closer, it was obvious that the smoke was indeed coming from the Bodega area. And it was getting worse.

When I got into town, the smoke was pouring over the hill near the cemetery. Traffic was being turned back. I stopped, as I’d planned, to get lunch at the Bodega Land Trust BLT fundraiser. I learned that the fire was near the turnoff from Route 1, and/or near the trout ranch, and that it had jumped Route 1.

I got my BLT to go, even though no one in town seemed particularly concerned. The light was weird and polarized as I drove up the hill towards home. Laika came out from under P’s porch, looked at the car carefully, and when she was sure it was me, macaroni-danced her way over, nearly leaping in the front seat with me when I opened the door.

The smoke was building and the air was full of planes and helicopters. The fire was about a mile or mile-and-a-half from our place. I took my BLT out to my garden sitting area and settled in to watch the show…not without some level of base instinctual fear, but certain that we were safe for the time being.

Here’s a short video:

It was interesting to watch the aerial fire fight. Those guys are crazy; thank god we have them. The planes spread a bright pink-read substance, and the helicopters seemed to be carrying bags of water to release on the sight. I later learned that they’d been dipping into the ponds at the trout ranch. (Fish fry? Ok, I know, that’s terrible.) I also learned that a local firefighter was seriously injured. He is well-liked around town and by folks on the ranch, and is in everyone’s prayers.

This morning, the goats were quite skittish during milking time. Usually they just walk into the holding pen, but this morning they balked. Then, once I had most of them in, they stampeded out. On the milk line, they fussed at their grain but didn’t eat much and had no interest in hanging around the barn. Strange behavior indeed!

Of course in a situation like this, my thoughts turn to “what if”…what if there was a fire here? What would I need to do, how should I be prepared? I thought about making a “bug out bag”, but honestly the only thing I want are my animals and my computer, neither of which are packable in advance.

I confirmed one thing with Jordan: open the gates, and maybe even shoo the goats out. Honestly, I’m not sure how much that would matter; the whole ranch is fenced in except for the end of the driveway. And here’s the thing: we live near the top of a ridge, looking downhill to the southwest. If there’s a fire, it’s going to be heading up our driveway and road. In other words, we’re fucked. Our best strategy may be to get over the fence to the neighbor’s house, and hope we can get down their driveway on the other side on foot. Or go stand in the pond and wait it out.

The experience also made me think from a permaculture standpoint; I realized the wisdom of sitting on the land for a year before making any changes. I hadn’t considered the fire danger much before. Now it seems all too present. Tonight our sunset was colored orange from the haze that hung in the air all day.

I’m grateful to the firefighters who put out the fire before it roared into the town of Bodega…or further.

There are dramatic photos here on facebook, courtesy of the local paper.

Oh, and our all-volunteer fire department is having a Polenta and Beef Stew Dinner on Saturday, October 9th. Come out and join me…you can bet that’s where I’ll be eating that day!