Skip to main content

We Have Kinders!!

We have Kinders!


A little more than two weeks ago I took off my Army uniform for the last time, loaded into a car and headed back to Mn for the last trip of my military career.   The ride home was an adventure in itself to say the least.  First, we stopped at the Double B Café in Beloit, Wisconsin, this is a small farm café, that is owned by Ms Barbara Beeler, whom we will be purchasing a cow/calf pair of belted Galloway from.  Since it was a Friday during lent Terri had an omelet and I had blue berry pancakes for a late lunch.  They were delicious!  We also tried their “duck butt” blue berry muffins, it is basically a blue berry muffin made with duck eggs.  I am starting to see what the big deal is about duck eggs in baking, they were delicious and very moist!  We also got to see Candy and Evie, our cow/calf pair.  Evie is a little fire ball! I cannot wait for them to get here!  After that, we headed about an hour and a half north east of there, to pick up three additional passengers, three 13-month-old Kinder Goats! Did I mention that we were traveling home in the Cadillac CTS and not the truck?

We picked up our new fur babies from Sue Beck at Prickler Patch Farms in Caledonia, WI.  Sue is the president of the Kinder Goat Breeders Association and was kind enough to be the go between me and a friend of hers who was parting with Curly, Classy and Maggie.  We loaded up the girls into the back of the caddy along with some hay and grain and started the last 600 miles home, by this time it is was about 4 PM (we had to time the pick up when Sue got home from work to get the girls!).  Of course, there was one potential problem, as we checked the weather, Northwest Mn, were we were heading was under a blizzard advisory, so now we were heading home with three goats in the car into snow storm!
The three girls in the back of the car, the smiling one is Curly.

So from that point on it was a race to get home before the storm, we made it to Minneapolis, about 4 hours from home with no issues and clear sky! About an hour later it hit, and hit hard, once it started we only made it about 30 more miles before it got so bad we could not see the road due to the blowing snow.  It was about 10 PM, we are stuck three hours from home with three goats in the car.  Now the goats can handle the weather ok, as long as they are dry and out of the wind, they had plenty of hay in the car so us staying at a hotel while they remained in the car should not have been an issue.  That being said, I could just imagine someone seeing the goats in the car, in the middle of a blizzard and calling the police or animal control for animal neglect or abuse.  Not gonna happen.  So, we pull into a Motel 8 and we convince them to let us bring the goats into the room as pets!  So, into the bathroom at the hotel they go!  Next morning, we were back into the car and made it home with no issues! Of course, when we got home, getting them out of the car was a little challenge, they decided they liked the caddy and when we did get them out, off they went to explore the area before we got them secure!  About 20 minutes later, everyone was settled in and we were able to finish unpacking!
Maggie

Curly

Classy

Three days later I was back on the road heading to southeastern Illinois to pick up three more Kinder girls!  These were from Kinder Korner Goats and Lisa Larose and Kelsee Gibbs!  I had been talking to Kelsee for almost 2 years about Kinder goats!  Kelsee and Lisa generously volunteered to meet me the evening prior to picking up the girls and after dinner (which they treated me to, thank you Lisa!!) they brought me with them to get 12 of their young (week old) goats to be debudded.  Debudded is when the goats budding horns are burned off at the roots keeping them from growing.  If horns where to remain they can be a huge safety issue to people when handling goats as well as they can injure each other and, in some cases, get them hung up in the fence.  We (Thebar1 Farms) will be debudding most of our goats however we will likely leave some with horns for specific customers who prefer unaltered animals.

The next morning, I picked up Pippa, a four-year-old pregnant doe who is due the first week in May, Scarlett a chunky 14 mouth old doe (I love her build) and Frita, a 3 month old doeling.  In addition, I also had volunteered to transport a bucking back to Mn for a fellow breeder to who Lisa donated him to.  This fellow breeder recently lost most of her bucks due to a barn fire, leaving here with a sole buck.  As goats are herd animals this left for a very sad and lonely buck as you can not really house bucks with does without souring the taste of the milk, not to mention unscheduled breeding’s so I am very happy I was able to help her with the transportation of her new baby boy.  This did of course lead to some challenges as the original plan was just to pile all of the goats in the back seat of the truck, well that was not really possible with the buck, my girls would have been miserable!  So, into the passenger seat went a large dog crate that could hold him.  It made for a slightly cramped ride home for me but he more then paid for his ride by his ample conversational skills for the trip!
Pippa

Scarlett

Frita

It was wonderful being able to spend some time with Lisa and Kelsee  as well as Sue and to be able to pick their brains for a little while about kinders and get to know them!  I cannot say enough great things about everyone I have met who has being involved with Kinders!  I will be getting three more babies from Lisa and Kelsee in June as well as three babies from Sue’s herd in that same time period.  I cannot wait!
Front:Scarlet and Frita, Middle: Maggie, Curly Classsy, Back: Pippa
Can you tell Pippa is expecting?

That first week was a very busy week, and it has not slowed down since but I am over joyed to have my kinder girls who are settling in nicely.  I am very excited to see Pippa’s baby (or babies) in a couple weeks!  This is a good point to end this entry I think I look forward to hearing from you with questions or comments!  I should be posting a follow up post in the next couple days about other farm/homestead happenings!  See you soon!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

April is Gonna Suck, Embrace the Suck!!

Well this week’s blog is more a personal update then the last few have been.  It is about 7 weeks until I start my terminal leave from the Army, I will leave the Army for home for the last time on Good Friday and get home right before Easter.  The timing is not lost on me that my next chapter will start in full on Easter.  We started doing our taxes today and part of that was figuring out how much we have already put into the farm, not including property or the truck we are over $35K in and that does not even count most of the livestock which we will not have  or purchase until this year.  That is buying mostly second-hand equipment folks and I still have some major pieces to buy, farming ain’t cheap. That being said, I am still confident this was the right move.  I ran into one of my former NCOs from when I was a detachment Sgt in Korea for lunch this week, he was one of three buck Sergeants I had, who basically made my job easy there (except they cou...
Post a Comment
Read more

Long over due update! We added livestock (and poultry)!

Non-gas operated lawn mowers! It is hard to believe I am so far behind on my blog posts.   Spring is a busy time on the homestead, especially a first spring!   Two and a half inches of rain last night in about a two hour period has given me some time this morning to write as it is too wet to get much done!   So much has happened in the last two months, I will probably on touch on most of it in an attempt keep this post readable!   First, we lost our bee hive from last year, the bees ate the stores in the middle of the hive, all the way to the top, but did not eat the outermost combs.   From the looks of it they ended up starving themselves out because they moved too far from the edges for them to reach them with the cold weather.   We were able to salvage about 15 lbs of honey and a pound or so of wax out of the dead hive. We also managed to harvest a couple containers of virgin honey comb. This years honey harvest In this picture you can re...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fruit Trees

Fruit Trees Well in the last three posts I have talked about some of the different livestock we will have on the homestead but it takes more then meat and eggs to keep us going (there is probably about half the members of my family who and having serious doubts that it is really me writing that!).  We have decided to plant fruit and nut trees for various reasons, as I mentioned in an earlier post I would like everything we do have multiple uses on the homestead.  The fruit and nut trees are no exception. I am going to go off subject here to tell you about the area where we are setting up our homestead but rest assured I will circle back around.  My wife's parents have a little less then 320 acres total. We will be getting a little less then 40 acres of that.   A lot of that land years ago was farm land but there is also somewhere about 60 acres that is native prairie and woodland.  The tract that we are planning on building the homestead on...
Post a Comment
Read more