With times getting hard and hay becoming so expensive, it became impractical to try and feed a small herd of Boers and expect to make anything back. During my (never-ending) study of goat health and husbandry, I found out about Nigerian Dwarf dairy goats. I visited many websites and visited one farm where I fell in love with his breed but I put off making any purchases until 2008 when we visited several more farms and spoke to breeders. By then I was completely smitten and made several purchases from Sue Rucker at Buttin'Heads, and Cindy Dahl at Wild Wind Farm. We started off with 5 does, 3 bucks, and a wether (he was a companion for another). We really love the dairy goats and will keep our herd small, focusing on healthy, physically sound, disease free, quality milking animals.
We do show our goats at some ADGA shows and it's helping to direct us in building a good base herd. We also plan to use Linear Appraisal as another herd improvement tool.
We started milking our girls for our own personal use and the milk is absolutely fantastic! Store-bought milk can't even compare. Besides milking, I have found that I thoroughly enjoy making cheese out of our fresh milk. Oh what I've been missing!!
One of life's simple, yet great pleasures for sure.