To the unfamiliar eye, female dairy goats can look a little masculine: the udder may be a dead giveaway, but their beards and horns give them an appearance few would describe as girlish. Here at the farm we have three females, and most of us had never encountered a male goat before. But with the milking season drawing to a close the time was nearing for us to breed one of our does, so we took a trip to a local goat farm in search of a suitable mate for our girl Totes (get it, Totes the Goat? She's totally awesome!).
Dairy goats need to be bred every year to produce milk, but since our goats are new to the farm this would be our first experience with breeding. Goat expert Sara—owner of four rambunctious billies up at Boulder Creek Goat Farm — walked us through the basics of the breeding process. The first step is to acquire a “buck rag” to encourage your doe to go into heat. Male goats have extremely powerful scent glands behind their horns, and when a rag is rubbed across these glands and presented to the doe, the odor alone can have her ready to mate within a matter of days.
Just how strong is this odor? Conjure the most intense, masculine smells you can imagine and multiply them by ten. Standing by the billy goats’ pen it was all we could do not to hold our noses. If we thought Totes’ beard and horns were manly, they were nothing compared to those of her prosective mate, Manly Man. The bucks were quite possibly the most testosterone-charged animals any of us had seen. They raged around their enclosure butting, mounting, and peeing as Sara attempted to get our buck rag properly scented. In the end though, the smell’s potency paid off: Totes was in heat within a week. We took her back to meet her new boyfriend in person, and after letting nature take its course, we are now expecting baby goats on the farm this coming March.
Let's hope they are as cute as this little one:
Photo courtesy of Boulder Creek Goat Farm (they give fun goat farm tours!).















