It reminds me of the phrase that God doesn’t call the equipped. He equips the called. God didn’t care how much my family or I knew about farming or goats, but he kept the phrase that he gave my Christian friend from Virginia on my mind. “What are you going to do with this?” For the first few months, we mowed…and mowed…and mowed. All in all, we mowed about 8-9 acres every week 3 seasons of the year. My family and I mowed about 4 hours each on a tractor mower and a zero-turn mower. The good news is that my wife and I found that mowing for the first two years was cathartic. We were just out in God’s country and the mowing did not seem like work. 
 

It was a fun journey learning how to take care of the property, but I’m sure we were plucky comic relief for anyone watching us. For starters, we had bought a tractor with a mower and brush hog. To tame the land, I attached the brush hog and went to my first overgrown field of about an acre. I remember feeling empowered on my first lap going through brush higher than me sitting on a tractor. However, I turned around and saw very little actual cutting going on and thought this was a crappy brush hog…only to find that the drive shaft had come off the tractor and I had done a great job of packing mud and dirt into the drive shaft of the brush hog. After I cleaned it, regreased it, and attached it correctly this time, the brush hog was a great tool and I went to clear out 3-4 acres. 

The next week I shifted to the mower and had another comic relief moment for my neighbors. On one of the fields by the main road that I had brush hogged, I was now using the mower to cut and “mulch” the new and old grass. My ensemble entailed a cowboy hat, cowboy work boots, jeans, and a Hawaiian shirt. I was enjoying my time taking care of the land. It was then I notice a car driving by and slowing down, so of course I waved. They sped back up and left me to my work. I thought it was odd, until I turned around to check my mowing. The large rows of grass from the brush hog were not going into the mower as I drove over them. Instead, I was “bailing hay” with my mower. The grass clumped up in front of the mower and was accumulating to the point where I had a no kidding clump of grass that was higher than my tractor tires. Naturally I felt silly and had to remove the “hay bale” to continue mowing, but it was on those days, we would daydream about what does God want us to do with this.

We tried bee keeping for almost 2 years. We set up 2 hives and bought some local bees to populate the hives and actually managed to have 2 full colonies of prosperous bees. Unfortunately, my wife and I gradually turned from bee keepers to “bee havers”…meaning we didn’t go check on the bees enough or something, because we came out before the second winter to make sure if we needed to set up feeding to find both hives destroyed by wax moths. So, bees were not the calling.

The inspiration came from the commercials for Heffer Project that provided dairy animals to people in poverty as a way to both feed them and give them an economic way out of poverty. After talking with the family and doing a lot of praying, the notion of being a dairy goat supplier for people was revealed to me as the calling, but I didn’t want to get into raising goats. I know nothing about this. 

The next few weeks we searched the internet for information about how to raise dairy goats and the whole family got into it. Durell’s parents, who also felt God’s calling and sold their house in Seattle to settle in on the family compound, also got into the dairy goat internet craze. Even Papa learned how to milk by watching YouTube videos. We were looking at fencing in a couple of pastures but hadn’t pulled the trigger and built actually fencing. Raising goats seemed like a lot of work and I wasn’t feeling sure if this is what we were supposed to do. Around June 2021, I decided we were not doing goats for this season because it just wasn’t working right.

Once God tells you to do something and you say “no”, He generally puts something in front of us that is an offer we cannot refuse. In late June 2021, we got a message that an elderly couple with dwarf Nigerian dairy goats were getting out of the business to travel and see family. These were precisely the types of goats we had settled on as our starting breed. This was also a good way to get goats, because you aren’t getting someone’s trouble animals that usually go to auction and this beginning herd was 3 males and 5 females dwarf Nigerian dairy goats. We went to see the goats and immediately fell in love with these particular animals. The final nail in the ‘deal coffin’ was the sellers were willing to throw everything they had into the deal for all of their animals in one purchase. This included 3 metal and fiberglass houses, a couple of climbing play toys like an old john boat and concrete culvert, two 80-gallon water troughs, all the remaining feed in its container, and feeding troughs. I told them that I didn’t yet have a trailer to haul this all, but they offered to let me use one of their trailers and follow us with their truck and trailer to take the second load. This saved us at least $2000-$3000 for not having to buy a trailer yet. I felt like God was saying “raise goats now and stop procrastinating.”

All of the adult goats were named by the previous owners, and we kept their names. Chatty was the herd mare and all black. Bubba looked to be part pigmy and was the herd buck. Chatty and Bubba had just made a baby girl and baby boy. The doe had a black and white face and looked like Flower from the Bambi movie. Naturally we named her Flower and her brother, who was solid tan, got the name Thumper. Next, we had an all-white, blue-eyed, natural polled male that was named Blue and twin dark brown goats rounded out the herd. Originally, we thought the brown goats, named Joy and Bar-B-Q were a female and a male, but later we found out that “Barbi” was indeed a girl.

Now part of the reason I had said we weren’t going to raise goats is that we didn’t have any pastures fenced in. The only reason I could agree to buy these goats on the too good to be true offer is another God timing coincidence or divine intervention. My brother was living in Georgia working for the Department of Veteran’s Affairs hospital but said the good Lord was telling him to move to the Northwest Arkansas area. The local Arkansas VA hospital had just created a position that was what my brother was doing in Georgia. He sold his house and came to live with us temporarily while he looked for a house. He had 4 dogs and we needed them to have temporary shelter. It so happened that we had the barn and a pole barn that were close to each other. My brother bought temporary chain link pens that we connected the two barns and the yard between them. This gave his dogs shelter inside the barn and outside space to play. 

