Over the last couple of years my son told me he really wanted to get goats, and I adamantly and repeatedly told him, “No, we don’t have enough room,” and offered rabbits as an option. He agreed but that wasn’t what he wanted and after a year gave them away.
In the meantime, he has helped friends take care of their goats and learned to milk them.
For the last few months I’ve been noting how much space owners set aside for two or three goats, and it’s less than I thought was necessary. I spent a long time thinking about if I was willing to change the look of my yard to make room for two milk goats and a pen for them. I started to slowly find the idea more doable and acceptable.
Until recently, I had hoped we could rent or buy some land adjoining us. One person was willing to lease us the entire plot of five dunam but only for a year and for five times the going price for agricultural land. The other didn’t want to lease or sell any land. The thought behind having more land was so we could raise some animals and practice permaculture principles to rebuild the completely depleted chemically farmed soil, and develop some kind of food forest. That would mean investing in fencing and many other significant start up expenses, that we wouldn’t be willing to do without a long term lease.
I realized if I scaled down my vision, I could do some of those things in my yard right now. But it means giving up – to some degree – the kind of ‘pretty’ yard I’ve spent time developing.
Why would I want goats? Seventeen years ago I learned about the incredible nutritional benefits of raw milk, and since then have thought how amazing it would be to have our own source of milk. In the US, I traveled every month or two to Pennsylvania, where I bought raw milk directly from a Mennonite farmer, twenty plus gallons at a time.
When I moved to Yavneel, I was able to buy raw goats milk from a local family and was thrilled to let someone else raise the goats and for me to have the benefits. My daughter and I bought all that they had. However, the supply became irregular and then petered out completely.
Healing our very broken industrialized food system begins with supporting local farmers, and there’s nothing more local than producing food yourself! Though milk hasn’t been an important part of our diets since we left the US, when I thought about what would be the best use of our very limited space to raise some of our own food, milk kept coming up as the top option. (Eggs would have been number one, but my son is already raising chickens.)
This is NOT a frugal undertaking. From a strictly economics perspective, it doesn’t save money but this goes beyond money for us, since we see it as an investment in our health. If we had our own raw milk, it would replace other less nutritious things that we currently eat.
So what are the costs involved in getting milk goats?
First is buying the goats – and the costs have gone up quite a bit in the months since we began thinking about this. A good milk goat costs between 1800 – 2000 shekels each. (I asked the goat broker why they’re more expensive than a few months ago, and he said, “Gas has gone up, food has gone up, meat has gone up – why wouldn’t the cost of goats go up?!”) You can buy young female kids for 700 – 1000 shekels but then have to feed them and breed them and wean the babies before you get milk, which costs plenty of time and money.
Then there’s the issue of buying hay. We’re in a shmita year, and can’t buy hay that is currently being grown. There is literally a hay field opposite my house, and a few days ago I watched him bale the hay and stack the bales, thinking how easy and convenient it would be if I could run over to the tractor driver and ask him to drop a bale over the wall into my yard – but I can’t buy any of it. Everyone who had animals who was concerned about shmita issues knew to pre-buy hay for the upcoming year. There’s no hay that I know of available for purchase left from last year – several months ago we found one person who had a few small bales who told us to call him back in a week, since he was out of town. When we called back, he had already sold the non-shmita hay to someone else.
When my son bought his purebred barred Plymouth Rock chickens from a Circassian woman a couple of months ago, I asked her for her hay supplier. I’m allowed to buy hay from a non-Jew, since he’s not violating any Torah laws by growing hay during shmita. She gave me a number, but when I called him, he said he’s no longer selling privately, and all of his hay is now sold directly to a broker. He had no suggestions of anyone else I could speak to.
We have to ask a rav if we’re allowed to feed animals hay that was grown as heter mechira, because that’s what most Jewish farmers have relied on.
Then there’s the cost of animal feed that is going through the roof. You can’t save costs by pre-buying feed, because after a couple of months the weevil eggs inside the grains hatch, multiply, infest the batch and the feed gets ruined.
And of course, we need to be able to house them, and in addition to the pen need a hay feeder and a milking stand – all of which costs more money.
Despite all the costs and logistical challenges, I’m still seriously considering goats. Does that sound crazy?
Avivah
It definitely sounds like a big undertaking !
