Last year, we bought our first two dairy cows. Maude is the larger girl. She is pregnant and should deliver sometime in mid to late June. She is a small standard, impregnated by a mini bull. You can read more about Maude here.
Charlotte is a mid mini heifer, born in late November of 2019. We are hoping to get her pregnant via AI sometime in July for a spring calf in 2021.
Recently, we needed to get these girls their spring vaccinations. Maude is an experienced milk cow, and has been a pleasure to work with, but Charlotte’s breeder had a family crisis at just the wrong time in her development and was unable to work with her as a young calf. Therefore, she is skittish and shy, and does not know how to follow a lead.
Our vet required our cows to be restrained before he could give shots, so son Jarred and I set in to build stanchions for both milking and vetting last week. We are very excited about how they turned out.
These are the two stanchions that we built into the overhang of our dairy barn roof. Eventually, we’ll probably enclose this 12 x 12 foot area so that winter milking will be out of the wind.
What I said as we stood back to survey the finished work was “Gee, I’d love to have that view at breakfast and dinner every day!”
The design of the stanchion on the right is for maximum restraint. Since Charlotte is so skittish and has never been milked, we felt that we needed one of these stanchions to have sides as well as a front restraint.
The wired, green gate on the far right was already in place (and will be replaced with a board wall in future days). The green gate between the two stanchions opens in to form a pen, and the chain for the gate attaches to the opposite one to form a butt restraint for the cow.
In this picture, the goats were exploring the finished stanchions before we put up the green gate between them. These stanchions did their job! The vet has come and gone, and the girls are both vaccinated.
Many newcomers to Mini Nubian goats ask, “What is the BEST generation to buy (or breed) with Mini Nubians?” The obvious answer seems to be “the higher the generation, the better!” After all, “purebred” sure sounds like it would be better than “experimental.” Right? Maybe not. This post was written to help educate you so that you can purchase quality Mini Nubians in the future by focusing your attention not on generations, but on animal quality.
Eliya Elmquist (of Green Gables Mini Nubians) has been raising Mini Nubians for 22 years, and she co-wrote this article (which is styled in her voice) with me. I think her insights are so helpful that I wanted to post it here for easy reference.
Are Higher Generation Minis Better?
Eliya writes, “This article was written because year after year I find myself explaining to newcomers (and also some who have been around Mini Nubians awhile) about misconceptions concerning generations. Hopefully, this article will help the entire Mini Nubian community to better educate buyers as to the proper view of the importance, or place, of generations in assessing miniature goats of any breed.”
(Note: the young buckling pictured at the right is Storybook’s Prince Valiant, an F2.)
First, some definitions.
What Do We Mean By Generations?
All mini goat breeds (Mini Alpines, Mini Toggenburgs, etc.) are crosses between a larger, foundation breed (in the case of Mini Nubians, a purebred Nubian female) and a smaller, foundation breed (a purebred Nigerian Dwarf male). From here on out, this article will focus on Mini Nubians (MNs) as our primary example, but you can apply what’s written here to other mini goat breeds as well.
When you breed a foundation Nubian to foundation Nigerian, the resulting kid is considered to be First Generation, or F1. It is one generation from “foundation” on both sides. It is a 50/50 Nubian/Nigerian cross.
(Pictured right: Joyous Farms Le Tigre: 50/50 cross. Nubian/Nigerian.) LOTS of milk creds on both sides of this cross! See a pedigree here.)
Min Nubian lines can also be started using a Mini Nubian crossed to a foundation breed. So, you can have a MN doe bred to a foundation Nigerian buck. This would result in something more like 25% Nubian and 75% Nigerian. More typically, however, if a MN is crossed with a foundation Nubian, you will find kids that are 75% Nubian and 25% Nigerian.
(Pictured left is Skillman’s Star AR 4*D. She is a Mini Nubian, and is 93.84% Nubian, and only 6.16% Nigerian.)
What is important to grasp here is that any kid that has one parent that is a foundation breed is an F1, also called “Experimental.” F1 does NOT indicate the percentage of the parents’ breed or its overall quality in terms of conformation or dairy abilities; it simply indicates that one (or both) parents were foundation breeds.
