teat size on first freshener

What is a "blown teat"?
Cara

The problem with really tiny teats is that as the udder gets large with more milk in it each year, even if the teats do grow, the udder is so tight down on the teat it still is hard to hand milk. I machine milk, it wasn't until we were milking a doe out after showing (a purchased doeling) that we even noticed just how small her teats were, my partner and I both milked from one side...we got a good razzing at the show for having to milk like this. When I used to hand milk I would not have kept a doe like this, nor her offspring. Thankfully this is a non issue in most bloodlines of Nubians, including ours.

A blown teat is when soo much pressure builds up in the udder that the teat no longer has any delineation between the teat and the udder, like a snowcone, which then becomes a bananna if it gets really bad. This is usually seen in the nursing doe who has two kids nursing one side, and no relief from the other.

So in dam raising, if you are going to have to milk anyway to keep udder quality...which is a given no matter how you spin it...why not just lambar the kids then? Why do double the work, plus have to keep kids tame and out of feeders and you can't sell them as infants and have the whole CAE question? Vicki

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Vicki McGaugh
Nubian Soaps
North of Houston TX
www.etsy.com/shop/nubiansoaps

A 3 decade dairy goat farm homestead that is now a retail/wholesale soap company and construction business.

Hi Vicki. :wave: For me, it is because the dam raised kids do better and perhaps I am col dblooded, but I just cannot stand the bottle raised personality, needy needy needy all the time! I work with the dam raised kids, have my chidlren spend time with them, so they aren't wild.

The way I feel is, why should I spend my time milking out 12-15 does (all by hand), taking about an hour and a half if they aren't nursing, just to havew to run the milk up to the house, heat it, store it, and put it back into a bucket or bottles to feed back to kids that would thrive better if they drank directly from their walking dispenser? Except for cocci and floppy kid syndrome, the dam raised kids have almost no health issues, and the fact that they are raised in the main herd means that the other goats don't pound on them. Whenever I have bottle kids and integrate them into the main herd, everyone beats on them because they're small and perceived as foreigners, and they drop to the bottom of the herd and do poorly.

I would bottle feed for a generation or two to get rid of CAE if I could figure out how to close all the gaps in that and come up with negative kids 100% of the time, but after an incredible amount of work doing that for two years, I still had some come up positive. For me though, the bottle feeding to get rid of CAE would be working towards a goal of eventual dam raising and total eradication of the disease, and a closed herd so as not to worry about inadvertently bring CAE in again.

When I dam raise, the work is cut by half or more. The milking of a dozen does could be done in 40 minutes, and any milk that I got could be sold or kept for the family, didn't have to be careful to leave it for the kids. Also, the constant demand for milk kept their milk production higher than if i had been the only one milking.

These are my reasons for dam raising. I can understand that some will bottle feed, but I just never seem to have acquired the knack for raising healthy bottle kids that matched the progress of my dam raised ones.

I paid attention to Holly's milk stream today, and it is not needle thin. It is more like the size of a pencil lead. Would that be considered a keepable sized orifice?

Yeah, it's a tolerable size. Are her teats just short, or actually hard to milk? With short teats, you let the fingers that can't grab onto it cock out of the way, sort of like if you're holding a little china teacup.

okay, thanks, I'm starting to get a grip on this. Her teats are short, she is not hard to milk. I have a rapid milking technique that works quite well on most of my goats. With most goats, I am through milking with 3 pounds of milk in the pail and I am ready to milk the next goat. With Holly, I milk until my forearm muscles are screaming, get up, shake my hands, go back to finish milking her, only to end up with 1 1/2 pounds of milk. I think she has tiny milk reservoirs in her teats. Her milk stream is the same size as my other milkers.

We got our second cutting of hay in yesterday.. While we are thrilled to be getting a second cutting at all, very dry here, we are looking to cull even more goats than we thought,due to the hay shortage. We got 125 square bales off a field where we should have gotten 200 in a normal precipitation year.

Thanks for the info on the blown teat. I guess my Saanen (not the doe I posted here about has one) has one. She was my first goat and I knew even less than I do now! She has been dried up since february. Her udder is lopsided, the side with the blown teat much larger. She is rather hard to milk on that side. I only have one goat that is really easy and gives alot of milk! I have a lamancha buckling I was going to breed her to as he got old enough. Will that teat still be usable?
Cara