Difficult Decisions, Omnivory and Sustainability

In my last posting, I talked about how we acquired our goats and began researching what needed to be done to breed them.  Up until this point, all of our experiences had been pretty easy.  Our goats were easy to manage, sweet, and seemed perfectly healthy.

Since most goat owners will insist on seeing blood test results for your goat before breeding, we went ahead and had blood samples drawn and sent away for testing.  When a goat is less than a year old, its immune system is still developing, so false results can be common, but this was a chance we needed to take if we wanted to go ahead and breed them.  We honestly didn't expect any problems.

It took several weeks to hear anything from our vet, and when we did, we were accidentally told by the vet's assistant the wrong result on one test, which was that one of our goats (Moe) was positive for CAE.  CAE is a terrible autoimmune disease   I couldn't believe this result, considering the fact that we were told by the previous owners that the herd was both CAE and CL negative.  This result was told to us by accident, and was cleared up later, but I had to wait for the entire week of Christmas vacation until the office was open again and I could talk to our vet before the situation was clarified.  We were also told that our other goat, Coco, tested positive for a disease called Johne's disease.  This was verified by the vet as an accurate test result when we talked to her again.  I knew little about Johne's disease and began researching it.  It's possible to get false positive results, especially on young goats, so we had the goats tested again.  And once again, we had to wait a while for the results.  This time, Moe tested negative for everything and Coco tested positive again for Johne's.

I've researched everything I can on this disease, and I can say that the outcome of an animal with it is not pretty.   It is a wasting disease that inevitably kills the animal with the disease.  The fact that Coco tested positive twice meant that somehow, she had been exposed to this parasite.  She seemed perfectly healthy.  We could have taken a chance and hoped that she would never develop the actual sickness, but it's a risky chance to take.  Animals with this disease begin shedding the parasite in their feces while they are still healthy.  This makes them extremely dangerous because they are contagious to other animals that come in contact with their feces, even if they don't appear to be sick.  There is no cure for Johne's disease.

Our next step was to test her feces for evidence of the parasite.  Once again, we waited.  Eventually, the results came back negative.  This was a relief because it meant that she was not shedding the parasite in her feces, and therefore not contagious to her sister.  So here were our choices:  Do we keep her, knowing that she could be healthy for the rest of her life, or get rid of her, knowing that she could be sick and contagious to other animals?

It was a tough decision.  I've grown attached to both of my goats, but especially Coco.  She's the sweet one who loves being pet.  Her sister is more skittish, but will follow Coco's lead.

Me and Coco

I need to be clear here about my level of attachment.  My goats are not pets.  I care for them.  They have personalities that are endearing.  I was looking forward to spending many years with them and their offspring.  But I did know that, eventually, our goats would probably end up being food.  I feel strongly about being able to produce as much of my own food as possible.  This includes meat production, since I am an omnivore and consume both animals and plants.  In our society, we view meat as something that comes in a package.  Not as something that actually comes from an animal that lived and breathed and had its own little animal personality.  When I was a peace corps volunteer in West Africa, I helped with the butchering of goats and sheep on a few different occasions.  I was not skilled at it, but it didn't bother me.  This was just what you had to do if you wanted to eat meat.

It is important to me that I understand where my food comes from.  Most of the animals we eat have been raised in stressful, unsanitary conditions.  Cows are fed corn and other grains instead of being allowed to graze, which creates all sorts of health conditions.  Consider the obesity epidemic in our country and realize that cows have their own version of it.  Usually, when you buy beef from the grocery store (that is specifically labeled as "grass-fed"), you are eating obese animals that were likely sick and wouldn't have lived very long before slaughter.  Chickens are housed in such crowded conditions that they begin to peck at each other and seriously injure each other due to stress.  Therefore, their beaks are cut off to prevent this.  This is a terribly cruel and painful thing to do in order to save a little bit of money and sell cheap meat.  I could go on and on about our current food industry and how the animals are usually treated.  It's pretty terrible stuff, but I don't think the answer is becoming a vegetarian.  Many of our modern farming practices cause just as much destruction and unneeded pain to animals in the environment indirectly, through the destruction of habitat, the effects of monoculture on the local ecosystem, and other farming practices that directly or indirectly cause harm to animals.  I understand why many people have chosen to become vegetarians and vegans for moral reasons, but I have come to understand that the real reason we are mistreating animals is because of our new dependency on foods from large industries with unsustainable practices.

