A Year With Goats: What We Got Wrong (and Right)

We bought our first goats in October of year one. Three Nigerian Dwarves — Penny, Olive, and Junebug — chosen because they were small, dairy-bred, and the breeder swore they had "the friendliest temperament in the county." This turned out to be true and also entirely beside the point.

Twelve months later, we have eight goats, two breeding seasons under our belt, a small dairy operation that keeps the workshop kitchen in fresh chèvre, and a list of mistakes we'd write in flashing letters on the barn wall if we could. Here's the honest version, in case you're thinking about starting.

What we got wrong

The fence wasn't tall enough

We built a 4-foot perimeter because every guide says 4 feet is enough for Nigerian Dwarves. Penny cleared it on day three. We watched her do it from the kitchen window — a casual hop, like she'd been calculating it since the ride home. The whole thing went up to 5 feet that weekend. Build for the athletic one.

We underestimated how social they are

Three is the right starting number — we had that part right — but for the first month we didn't realize how much they wanted us with them. Olive screamed every time we left the pen. Not bleated; screamed. The fix was boring: more time, more handling, more routine. By month two she was the first to greet visitors. The lesson was that we'd been treating goats like chickens, and goats are not chickens.

The first kidding was a disaster

We thought we'd read enough. We hadn't. Junebug went into labor three weeks before her due date, in the middle of a snowstorm, and we ended up on the phone with a vet at 2am while she pushed out two healthy kids on the dirt floor of the barn. Both kids made it; the lesson was that no amount of reading replaces having someone on call who has actually done it before. We now have that person on call.

What we got right

We started small

Three goats was small enough to learn on. If we'd bought eight that first October, we'd have lost some, and we'd have lost more than we could have absorbed. Three is forgiving. Three forces you to know each animal. Three is a good number to start with.

We picked the breed for our use case

Nigerian Dwarves are dairy goats — high butterfat milk, manageable size, good for making cheese in small batches. They were also, importantly, the right size for our barn and pasture. We could have been seduced by Boers (meat) or Angoras (fiber). We weren't going to do meat or fiber. The decision tree was simple: what do you want from the goats? What do you have space for? Pick the breed where those two answers overlap.

We brought the workshops in early

By spring of year two we were running cheesemaking workshops. The goats made them possible — a working dairy on the same property as the kitchen — but also gave the workshops a story. People come because they want to learn the cheese; they leave because they spent an hour with Olive. The animals are the workshops, in a way that took us a while to understand.

What's next

We're at our pasture's carrying capacity for now. Next year, if we expand the back acre, we'll add two more does. The breeding side stays small on purpose — every kid we keep is a kid we have to feed through winter, and we'd rather have a dairy that runs well than a herd that runs us. Slow, on purpose.

If you want to meet the goats, they're on the route for every guided tour. The cheesemaking side comes up in workshops too — we'll have one on the calendar by midsummer. Plan a visit when you're ready. Bring a hat. Penny will definitely try to eat it.