

| Fancy, our first goat, is a fixture in our barn. She likes to be brushed and petted and fed peanuts! Now Fancy lives a quiet life with our two sheep, Nibble and Cher. |
About the Goats After some serious consideration and a fair amount of sadness, I have sold my goats - except for Fancy, of course. Life and all its fullness just got to be too much. Not selling my milking equipment, though, as things may change in the future and goats may find their way back into our lives. And I'll still be making soap, with good LaMancha milk from Silver Spur Dairy Goats in Mountainair, NM. Keeping it local but trying to simplify! "What did you do to their ears?" is a question you must learn to answer when you have LaMancha goats. Their breed trademark is indeed their tiny ears, but after tasting the high-fat creaminess of their milk, it is easy to overlook this PR pitfall. Having been brought to the US from Spain during Spanish colonization, these goats first became registered as a breed in 1958. Contrary to popular belief, goats do not eat everything; in fact, some of them can be quite picky! Our girls eat alfalfa and/or grass hay and grain formulated for goats. They also enjoy lots of attention, brushing now and then, and peanuts for treats. We are not licensed to sell milk or edible milk products, but we enjoy the milk for our own use and add liberal amounts to our luxurious goat milk soap. If you do ever have the opportunity to taste fresh and well-cared-for goat's milk, give it a try. You might see a big difference between your expectations and the real thing! The girls are bred in the fall and give birth approximately five months later in the spring. For approximately eight weeks we bottle feed our babies to insure their health and sociability. Toward the end of the eight weeks, we begin to have enough milk for family use, and then the twice-a-day milking continues throughout the summer until the girls are bred again in the fall and "dried off." Milk production amounts can vary greatly from animal to animal and breed to breed, but our goats usually provide us with 1 ½ to 2 gallons per day during the mid to late summer peak of the season. |






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