01/27/2025
I haven't posted in a while and wanted to take a minute to recap 2024. This was probably the roughest year we've had since we started our little hobby farm. There were some wins, but there were so many personal losses.
We kicked off the year strong with some cute, healthy kids. Unfortunately, they were all boys with the exception of little Ahsoka (who eventually went on to find herself a cute little home). When we finally started seeing some pink in our baby goat pens, we had heartbreak hit with the loss of two of our little doelings, a first for us. The last remaining doeling at the time, Violet, then was struck down with a freak case of tetanus. We caught it in the early stages and rushed her to Lansing for a stay with MSU. When she came home, she needed regular tube feedings so she became a little Bluey-watching house goat. It took all of June to rehabilitate her, but in the beginning of July, she accepted Anna as a substitute mom for nursing and was able to go back outside to live with her fellow kids.
Only a few days after successfully getting Violet off the feeding tube, our beautiful Zeppelin suddenly started having trouble breathing. We rushed her to the emergency vet only to find that she appeared to have a cancerous mass in her lung compounded by an infection. She was only six years old and hands down the best shepherd we've ever had share our farm.
Unbelievably, only ten days after the loss of Zeppelin, my 29 year old childhood horse, Tuffy, colicked. Our vet graciously came out for a midnight house call only to find that he was most likely twisted. She gave him a number of treatments to see if he could pull through, but ultimately she came back in the wee hours of the morning and we walked him to the back of the pasture as the sun was coming up and laid him to rest.
We picked up in August and attended the annual Mitten Madness ADGA Goat show. We didn't bring home any ribbons, but it's always good to network with other MI goat farms and oogle everyone's beautiful animals. Directly after the goat show came Michigan's Linear Appraisal. What a huge learning day! The highlight of the day was our Sr. Alpine doe, Doterra, coming away with a score of EEEV 90 even though she was dry.
We also logged some amazing udders from our girls (Anna, Lia, and Trixie shown).
We made a new addition to the farm, a little 3yr old we named Bitsy B. She came from a beautiful hunter-jumper facility north of Detroit and had an injury to her stifle that needed a long rest period. With the loss of Tuffy, I felt like our farm could be just the home she needed.
With the fall came a protracted battle with an new enemy that took a while to diagnose - barberpole worms. We'd tried several differential diagnoses after an initial worming didn't solve the issue, including sending blood samples off for analysis. We finally learned we needed to use a more potent antiparasitic. A point of confusion through the entire experience was wondering why our bucks were getting so sick so quickly, one by one, but our does were perfectly fine. We later learned that horses are not an intermediate host for barperpole worms and that co-grazing our girls with our horses had likely provided the protective factor they needed to prevent them from becoming ill. Going forward, this is an important lesson we've learned to improve our holistic management. Unfortunately, we lost several important bucks to these parasites, including our main herd sire, Hulk.
October came and southeast Michigan got the joy of "seeing" (if you looked through a camera) the gorgeous aurora again. We also saw the fruits of adding pigs to the farm in the spring and got to enjoy some delicious bacon as well as supply our friends and family with pasture & milk raised pork.
With the coming of breeding season, our farm tried out a new technique this year - artificial insemination. For the past few years, we've bought Black Friday specials from Blue Mountain Genetics and we finally got to put them to use. So far we've got one potential positive and we've got our fingers crossed for a few more.
2024 had one final barb it wanted to throw our way in December. My pony, Runa, had been having issues with multiple infections as well as weight loss in spite of a 3x per day feeding program. We'd had the vet out multiple times for wound care, medication, teeth checking, etc. and she was scheduled to go into the big guns dental doctor later in the month for at least one surgical tooth removal. It seemed like no matter what we did, she just kept getting weaker. Finally, on December 4th, I came out to find her down in her stall and unable to rise, even though she clearly wanted to. We called the vet out again in hopes that she just needed some different medications and fluids to get her feet back under her. What we found instead was that she'd broken her hip in some earlier attempt to rise. As our vet said, when deciding whether or not to put a horse down, a broken bone is one of the clearest answers you can get in the horse world. We put my pony down that afternoon and laid her to rest next to Tuffy in the back of the pasture. The vet suspected she had a larger, systemic issue at hand that was causing her immune system to fail and her body to weaken.
As we move forward into 2025, we're taking any lessons there were to learn with us as well as the memories of the special friends we lost. We're crossing our fingers that more of our AI breedings come back positive. We also expanded our hog operation by purchasing a breeding boar that was himself sired by On Tap. On Tap was the Grand Champion Berkshire Boar at the 2021 National Recovery Show in Des Moines, IA. and his littermate was the Grand Champion Berkshire Boar at the 2021 CPS STC in Springfield, IL. We're looking forward to him siring little piglets with our Tamworth, Henrietta. With the addition of pigs to our rotation for both garden and pasture, we've got high hopes for a better garden this year.
2024 may have kicked our butts a little, but we're not down for the count, and we'll see you in 2025!
