Milking Goats

Chloe

We had been trying to milk Chloe for a week an were only getting an ounce or two each time. I did try separating her for a few hours during the day from her son, but he kept getting out of the pen I put him in. We thought Chloe just wasn't a good milker and decided to put her up for sale. A registered milking goat came up on craigslist so we went to take a look at her. The seller (we told her the issues we were having with Chloe) let us milk 2 other goats as well as the one for sale just so we could see the differences. We also got to see how much milk Bambi was giving. We decided that we would take Bambi, we were just going to wait until the weekend to pick her up. She also told us to try separating Chloe from her son at night and then milk her in the morning. We separated them on Friday night.

Bambi

So Saturday morning we tried milking Chloe in the morning (We had to wait until Saturday so my husband could help me.) I could feel the milk in her udder! So I milked her. She finished all the grains while milking so I got her more and kept milking. We ended up with 12 ounces of milk! (All this time we thought that we needed a registered dairy goat to get milk; we were so wrong, You just need to learn the correct procedures to milking a goat, which Bambi's owner taught us.) So I took all the ads I posted to sell her down.

Chloe has been giving me 12-14 ounces of milk every morning since then, which has only been a few days. I am very pleased with her. She is also much better on the milk stand as she will only kick a few times and doesn't fight me while trying to milk her.

We have decided to sell her son. We are going to have to keep him separate if we want to use him for breeding purposes which means we will have to get him a male goat friend to keep him company in a separate pen. But we already know he can get out if he really wants to. Also, I have to use him to bribe Chloe on the milk stand in the mornings - too much work! Not to mention, my husband would have to build a pen for him and we would always worry about him getting out and knocking one of our goats up.