When we decided to buy the goats, my brother had taken a temporary assignment outside of the area and his dogs were either with him or in a shelter, because he couldn’t take all four. This left the temporary dog pen available for our brand new 8 dairy goats. However, now the fencing delay and long-term plans had to get back on track. I went to tractor store and bought an auger for the tractor and started digging holes as best we could. First thing we encountered was the reason for the name of our road address: Rock Haven Lane. I think we have every rock in the state of Arkansas in our pasture area. The auger helped but early in the process I hear a snap and the auger stopped turning. The tractor and drive shaft were still turning, but not the auger. Here I think I have broken the brand new and not cheap auger that is going to stop my fencing work. But apparently a shear pin is a thing. This is another simple life lesson that makes me shake my head at what I don’t know what I’m doing. We fix the shear pin and get back to digging. 

Despite several rain delays, we were making progress, but I began to get extremely tired. After all, it was digging in the summer heat, throwing a 16lbs bar at rocks to bust them out of the holes, and manually driving in T-posts. As a retired Marine, if you are tired, then you are out of shape. Therefore, the answer is to push harder and do more work. It got to the point where I couldn’t use the T-post hammer but 3 times before I couldn’t breathe or lift it. I knew something was wrong when my daughter was able to make me get into the truck while I was trying to resist. 

Went to the doctor and they said that my blood count was low. In fact, it was so low, they recommended I go to the emergency room and see if they would give me a transfusion. I relented and went to the ER. In the waiting room, I start researching low blood counts online. Apparently, the low end of normal was 14. Emergency needing transfusion is below 7, and death can occur at 5. I was just above 6. This put a delay in my fencing plans as over the next several months, I had transfusions, tests, scans, and surgeries to find the leaking blood spots.

We could not afford to rest despite being out of blood. I now had goats that needed me to get a pasture fenced. I looked for estimates to convert an old 300’ chicken house into a goat barn and labor to put in my pasture fencing. Both estimates were in the multiple thousands of dollars that we could not afford. We turned to the internet for help. There were many self help and beginning goat people that had suggestions for using pallets as foundational building materials. My wife and I were able to locate enough free pallets to wall off each end of the chicken house. One side for boys and one side for girls. Then we made pallet pens on the girls side for expected birthing pens or isolation pens. Finally, we were able to get 1 acre fenced. Then my wife gets another message that a 4H teenager is getting out of the goat business to spend more time with his girlfriend. They had another 5 female dwarf Nigerians and were willing to sell them cheap if we bought all 5. Therefore, we got another 5 females and were up to 13 goats. None of these were named, so we assigned them names based on how they looked and their personalities. Cookie was the largest with grey and white stripes. Elsie was black with a white face of a cow. Oreo was a mix of black and white. Bambi was all tan and looked like a momma to Thumper. And Loralie was the smallest and named by my brother as one of his favorite names. Now, the boys really needed their own section, so we divided the acre in half and put the boys into goat hell because they were completely distraught about being separated from all the girls that they had been living with for quite some time.

The next thing on our list was getting some sort of protection animal for our growing herd. With goats you can get guard dogs, donkeys, or llamas. We didn’t want dogs because we already had dogs on the ranch and donkeys didn’t seem to be a friendly lot. My wife and I were thinking then about guard llamas but where do you even find something like that in rural Arkansas. Then my wife was at the feed store that same week we had been discussing this dilemma, and she overhears someone saying that they are getting out of the llama business and has 4 llamas they would like to sell. We found out later that the owner had a terminal disease and ended up passing away about a month or two later, but he was a very knowledgeable man who helped us get his llamas to our ranch. 

All three of the batches of animals we bought were coincidentally provided right at a time when we were asking God what to do. Each of them were also animals that were being sold because the owners just needed to get out of the business, which meant all of their personalities were great. No fear of mean animals trying to be gotten rid of at auction. Our herd was growing and now seemed protected. We grew quite attached to the male llama, whom we had named Kronk from the Emperor’s New Groove movie and the oldest female was Isma. The young female llamas we named Coco and Channel. Every goat had names and we swore all of our animals could recognize their name.

Spring of 2022 came in with a bang because we learned what happens when you leave boy and girl goats together for so long. The birthing season wasn’t timed correctly so we were having babies during the end of winter still. Our first-born goat is my favorite because it crawled up into my lap the first week it was born and fell asleep. Overall, we had 10 babies that year and were feeling pretty good. Unfortunately, we lost 1 doe to a hard delivery because of our inexperience. I remember trying to help pull the baby out around midnight, but nothing worked. She went into labor on a Sunday and no vets were open to help. Monday, we took her to the vet to see what they could do. The baby was gone but they sent momma goat home with us and a checkup in two weeks. Momma goat didn’t survive the night. She was our first goat death less than a year after getting into the goat business. Her name was Loralie, and we named her burial field after her. Worse, we lost both Kronk and Isma in June due to the excessive heat and drought. I’m sure our inexperience contributed to their deaths, but we are learning from tragedy. Fortunately, we had mated Kronk with Koko and Channel in May but would have to wait until April of 2023 to see if it worked, because llamas take 11 months to make.

On a good note, we now had several of our dairy goats making milk, so now what God? How is this supposed to be some sort of goat ministry. What do we do? We turned to the internet!