Besides for the benefits the goats will give you IYH, will their upkeep be very time consuming and uncomfortable for you, or do you picture it as an enjoyable pastime?
I guess, if I were you, it would mainly boil down to – how nutritionally deficient do you find your diet now as compared to what the goats can give you.
It would probably be less work to pursue finding someone growing goats (though it does sort of sound like you’ve exhausted that venue)
I’ve gone back and forth about if it’s worth it. There are things that don’t logically make sense but feel good, and this is one of those things. I can tell you a long list of reasons I shouldn’t do this, starting with the money and the work.
I see the work involved as a task that needs to be done, but a positive task. Yesterday I visited someone with goats, just to see some things that I wasn’t able to visualize, and it felt so relaxing to sit next to the pen. I enjoy being in nature and for me, there’s something about being around animals that gives me a similar feeling.
I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long, long time, picturing all our homeschooled kids being involved. It’s a bit of an irony and bittersweet feeling to be able to do this now, when most of our children aren’t around.
About our diet – it’s not that it’s deficient. But there are nutritional benefits to high quality animal products that aren’t found in other foods. And being able to have a bit of self-sufficiency is a nice thought. Goats are very tangible, and the benefits are less so….
I know very little about goats, other than that a school near where we used to live had goats for many years and we went to visit them a lot. When we moved in, they had a male and female and we saw them have a number of “kids” over the years. The male was very aggressive and would charge the fence but the females did not seem aggressive. There was quite an odor as well. Not sure if that can be avoided but you could smell it from the street above the school walking by. I wanted to mention that on a separate note, I think it would be very interesting to make a post about what we discussed last week about “canning” – just out of general interest. I’m researching it more now!
There’s two sources of smell – a male goat of breeding age has a certain smell. We’re not getting males.
The other is not cleaning the pen enough. Hopefully we would take care of that!
About the pressuring canning post – I’ve thought about that for a long time. Maybe now is a good time for it; I’ll see!
I recall sleeping in Har Nof of all places many years ago and staying awake all night listening to a goat bleating (maybe it belonged to an Arab down below). I’m still fairly traumatized by that sleepless night (it was also insufferably hot/no a/c). So if you’re all sound sleepers, then disregard my possible concern.
Oh, dear! It sounds like the same issue as the people who have dogs who bark all night.
I think when an animal is making that much noise at a time they’re meant to be sleeping, they’re indicating something is wrong. But maybe some breeds are just louder at night? I know that some breeds are much quieter than others.
I’m such a city girl but next year or later this year if you find hay seems reasonable because it would not only be a food experiment but provide a valuable educational project for your son who seems like he could easily carry on with animals and food production in his adult life. Google tells me dairy goats can live 8-12 years but if you just mentally release the idea of getting any investment back (or just think of the investment being for your son’s education) they could always be given away if necessary to someone wanting to also try.
Would they reduce your yard work by eating grass? I always thought they were much better than mechanical lawn mowers because they’re so cute!
Hi, Anne! I agree it will be a good learning experience for all of us!
If I had a large American sized yard, it could help keep my grass short, but alas, my Israeli sized yard is comparatively like a postage stamp. I’ve been repeatedly warned that my vegetation will be ruined in short order if I let them out, so they will NOT be given free reign in my yard. My natural lawnmowers are my three rabbits, which I’ve been rotating on the grass but in these drier summer months am running out of space to rotate them so just this week I put them on a soil base in the garden instead.
As far as the goats, I have a public area adjacent to my yard and hope to periodically graze them there. The challenge with grazing is that we need to stay close by when they are there, to keep them from running off and prevent them from being stolen. So their grazing would be limited to when we could stay close by for an extended period.
Sounds like a very cool idea if you can work out all the logistics. And I’ve been dreaming of permaculture and food forests myself for quite some time…
I decided when when I moved here that I can do something aligned with my permaculture ideals, even if I don’t have a huge amount of space. The first things I planted when I moved here were fruit trees all around the perimeter – it’s amazing how many I managed to pack in! (Mango, avocado, plum, pomegranate, fig, loquat, orange, clementine, lemon-lime, kumquats, fejoia, banana, moringa, and others.) I’ll need to do a good bit of pruning as they get older, to keep them size appropriate for our space.