Subsequent breedings follow sequentially. If you breed an F1 to an F1, you get an F2 (two generations away from foundation on both sides). However, if you were to breed an F1 to an F5, the kids would be F2, since on one side, their parent was only one generation away from foundation, and they are only two generations away from foundation on that side. The rule is that kids’ generations are always one step up from the parent who is closest to foundation. F1/F6 = F2. F3/F4 = F4. F3/F3 =F4. And so on.
In developing the Mini Nubian breed, it was decided that it would take six generations for an animal to be considered a purebred Mini Nubian. F1 and F2 animals are designated “Experimental” by registries. F3, F4, and F5 are termed “Americans.” F6 and up may be registered as “Purebred,” if they meet the breed standard. (After “purebred” we stop counting generations.)
Newcomers to MNs often hear the word “purebred” and think it must be desirable. Who wants a mutt when they can have a purebred, right? But the idea that lower generation goats are mutts is a serious misconception, which can be hard for newcomers to understand.
Storybook’s Ursa Major, pictured right, is an F2.
Remember how the generations are calculated? As stated above, a sixth generation from foundation (F6) can be registered as a purebred (if it conforms to the breed standard). And all that the F6 designation means is that an animal is 6 generations from a foundation parent on both sides. It says nothing about its conformation, quality, health, or breed character; it simply means that at least six generations back on at least one side of the parental line (the other side could be further back), this particular bloodline of goats got its start.
Now, I just mentioned the term “breed character. What is that?
The goal with breeding MNs is to work towards goats that look like a Nubian, but smaller. Nubians have pronounced Roman noses and long, floppy ears. They are a dairy breed, so there are other aspects of conformation that contribute to amounts and longevity of milking, of course, but the main distinctives of the Nubian breed are their noses and ears, and we call this “breed character.”
(Pictured at the right is VMCH Green Gables GS Magma 5*P. She is a wonderful example of correct breed character for Mini Nubians. She is an F5.)
The challenge in breeding Mini Nubians is that Nigerian Dwarfs have short upright ears. When you combine Nubians and Nigerians (especially in early generations) you often —but not always — get long ears that stand out from the head, called “airplane” ears. You can also get “2/3 drop” ears. Or, you can quickly arrive at the goal: what are called “pendulous” ears (like Magma’s), which is what Nubians have. Those pendulous ears should not stand out from the head, and should be long enough to touch the goats’ nose tips.
In general, you can expect to see airplane ears in the first generation (F1s), which are 50/50 Nigerian/Nubian. You may have excellent Nubian breed character in an F1 Mini Nubian if with 75% or more Nubian (typically a Mini Nubian bred to a foundation Nubian). Occasionally, you will have an F1 50/50% kid that takes more after one parent than the other and thus has either upright, Nigerian type ears or very correct Nubian ears.
Now, with all that information under your belt, we’re ready to address misconceptions that many newcomers (and young breeders) have.
SO: Are Higher Generation Minis Better?
Eliya writes, “I get asked ALL THE TIME for a certain generation MiniNubian. As a seller, I always ask the buyer why they are looking for that particular generation. Most of the time they are looking for a higher generation (like 5th generation and higher) but occasionally it is a specific lower generation. Understanding the reasoning helps me to help them better.
Over the years, buyers’ reasons for wanting higher gen kids are often based on misconceptions. I want to cover three specific ones here, and also mention some specifics about generations and breeding that are often overlooked.”
General Misconception #1: “Higher generations have better breed character.”
Eliya writes, “This is not always the case! Great breed character is the goal, but it is not true that the further you get from foundation parents (i.e. higher generations) the better the breed character. It simply does not always work out that way. Try telling the generations of the two kids pictured below. One is an F5, and the other an F2. The parents of the F5 both had correct breed character, while the F2 kid had a dam with 2/3 drop ears and a sire with short, but pendulous ears. The one on the left is the F2. The one on the right is the F5.”
General Misconception #2: “Higher generation MiniNubians are better quality.”
Eliya writes: “Honestly, speaking as a seasoned breeder (since 1999), generations have nothing to do with the quality of the animal. I have seen some absolutely horrendous purebred Mini Nubians: wavy toplines, weak feet, poor breed character, terrible udder attachments, etc., and some absolutely stunning lower generation goats. Below are some examples of udders from various generation does in the Green Gables’ barn:
Gen 1
Gen 2
Gen 2
Gen 5
You need to carefully define the word “quality.”And this word can mean different things to different people as different breeders will love different aspects of the breed. But at base, it should mean that the goat has those elements that contribute to a long, healthy, productive life: conformation, strength, and milk production.
There can be excellent Mini Nubians at any generation and also terrible quality at any generation. The savvy buyer will look at the individual goat and the genetics behind it to determine its quality, not its generation.”
General Misconception #3: “Higher gens are easier to sell.”
Eliya writes: “This is true to an extent, but sadly, it is largely true because of misconceptions 1 and 2 above. If you think that higher gens mean higher quality, you will look to buy and breed higher gens, and look to sell higher gens as a breeder. This is a self-perpetuating issue that I have seen during over 22 years working with the breed make things worse for the breed, not better.
The informed buyer can take the first step in breaking that cycle. As a buyer or a breeder, educating yourself and others (buyers) can help prevent this from being an issue. If we would all start looking at animal quality instead of animal generations, then we would purchase and breed forward only the more excellent animals.
Please feel encouraged to send buyers who do not yet understand about generations to this post!”
Additional comments by Eliya:
While it is understandable to expect that higher generation MNs should be more true to the Nubian type, it simply is not always the case (see photo examples above). Looking at the actual breed character of a goat you are thinking of purchasing (and its parents) will get you much farther towards the goal of developing good breed character than looking at the generations.
I always recommend that breeders choose a buck that will best improve your doe(s)’ specific weaknesses regardless of the generation. I honestly do not consider generation at all when making my breeding plans. Often times, my higher gen does get bred to my lower gen bucks (just because they happen to be the best match for improving their kids over them). And, my high gen bucks often get the lower gen does. Again, I have been breeding MNs for over 22 years, but have only had a handful of purebreds so far. I would rather have excellent quality, regardless of generation, than rush for higher gens and sacrifice the quality and the improvements I am striving towards.
Boy do I LOVE LOVE LOVE my modular barn. I am so glad that I didn’t make permanent divisions within my goat space!
In the past 12 days, we’ve kidded out six does. Now we’re done until April, when we’ll start kidding out 11 more over the space of a month and a half. But then we’ll have nice weather for it! Whew!
We now have 14 new kids on the ground: 10 bucklings and 4 doelings, and their moms, to care for. I’ve spent 3 hours today digging out jug stalls and rearranging heat pads and barriers. As a result, our barn can easily accomodate the changing size and needs of our herd.
The Nursery Setup
With six does due to kid within a week during record cold and heavy snow and ice storms, we set up what I would call “the nursery.”
We could accommodate up to 4 does kidding and bonding simultaneously (three in stalls and one in the aisle as pictured, right). Then there was the adjacent “romper room” where 2-3 day-old (and older) kids and their dams can hang out.
In the romper room, for cold nights, we have heat pads under the manger, but will transition kids to just sleeping on hay under there in the next week, as temperatures are supposed to become warmer when the polar vortex moves out (yay!).
Tot Lot
With all the kids in this batch of does safely delivered, and with some sleep under my belt, I took the morning to change the space from “nursery” to “tot lot.” It took about three hours of solid work.
I left the jug stalls in place, but opened and latched back the doors so that all moms and all kids can have whichever spaces they choose. I took down the aisle partition, so the “romper room” space is bigger.
Does can also browse hay in the stalls, since the manger is tight for six does at a shot. (The hay scattered on the floor is for footing for kids as they run and play.) Below are some pictures of new kids exploring their expanded spaces and snuggled up under the manger for naps.
Manger with kids under
Kids sleeping under manger
Kids exploring new horizons
What’s that you’re eating, mom?
In a couple of weeks, as pasture comes in and fences are completed, we’ll be moving the cows to their new shed from this barn (their winter quarters), which has an adjacent 1.5 acres “safe pasture” for these six moms and their 14 kids.
Then, eleven more does will use the nursery/toddler space over a month and a half (early April to mid-May) to do their kidding. As their kids are established, they’ll in turn move to this “safe pasture” stable and these first six moms from winter kidding with their kids now six weeks older will move back to the big barn to enjoy larger pastures and the main barn space.
