It was all about hay this week on the goat farm. The last few days, we’ve been counting our bales of hay every time we feed the goats. It takes a little over one bale of hay to feed all the goats each time - and we feed them twice a day. But, look, our hay barn is nearly empty! This photo shows somewhat less than an eighth of the barn. These are bales of millet. The opposite corner of the barn has bales of alfalfa. But, the remaining three quarters of the barn is completely empty.
Jan has a hay guy - he supplies all her hay, year ‘round. She got in touch with him and told him we were running low. So, he came over and brought us more hay.
But, the trouble was, it’s been incredibly wet here. We had a freak snow storm just before Thanksgiving - eight inches of snow that completely melted the following day. After that, we’ve had several unusually rainy days. So, our roads have been wet.
The photo below is the main road that runs in front of our house. I took this from the end of our driveway. On the main road, you can see ruts at the sides, and puddles - but this is the main road, so it’s in pretty good shape. The little road that branches off from this to our hay barn is NOT in such good shape!
So, instead of delivering the hay to the hay barn, the hay guy delivered twelve bales to the breezeway in between our two houses! (See the photo below).
This just isn’t a great place for the hay. For one thing, this is an area where the guard dogs hang out.
Look at those good dogs! They are Great Pyrenees. Their job is to guard the herd of goats, and they’re brilliant at it. But Clark (the dog on the left) is still kind of a puppy (at over 90 pounds) and he will completely tear up a bale of hay if he gets a chance. Also, we load up the hay cart in a really specific way, and it’s awkward to do it in the breezeway, what with the table, and all the other stuff in the way.
This is the hay cart when it’s loaded, ready to go out and feed the goats. Notice how the hay is all broken up - not a solid bale any more. It’s broken into flakes. Flakes are kind of the natural way the bales break into slices. Jan says the rule of thumb is about a half a flake per goat per feeding. So, the hay cart has specific flakes for specific pens, and some of the flakes are millet and some of the flakes are alfalfa.
The goats really prefer the alfalfa.
Hay is amazingly complicated. Who knew? There are three basic types of hay: grass, legume, and grain. Alfalfa is one of the grass types of hay. It has a really high protein and calcium content. Other types of grass hays are Timothy and Orchard Grass. Millet is a grain type of hay.
I know exactly two things about millet. One is that it’s a delicious grain! The other is that it was one of the few things St. Simeon Stylites ate. He was one of the Desert Fathers - lived around the year 400. He spent 37 years living on top of a pillar near Aleppo, Syria. He survived mainly on millet. He had joined a monastery when he was a teenager, but felt the need for more silence and austerity, so he began living in a tiny hut. Pilgrims kept seeking him out for advice, interrupting his solitude, so eventually he built a platform on top of a pillar, where he felt more serene. Folklore says that he came down from there once a month to meet with the pilgrims and eat a handful of millet seed. After his death, a church was built around his pillar, and it survived until May 12, 2016, when it was destroyed by a bomb.
But, back to the goats’ hay. This hay is millet:
This hay is alfalfa:
After the hay guy put the hay in the breezeway, I thought, how hard could it be to move all the hay from the breezeway into the hay barn?
Luckily for me, Jan has a gorilla cart - I don’t know if it’s meant for hay, or what, but one bale fits perfectly in the cart.
I was able to move all the bales over to the hay barn. The best thing about that project was that the dogs felt that it was their duty to protect the hay shipments. When I moved the first bale, the dogs were very curious - this was not an activity that was part of their normal routine. But, when I moved the second bale, they recognized a pattern, and from then on, they went ahead of me all the way, making sure that the route was safe, and the hay made it to the barn without incident. Dogs are amazing
This is a photo of the sky on the day I moved the bales. So incredibly beautiful!
I’ve gotten several responses from last week’s newsletter. The first one was from my cousin, Jan, who says that Jet (the cat who loves the chickens) is a FEMALE! I got her pronouns all wrong! Sorry, Jet!
The second topic - which got a lot more responses - was about the goats peeing on their own faces. How do they do it? That was the thing everyone wanted to know. I asked Jan. She explained it.
When I was a kid, we had a special nozzle that you could put on the garden hose. When you put that nozzle on, the water was forced out a much smaller hole. Water normally just gurgled out of the end of the hose, but with the nozzle on, it could shoot halfway across the back yard. Well, the male goats have a nozzle like that as part of their standard equipment, and when they want to pee on their faces, that’s what they use. Sadly, that piece of equipment means that if they get kidney stones, it’s almost impossible for them to pass. But, the vet can surgically remove the entire nozzle!
Nature is fascinating!
Here’s a photo of the girls (who we hope are all pregnant) wondering why I’m standing at their gate with my phone:
