Fall 2025 Kidding Season pics, blog below
I have been rearing livestock here on our 60-acre generational family land long enough now that I am starting to forget some of the names and lineages of the goats. However, every time one of these bundles of joy comes into being here at the organic farm from our mixed breed herd, it is a look into the past (the lineage), and a look into the future, yields. The yields could be further breeding, live animal sales, meat, maybe dairy if I ever make that next step, and well manure and crap to deal with so to speak. The bundles of joy are precious beyond belief, watching the bond get created between mom and child and siblings. It is heart provoking witnessing the wobbly legs and senses turn to razor sharp attunement to find the teat full of colostrum, hearing the guttural sounds of mom and the wailing lungs of youngins. That is the present and the reality of the future sets in fairly immediately. In the meantime, the nowness of newness is exhilarating. The culmination of a series of extended cycles such as the anticipation of the last few weeks of waiting for those last telltale signs, 145-to-150-day gestation, the getting to sexual maturity or the next heat coming in after a birth. It’s fascinating, each animal different in their patterns.
Newness is something to be cherished as the buildup phase of a farm lessens and the management intensive period begins (less newness). It’s that 3 to 5 years of a small business also being represented on the farm. Within the totality of the project and each unique element like a goat herd or an orchard garden, there is the buildup phase that is research intensive and pioneering. It’s tough, groundbreaking work but there is an air of mystique to what comes next. This newness stimulates the brain to dial in your observations and despite all the pre research and planning, you truly learn once the actual element is manifested and the tinkering of the systems begin. As someone addicted to learning, newness on the farm is something I can say is addicting as well. Hence part of the reason of the blog is to say, despite the desire for newness, sometimes being content with what we have is simply enough. Because for everything new, there is a period of actualization that can be compounded by seasonality. Each element on a homestead or farm has more of a peak of season, for example with goats its kidding season. Interestingly enough, when its winter there is less setting up and taking down of electric fence but there is a lot of fiddling with hay bales and scooping poop. Scooping poop allows a new compost pile to be built or beds in the orchard garden to be newly topped up, annual or perennial. These new inputs of fertility will represent new beds of production whether that be vegetables, fruit, or nursery plants. The system is a series of functional interconnections.
But suffice to say before ROI there is a hum drum of day in day out grind away (not newness). For those who romanticize homesteading and farming because of the one-minute reel or 15 second story that shows these bouncing bundles of joy, they forget the 365-day opportunity to steward land and resources while eventually reaching those points of newness. Yet each day is a new day to create data points within our observations of growth, effects of grazing, patterns of rotations, forage changes representing feedback in our grazing style, etc. So let the mundane management days be your witnessing the slow and steady evolution of your agroecology unfolding in the space and time patterns of permaculture; its principles.
TreeYo Permaculture 
Leave a comment