When they do, we’ll take down all the internal barriers, and voila! The now-older kids and their dams will have all the space they need at nights in the barn. Most days, they’ll be out on pasture.
Finally, as the second wave of kids grows older, they will also move back to the main barn to enjoy the enlarged space and bigger pastures.
Our kidding season is fast approaching. In about two weeks, we’ll have goat kids on the ground (and, Lord willing, a calf in June) and that means MILK — and also LOTS of cheese.
Last year, we started with a small wine cooler as a cheese cave. Then, we co-opted a freezer with a temperature controller gizmo on it. Still not big enough, with only 9 does in milk. This year, we are anticipating 17 does and one cow in milk, so now we have graduated to a 6′ x 8′ walk-in cheese cave! We’re excited.
Our cheese cave is a Cool Bot brand walk in cooler. It came a few months ago in pieces, and has been stacked in a corner of our barn until our friend Chris Lambert could come and put it together for us. Last weekend, he did! It was a big jigsaw puzzle at first.
The first step was to create the base of the unit. The pieces fit together using cam locks, but it’s really necessary to get the floor dead level.
We had done the basics ahead of this day, but Chris still had to do more work to level the sand beneath the unit before it could be erected.
Once the floor was level, the sides started to go up quickly. One corner gave trouble, but most of the rest of the sides, and the roof, were pretty easy.
Here is the shell, all erected. That hole on the right is where an air conditioning unit will fit. This will cool the interior to a temperature controlled by the Cool Bot controller.
The door is really heavy duty and loaded with safety features so that no grandchildren can get trapped within. (Even if they did, it’s not airtight, nor will the temperature be freezing, but it would be scary, so we’d like to avoid that! 😉 )
I think it will take awhile for Scott to fill this with cheese. Basic exterior dimensions are 6′ x 8′. Plenty of room for cheeses!
In late December, we had many adventures, not the least of which was the delivery of a new shed. I was SO praying that this shed would come before we left on our mid-winter break to FL so we could bring Maude home. Kudos to Caleb of Helmuth Builders for NOT giving up on what proved to be a grueling 14-hour delivery challenge!
Pictures below show the painful and difficult “birth” of this building. So narrow were the margins that we more than once got to calling it “the baby” and talking about “the birth canal.”
The building arrived from Helmuth Builders JUST after a big melt, and JUST as the sun was going down. 😬🙄🤷🏼♀️
Caleb (the delivery driver) put the building on a set of wheels on the back and on the front he pulled the building up our hill using his “mule” — the small hydrolic jack you can see in the pictures and video. It was astounding to me how this mule went over ice, thru mud and finally across our (former) riding ring in order to get the building to the site prepared for it.
First, the building went up our hill (we had to tear down our orchard fence on the left in the picture above) to get it past there. Then it had to go across the icy part at the top of the hill.
THEN it had to go between the existing big barn and past the goat porch — which is how far they got after the first 5+ hours of sweat and strain.
All this in the cold and dark. They didn’t give up until one of the mule’s tires blew.
Kudos to Jonathan Eye who came and helped with his skid steer and body until 10 PM that first night, when we all gave it up and went home to regroup for the night.
Next morning, it was more ticklish business to get the “baby” past the new barn goat porch, across the (now frozen) mud to the proper site, and then position it in place.
The above picture is of the “field side” where animals can use it as a run-in shelter. We plan to add gates as needed so that these can become holding stalls as well. Each has a door opening into the “ring side” of the complex.
After placing the building correctly, the delivery team had to erect the overhang that had hung by the side of the building on a giant “hindge” when it was in motion. They put four supportive posts in place where there were pre-existing piers poured, afixed trim, etc. Again, they finished after dark.
Putting up the overhang took two men working hard from noon until dark!
SO: we have a great new shed.
Again, so many thanks to Caleb and Jonathan and a good God who made it all possible!
I am relatively new to goats. This spring will be our third kidding season. As I reflect back on 2020, two success stories stand out, and I wanted to post about them to give hope to others, and give thanks to God, Who enabled us to bring full healing to two of our kids.
Listeriosis and polio in goats are both deadly diseases, left untreated. They present with nearly identical symptoms, so the typical approach is to treat for both of them simultaneously. Listeriosis can cross to humans, so you need to wash hands after treating sick goats. In case you’ve never had either of these, I’ll briefly define them.
