After our first couple of years on our 1-acre smallholding in Cornwall, we didn't really change the types of animals we kept nor their numbers. This was manly due to our restricted land amount. Other than the poultry we weren’t in a position to keep any animals we bred and once we had our handful of goats, sheep and alpacas, there was no way we could entertain keeping another species.
Once we bought Cadbury Cottage, we knew we would have the opportunity to both grow our numbers and add to the species of livestock. We have already done both by buying six more sheep, three more alpacas and getting our Dexter cows. And now we are trying to decide the best way forward for our goats!
Our plans before we moved were to buy a couple of Boer goats so we could raise meat stock as well as dairy. Now that we are no longer going to be able to breed from Curds, Cheddar and Gorge, we need to decide what should happen to the three of them and alongside that, whether we still want to keep Boers and if so how many.
We MAY have found someone who could rehome Curds and family BUT aside from the fact that Jack in particular is going to find it hard to ‘let go’, re-homing any animal can be very risky! The person concerned specifically wants to offer a home to goats that need re-homing (as opposed to just ‘buying’ some goats), she has visited us here and met the girls and we are due to ‘inspect’ her farm as well. Depending on the outcome, we should then be able to decide about the Boer goats.
And to add to this welter of emotional indecision, we are also now thinking about getting a Shetland ram as well as our Dartmoor Ram so we can breed pure Shetland sheep. How this pans out will then affect what we decide to do about this years’ lambs, as mentioned back on the 6th August.
Decisions, decisions...