This dependency partially results from the relatively recent phenomenon of being able to buy pretty much any food item we want at any time of the year.  Want tropical fruit in January?  No problem.  Just ship it from the tropics.  Mid-summer veggies shipped come all the way from South America in the middle of the winter.  Right now, I've been buying berries from Mexico.  I am part of the problem because I love these foods and therefore support the industries by continuing to buy them.  But this is for a different rant.  It is related to my story here, but only in that it demonstrates my frustration with our current food system and my need to address it in some way.

What I've been contemplating lately is the harvesting process.  I use the word "harvest" for not only plants, but our animals as well.  In addition to the fish we raise in our aquaponics systems, we also raise chickens (for eggs), goats (for milk), and rabbits (for meat).  As I mentioned earlier, I think it is important to be producing my own food and I think it is just as important for animals to be treated humanely and compassionately.  When Brian first mentioned raising rabbits for food, I was uncomfortable with this.  It's one thing to harvest fish, with their scaly bodies and buggy eyes, but rabbits are adorable and fuzzy.  Many people own rabbits as pets.  How on earth do you harvest something that is so cute?  What I have come to realize, however, is that my relationship with our rabbits makes it easier in some ways to know that they are going to become food.  Rabbits in the wild will most likely die a much more painful death than our rabbits.  Neither will live very long lives, as our pets tend to do, but that is just the way it goes.  Instead of eating chickens that had their beaks cut off so that they could be raised in inhumane conditions, I am eating rabbits that were cuddled almost every day, fed healthy food, and given enough space to move around (and occasionally come out of their cages to run free for a while).  I have reached a peace with this now and strive to continue providing compassionate conditions for these animals that will end up sustaining me.  Brian has done all of the harvesting so far, but I intend to learn how to do it myself soon.

Now back to our goat situation.  Given her blood results and the chance that she could develop an infectious disease in the coming years, despite how healthy she was right now, we realized that the best choice would be to cull her.  "Culling" is another term I have had to become acquainted with.  It is used to describe what livestock owners do with sick, weak, or otherwise undesirable animals in their herds.  Even though she could very well have lived a long, healthy life, the risk that she presented to Moe (her sister) and any other goats we may end up with in the future was too great to leave to chance.  After much more research, I discovered that eating meat from an animal exposed to Johne's disease is safe, so we decided to harvest Coco.

Despite my opinions on meat harvesting, I had no intention of eating either of our goats any time soon.  We purchased them when they were only a few months old and intended on using them for milk production.  I assumed I had at least a few years with both of these gals... some goats can produce milk for up to 7 years or longer.  I think I knew that, at some point in time, these animals would become food, but I also thought I would have plenty of time to spend with them before this event occurred.  And did I mention that Coco is really cute?  There's the cuteness factor again.  I truly understand why many people keep goats as pets.

Coco looking cute when we first bought her

Our goats, however, were not pets.  We made the decision and needed to follow through with it... but I couldn't do it.  Not this time.  Not with her.  Luckily, our neighbors came to help Brian with the process and to provide me some emotional support.  They recently harvested one of their own goats, and understood the emotional aspect of the process.  They brought their goat to be harvested at a butcher, however, and we were doing the deed ourselves.

I feel the need to address something now.  I know the thought of killing and processing an animal is horrifying to some people.  Even certain people that I love and respect dearly seemed to be shocked or dismayed when I explained what we did.  I hope that my rants above explain why it was important to us to do this, even if you don't agree with it.  I hope that, before judging our actions, you can take an opportunity to examine your own choices and what effect they might have, even indirectly, on the lives of others.  It might feel better to purchase your meat from a store after all the dirty work has been done out of sight, or to purchase your meat substitutes without knowing the true effects that those plants may have on the ecosystems they were grown in.  All of our choices have some sort of effect on others.  I am simply trying to have more control on those effects.

Brian and I both spent hours researching how to do this humanely.  We cared for this goat and did not want her to experience hurt or fear on our behalf.  As I mentioned before, I couldn't bring myself to participate in this one.  I just wasn't prepared for it yet.  Brian did his best with help from the neighbors while I did a thorough cleaning of the goat pen.  Both Brian and I shed tears over Coco.  We miss her, but we are also thankful for her sacrifice.  While I am on the topic of being thankful, I can't express how thankful I am that Brian was strong enough to do this, even though he was dealing with his own emotions.  I've learned so much from him and plan to take a larger role in this process the next time we have to do it.  I now understand how to be more emotionally prepared.  I am also incredibly grateful for all of the support I have received from my neighbors and other "goat mentors" through this process.  I think we all walked away learning some valuable lessons.

Once the processing reached a point in which she no longer resembled the goat that I could recognize as Coco, I was able to help with the rest.  We spent another day cleaning, cutting, and processing meat into packages that could be frozen.  I also cooked a LOT of goat meat in a few different ways and froze some of the food for later.