“Listeriosis is caused by the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes and is commonly seen in cooler climates [though our first case was in August]. These bacteria can be found in the soil, food sources, and even the feces of healthy animals. Most commonly, this disease of sheep and goats is observed as a result of feeding moldy or spoiled hay or silage.”
You treat listeriosis with massive amounts of penicillin, given in shots. Because these bacteria cause a neurological disease yielding deadly paralysis, you need to push the bacteria-killing penicillin past the brain/blood barrier to defeat it. Some people give the shots every six hours around the clock. Our vet directed us to give it twice a day, AM/PM.
We didn’t have moldy hay in our barn, but our goats forage daily in a large pasture, so in the humid days of late summer, our 10-week-old kid, Dandy Lion (right), could have gotten it in the field.
Or… he could have had polio. “Polioencephalomalacia (polio) in ruminants is caused by a thiamine deficiency and/or sulfur toxicity. Other causes include improper feeding, feeding too much grain, or anything that disrupts the health and well being of rumen microbes, such as chronic or acute acidosis or indigestion.”
The treatment for polio is to give large doses of Thiamine (a type of vitamin B) injected sub-Q. Polio is relatively easy to cure if caught early, but since both of these diseases present the same, and it’s important to act immediately, we treated Dandy for both simultaneously, under the direction of our vet.
We think that nine-month old Bridget (left) was possibly stressed by being forcibly weaned, and that her stress brought on her susceptibility to her listeriosis/polio battle.
I felt really badly that two of our animals came down with this disease within a few months of each other, and I earnestly asked my vet if my management was at all at fault, and he said “No. These bacterium are everywhere.”
Symptoms and Treatments for Dandy Lion
So, if you’ve never seen it, what are the symptoms of listeriosis/polio?
With Dandy, during morning chores one day, I noticed that my normally bouncy, friendly little buckling was sleepy and listless. He looked punk; he looked “off.” I noted it, thinking it might be coccidia, and moved on.
But, that night on barn cam, he was standing with his head jammed into a crook in the goats’ sleeping benches. When I went up at 2 AM to help him (thinking he was actually stuck) he stumbled away from me as if drunk and dug his head sideways into another corner.
We waited until daybreak, and then contacted mentors and our vet. After gaining an ides of what it was, we started pumping penicillin and thiamine into him.
Since he was young and really bad, we also had to tube feed him. It takes about 4-7 days of treatment fo them to be fully healed, so they need to be hydrated and fed, or the disease will win.
The idea of tube feeding terrified me at first. Our vet talked us through the process by phone, but it was watching YouTube videos that really helped us out.
We found that, in practice, with a 10-week-old kid tube feeding is not hard, especially if the kid is really out of it. If you mistakenly get the tube down the windpipe (which we never did) they cough. If they don’t cough, you’re good!
We ended up tube feeding this little guy four times a day, giving him four ounces of milk each time. It got to be routine, amazingly, and now I can do it easily. But starting it was scary. I’m just writing this to say: YES, you can if you must!
We also made Dandy into a little pin cushion: we gave him 10 ccs of penicillin morning and evening for about five days. I hated it; but again, the alternative was death.
Part of Dandy’s response to his pain was to STAND for three straight days (as in the picture above) with his head jammed in a corner. He would NOT lie down to rest. We tube fed him, isolated him to a small area for his safety, and gave him shots for four to five days (I can’t remember the exact number).
PLEASE NOTE: We isolated Dandy for his safety. You do NOT have to quarantine for these diseases since the bacteria are everywhere. However, we did use gloves and wash hands because Dandy was drooling and listeriosis does cross to humans.
At nights, we put his mom in with him for comfort. She needed to go out during the day to eat, but at nights we put him in with her. He would try to nurse but not be able to suck the teat because his brain had lost that connection. He would need to re-learn it, or not be able to drink, and thus live.
I watched him day and night (on my barn cam) and he never layed down. This worried me. After he’d been on his feet for three days straight, I decided to just FORCE his little body to rest. I sat in this chair for three hours on the fourth day and just let him sleep in my lap. I also did the same that afternoon for more than an hour. He really did seem to get better from that time on, and that night I saw him lie down with his mom.
