goats

Speaking before a packed lecture theater at MIT yesterday, Neal Stephenson worried that the gloomy outlook prevalent in modern science fiction may be undermining the genre's ability to inspire engineers and scientists. Describing himself as a "pessimist trying to turn himself into an optimist," and acknowledging that some of his own work has contributed to the dystopian trend, he added "if every depiction of the future is grim...then it doesn't create much of an incentive to building the future." Consequently, Stephenson is trying to make a literary course correction... Well, since he ruined…
Lots of stuff to update you all on. First, the family expansion project - still nothing new. After three months of waiting, we've decided to expand our looking in a few different ways - our county just doesn't have a placement, and after all the work of getting ready, we're anxious to get one. Meanwhile, I'm powering through the Adapting-In-Place Manual, and it will be out next spring. Here's a preview of the Cover: Making Home Cover.pdf I'm also getting ready for the ASPO-USA conference - where I'm going to be sharing a hotel room with Nicole Foss. We're going to have a late night…
I knew that goats were the new chickens, the new black, the coolest accessory of all time. That I got. But I admit, I hadn't kept up with the new public role goats have been taking. Apparently they are out shopping. I've never considered taking mine to the mall, but hey, why not? Maybe I'd learn to appreciate shopping if I had a goat with me! It couldn't make me enjoy shopping less! Sharon
I thought y'all might want to see as well as hear what's going on around here. First, there's the baby goats: (Asher with Midori) (Isaiah holding Margarita) (Poppy nurses little Grog. Stout is in the background waiting his turn.) The baby goats aren't the only baby things we have in profusion: (Marigold gave us 8 baby Cinnamon Rabbits, while Rosemary followed with another five.) (Mama hen and her babies) Meanwhile, the harvest is coming apace! Everything is growing like weeds (including the weeds!). Check out the boys in the raspberry patch. They don't leave us much! (Lavatera in…
Last night as I went about my chores, I was mulling over a possible post on how farming is actually easier than most people think it is. I'm winding up a stretch of time where Eric and the boys have been in NYC visiting Grandma, while I stayed at home to tend the farm. While Eric and I don't have a very gendered division of labor, we do have our customary tasks. Eric does floors, I do roofs, He does engines, I cut wood, I can, he bakes, when we had babies, I did input (nursing) and he did output (diaper changes). I got all self-satisfied about how well I was managing by myself, which of…
The always-wonderful Matron of Husbandry has a lovely post about pasture diversity and grass-feeding that did better (and purtier - she always has lots of great pix) something I've been meaning to do - ie, explore what you learn from grass farming that no one else teaches. For all the books I've read about grazing, I don't learn nearly as much by simply watching my animals and my pastures. I suspect this is true for everyone. I think the single best thing I have learned from rotational grazing is I didn't know what I thought I knew about grass and cows. Namely what I think looks good is…
It has been kind of quiet here, because well, it is spring, and that means that all my primary focus has shifted outside the house. The period from May 1 to June 15 is the busiest, craziest, wildest period of the year, and the shoulder season, ie, the month of April, its biggest rival. We have six baby goats on the ground right now, with two more does due this weekend and five more due in July. I'll be posting the "goats for sale" list very soon - we'll have a 1 year old buck (Goldenrod), at least one senior milking doe and at least one baby, and later in the season, we'll have two doelings…
I was planning to whine a little. You see I got back from Maryland and I was really, really tired. Got up at 4am after a late night to get to the train the first night. Four hours sleep the second night, because I was (you pity me, right?) drinking wine with Dmitry Orlov, Megan Bachman, John Michael Greer and other cool people until the wee hours. Then my train pulled into NYC close to midnight and I didn't get to bed at the Hotel In-Law until the wee hours again. Up at dawn to catch the next leg of the train up to home, with guests coming a couple hours later. So I was most definitely…
For those of us with dairy critters, now is the time of milk overflow, but even if you aren't ever going to get a cute little goat, you might have milk around. And boy is this yummy. We'll get more complicated eventually, but this is pretty simple, and if you've never made any kind of cheese, this is a great start!
Chores sounds like such a dreary word, and until I moved to a farm, I would never have believed that I'd have anything positive to say about it. As a kid, I did chores around the house, and while I may have groused less about the dishes and cleaning gutters as an adult, I certainly didn't (and don't) love the jobs. But on a farm, chores are something else - they are bookends to each day, a formal structure like the forms of a sonnet or musical scales that shape the day. They can be speeded up, slowed down, slightly elided and occasionally contracted out, but for the most part, they are…
Simon came in the door calling "Moooooooomm....Moooooommmm!!" It didn't sound like the "someone is bleeding to death" call or the "Isaiah said my hat looked funny and I beaned him one with a rock and he had the temerity to hit me back and it hurt..." cry, each which has a certain urgency too it. Nor was it even the much more relaxed "by the way, I haven't seen my littlest brother for a long time, like since before lunch, and you told me not to let him fall in the creek, but I really wasn't paying attention" one. No this was a "Mom, I've got something cool to tell you" call. What, I…
Energy Bulletin ran this excellent piece from the New York Times on a crisis facing Mongolian Goat Herders who are attempting to deal with unstable world markets, climate change and overgrazing. I was fascinated by the clear way that the author of the piece lays out the vicious circle that they've entered into, and I was struck by how useful an example it is of the kind of ecological vicious circle that we face all the time: To compensate for low prices, herders have been increasing supply by breeding more goats -- a classic vicious circle. Mongolia's goat population is now approaching 20…
As I've mentioned, we raise our own dairy goats and milk them, and we drink the milk raw, or rather, unpasteurized. Since I wrote my last piece about the goats, I've had several people email me asking for advice about their dairy choices - one person living locally wanted me to sell her raw milk, two others asked if I advised people who can't get their own livestock to source and purchase raw milk. So I thought I'd write a piece about raw milk and your options. Perhaps the first thing I want to say is that I actually don't have that strong an opinion on this subject, believe it or not.…
Note: Another new reader asked if I could say a little more about the goats. Here's more. If you were to come to visit right now, you wouldn't see The Milk Truck until you started to get out of your car. But the moment you opened your door, the little vacuum cleaners would stick their heads in, just to make sure there's no food on the floor. You see, at my house, there's always food on the floor. My children drip crumbs and leave apple cores, and the litte vacuum cleaners feel it is there job to clean up. But let's back up. The little vacuum cleaners are Tekiah (Tekky) and Arava. They…
You all know who Kanye West is. Personally, I had never heard of the man until yesterday afternoon. But then, until yesterday afternoon I thought MTV was a cable television network that played music videos, so what do I know. But never mind that. We're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about Kanye West... In 2006, West appeared on the front cover of Rolling Stone as Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. I'm sure a lot of Christians thought he was an asshole for doing that. But just as his very in-your-face efforts to speak out against homophobia in hip hop, he was not afraid to…