This website aims to explain how I go about raising dairy goats in the city. I keep chickens, bees, and a big vegetable garden too, but there are lots of websites on how to do those things, so here I will focus on urban dairy goats. I will also focus on how to raise dairy goats in a way that is sustainable.

I keep two does (mini-la manchas) in a well fenced 20 foot by 20 foot area of my back yard. They have a six foot by eight foot shed that keeps them dry when it rains (which it does A LOT) here in Seattle. They also have a set of stairs that they like to climb and a hay feeder that they like to hop up onto and sleep on. They are each about two years old now. Snowflake had two bucklings in May of 2007 (Joel Salatin and Abraham) and a bucking and a doeling in June of 2008 (Bessie/Jackie O and Richard Conlin). Brownie had her first set of kids (two doelings, Phyllis Schulman and Rosie Fluffy Socks) in March, 2008. I breed Snowflake and Brownie each year for maximum milk production, but as time goes on, I hope to breed them only every other year. I sell the kids when they reach eight weeks old.

Every morning I go to my goat area, change water, sweep poop from the stairs, collect eggs from my chickens and sit down to milk Brownie and Snowflake. Milking is a difficult skill to learn. It’s not complicated, but it takes lots of practice to get fast at it and you do need to be fast. If you are not, the goat gets impatient and tends to kick over the milking pail and cause trouble. Between the two goats, I am now getting about a gallon of a milk a day and there is nothing so satisfying as carrying into my kitchen a mason jar full of fresh milk.

Lots of people have told me that they would like to keep a goat, but that they don’t care for goats milk. What they almost always mean is that they don’t like the goats milk they have tried from a carton from the super market. Fresh goats milk is very similar to cows milk, but perhaps richer and sweeter. I always thought I hated goats milk, but when I first tried fresh goats milk, I was delighted. I felt I had discovered a sort of mini-cow, and I had to have one. (turns out I needed two, since goats are always unhappy without another goat or hooved animal around).

This website is still under construction. I am a full time mom, I have contract work when my son is in school, and I have a farm to tend. So, bear with me as I add to it bit by bit every week or so.