After about five days of treatment, Dandy was definitely on his feet and moving around normally, but he still couldn’t nurse his mom. This worried me so much! He did start eating hay, but wasn’t nursing. I worried about dehydration.
Finally, on the sixth day, I saw Dandy take a LONG drink from a bucket of water and I dissolved into happy tears. He was old enough to wean from milk and eating hay. If he could drink from a bucket, he would live without tubing.
As it turns out, one of the strengths of the mammalian brain is that it can reroute itself to re-learn tasks that are lost from injury to the brain. So it was with Dandy. We kept him another two weeks beyond what we would normally have before he went to his new home, and in about 10 days, he had figured out how to nurse again! (It was just in time for us to send him home with his new family, and he had been trained to the bottle, so they were able to baby him with milk feedings for another month to help him regain his lost weight.)
Symptoms and Treatment for Bridget
We were so grateful that Dandy was healed through this process, and it gave us confidence when, on November 4, during morning chores, 10-month-old Bridget started the behavior in the video, right (click on the triangle to view the video, and be patient while it loads).
Note the tongue hanging out the left side of her mouth, the slobber, and the rubbing of her mouth on surfaces.
We knew something was badly wrong, and began immediately with the penicillin and thiamine. We contacted our vet, and he agreed on the treatment.
Bridget was much older than Dandy had been, and it was fall, where the foliage was dying down. She was too old for us to safely tube, and she was not as sick as Dandy had been, in terms of behavior. She was walking, eating, and drinking. She just could not put her tongue in, and her cud got caught in her cheek.
In her case, we asked our vet to come out and make sure that it wasn’t a dental issue, or maybe a thorn caught in her cheek or throat. He checked her thoroughly and determined that it was most probably early listeriosis/polio.
Thus, Bridget became our second pincushion for another week or so. She was eating and running with the herd the whole time we were treating her. She had plenty of energy. She never had the twisting of the neck or the dazed “out of it” expression. She laid down with her mom at night, and also ate out of the manger from time to time at night on cam.
The issue with her was that, each morning, in the bedding (and also in the mineral dishes) we found regurgitated cud. LOTS of it. At first I thought it was scours, but then I would see her poop normal, black goat berries, and this “scour” had texture to it and was very green and didn’t smell bad. It finally dawned on us that it was drool! All night long, as Bridget chewed her cud and sought to process her food normally, her mouth paralysis was preventing her from swallowing her cud back down to where her the rest of her digestive system could finish processing it. We worried about her losing weight day by day and bought an animal-size scale.
We started to weigh Bridget and found that she was losing weight. Though her rumin could process 80% of the fatty acids of her feed through its walls (thus, she was not dying quickly), we were thinking that if she became weak or wasted away to pitiful proportions, we would have to put her down. Having fought so hard for her, and having a lot invested in her bloodlines, I was really sad and praying hard for her to be healed. Morning by morning, there were several large piles of cud drool in her bedding, and on her mom’s back from sleeping near each other, and some in those mineral dishes. SIGH. (It was both gross and discouraging.)
Having seen Dandy’s brain reconnect, though, I kept waiting to see if her brain would repair the paralysis damage. But, I also worried that it was taking so long. After six weeks of drooling illness, I was seriously thinking of putting her down, and really depressed about it. At that point, though, Eliya Elmquist really encouraged me that one of her does had taken a LONG time to recover from listeriosis. This gave me peace to wait on the Lord to see what would happen, and to simply give it to Him.
On Christmas morning (almost 8 weeks since she had first sickened), I went up to do morning chores and mucking. I came to Bridget’s bed with a pitchfork, ready to put her drool piles into my muck bucket. There was almost no drool!! Excited, I told Scott about it and waited for the next morning… no drool!!!! I was SO HAPPY and excited. She has been drool-free since Christmas Day.
After a few days of not seeing drool, we weighed Bridget. She had gained 10 pounds in two weeks from her last weigh in! We were SO SO grateful to God for His grace in creating that mammalian brain that had been re-routed to allow Bridget not only to live, but to re-learn how to swallow her cud. Bridget will probably make a full recovery and be bred next fall.
We are thankful, and I hope that this post will encourage you in any battles with listeriosis/polio to hang in there and wait on that amazing mammalian brain if your goat has some lasting after effects.
