I would love to have a goat. Making goat cheese and goat milk soap holds a certain pastoral charm for me. But I also love having a yard full of edibles, and I don’t want everything in it grazed down to nubs by greedy ruminants (I don’t think goats ever feel full). I was thinking about starting a goat co-op, where the goats are kept on someone else’s lot, and all interested people would share the work and the milk. That still means I would have to find some other people interested in such an endeavor. Having the farm animals I want in a city setting has to have compromises.
But, while traveling on the west coast, I got a new idea to mull over.
Novella Carpenter is an urban farmer in Oakland. She lives in the upstairs unit of a double, next-door to a vacant lot that she has turned into a garden. Over the course of the last six years, she’s raised bees, rabbits, ducks, turkeys, and two pigs, chronicling most of her lessons learned in a recent memoir, Farm City, the education of an urban farmer.
After I read her book, I went to her blog and discovered that she has started raising goats since the book was written. So, I contacted her when I was in the Bay Area and she was ridiculously pleasant about letting a total stranger visiting from New Orleans come tour through her garden lot, her backyard, and take notes on her backyard goat management.
She’s found the perfect goats for a small-scale setting; they’re dual purpose for meat and milk and they are small – Nigerian dwarf goats. Okay, hold on. I know what thoughts immediately spring to mind – I thought it too before I saw the goats myself. Anytime you put the word “dwarf” in the title of an animal breed, images of pot-bellied pigs and miniature horses comes to mind – totally useless animals that have no purpose besides companionship (oh, and they look ridiculous). But the dwarf Nigerian goats were specifically bred to produce lots of milk, and survive on less food than a standard size goat that could eat me out of house and home – they are very efficient creatures that can provide milk and meat, and don’t need ample pasture to roam or graze.
And as an added bonus, the goats themselves are quite personable, and are hilarious to watch. Novella’s goats spend their days running up and down the staircase in her tiny backyard, climbing up onto anything that is taller than them, then jumping off.
So, on the long drive back to New Orleans, I’ll be busy planning ways to make my yard more efficient, maybe planning fencing for the possible addition of some efficient little goats.
I just bought two lovely and very pregnant goats in hopes of beginning an urban goats project. Let’s join up! My friend Amy, who is a biologist working at Tulane, and I are co-mothering the goats, one is a Nubian and the other an insanely friendly La Mancha. They are both divine milkers but have not, of course, produced since they are now pregnant. They can definitely use more caretakers. We’ve been talking to Studio in the Woods and the community gardens projects about sharing time. Please get in touch!
Best,
Nina