Drying off is the process of stopping a dairy goat from producing milk.
We bred our sweet, independent and herd queen Stella, also first time freshener, with our handsome and equally sweet herd sire, Patrick, in early November 2019. Stella gave birth to two beautiful Oberhasli does on March 30, 2020.
These two new little lives and Stella’s ease into motherhood (she was an absolutely wonderful mum) provided us a welcomed distraction and many moments of joy at a time when joy was hard to come by as our world was entering into this historic and dreadful pandemic.
After these babies were weaned and re-homed (to a great family with lots of love to give), we started milking Stella for our own milk supply. We practiced once a day milking and Stella was giving us a whopping 72 oz each day!
(I will be talking A LOT more about milking and things goat milk next season, but for now I will just say, goat milk is delicious and it also gave us one more way to be more self sustaining on our little homestead).
Drying off had started naturally after about 5 months in milk as Stella had already dropped to about 64 oz at each milking. After about 7 months of milk production we initiated the drying off process, end of September, and we started this by simply reducing her morning grain for 1 week.
Fun fact: when kids are retained and kept with mum, drying off happens naturally as kids have less need for milk from their mum, or she pushes the kids off first. The pressure in her udder with the milk that is left lets her know that she can stop producing as much.
And that is the process we are trying to mimic.
After reducing grain, we then went from once a day milking to every other day milking for about 2 weeks and instead of mostly grain at milking, we increased fruits and veggies for morning milking snack with only minimal grain.
After 2 weeks of every other day milking, we moved to every 3 days milking for another 2 weeks or so and then that was it. Done. Finished. The End.
It’s been about a week since last milking and while I miss the routine of the morning milking and having fresh goat milk in our fridge, I miss that time that Stella and I shared those mornings much more.
Side Note: Mastitis is troubling at any stage for a dairy goat in milk production, to include when drying off. Good hygiene practices and daily well fare checks are always of importance for us and we were especially aware during drying off and sure to check her udder daily.
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