Those that are around me often may have notice that I've been introspective and kept to myself a little more lately.  These are the reasons why.  This has been quite a learning experience and I have been intent on growing from it.  The only way to accomplish our goals is to learn from our experiences.

Last night, our dinner was goat-meat tacos.  I said a little prayer of thanks to Coco and then enjoyed my meal guilt free.

Becoming Goat Owners

Until now, my blogs on sustainability have been in regards to our trials and errors with our aquaponics system.  This post will tell the beginning of our dairy goat story.  We still have much to learn, but can share our experiences up to this point.

I have a sensitivity to the protein found in cow's milk (called caesin) and avoided most milk products for years now.  I eventually discovered that goat's milk did not affect me the same way, which inspired me to want to own my own goats at some point.  The added benefit is that it is yet another way to produce some of our own food.  I now know how to make my own cheese, yogurt, and butter and plan to learn some other things to do with goats milk (soap, etc.)  We were lucky to have neighbors with goats, who were interested in doing a "milk share" with the goat's milk.  Goat shares are just a tricky way to get beyond the laws governing the sale of milk in general, but especially raw milk.  In a milk share, you do not pay for the milk, but a share of the goat, which conveniently comes with some milk.  In our milk share, we actually helped care for the animals, including feeding, milking, cleaning, etc.  In return, we kept the milk and only paid the price of what it costs to feed the animals for the days we took care of them.  This was excellent practice for us.  Our neighbors were new to owning goats as well, so we were able to learn from their experiences and figure out how we wanted to do it ourselves.  Goats are creatures of habit, and can be hard to manage when you change something in their routine.  Our neighbor's goats were full grown milk producing goats when they bought them and took a while to adjust to the new home and routine.  For this reason, I wanted two goats that were young enough to raise ourselves.  

About 6 months ago, we bought our first goats.  The family we bought them from seemed like good people trying to do a lot of the same things we wanted to do, including raising and producing much of their own food while working regular jobs.  They owned the mothers of the goats we bought.  The mothers both came from the herd of goats owned by their neighbors.  The father (of both of our goats) came from the same herd, so our goats were sisters (and cousins too, technically).  We knew about two main goat diseases to be concerned about, CL and CAE.  We were assured that the herd tested negative for these diseases, which should mean that the mothers of our goats (and therefore our goats) would have no exposure to either of these diseases.  They were both hybrids of two dairy breeds (LaManch and Alpine breeds).  They seemed perfect for us.  We brought them home.

The goat on the left is Coco.  Her sister on the right is Moe.

We were only partially finished building our new fence and goat pen when we brought them home.  Luckily, it was summer, so I had time to devote to help Brian with these projects.  It was a lot of work, but we finally enclosed a nice area of our property for the goats to browse and play.

There are few things cuter than young goats.  Our little gals adjusted easily to their new home.  It was good that they had each other.  We were always told that goats need companions, and this was evident from how these two stuck together for everything.  

For several months, everything was fine with our goats.  We created a "goat playground" for them to climb around on.  We fed them well, so they grew quickly.  We began to consider breeding them.  Since these were dairy goats, they need to give birth to kids before they can start producing milk.  I had joined several online goat forums as well as made friends with several local goat owners, so I had advice about breeding goats coming from every direction.  I soon learned how opinionated (and often pushy) some people can be when it comes to breeding goats.  Several experienced, trustworthy sources told me that once a goat reaches about 80 lbs, it can be bred safely.  Others swore that goats bred earlier than a year old will have complications because they are too young.  When I asked these sources to explain the negative effects of breeding a young goat (that was of an appropriate weight), the most common answer was to compare it to teenage pregnancies in humans.  They "just aren't ready," was the response I was given.  

As interesting as this point of view was, I could have pointed out that human teenagers have been having healthy babies for centuries.  The social/emotional impact of having a child as a teenager is another issue completely, but let's be real here.  We are talking about goats, not humans.  I came to the conclusion that, as long as my goats were healthy and large enough, I was going to go ahead and breed them.

Other factors to consider when wanting to breed a goat include figuring out when your goat goes into heat and how you are going to breed her.  Most goats have a window of time in which they go into heat.  They are in "standing heat" for 3 days of this time period on a 18 to 21 day cycle.  This is when they can actually get pregnant.  So you first need to be able to recognize the signs of your doe in heat.  Then you need to either get her to a buck or get a buck to her.  Choices include scheduling a "date" between doe and buck.  You bring one to the other and let them hang out for a while and hope the deed is done while you are waiting.  You can also board your doe with someone who has a buck until she is "confirmed bred."  Another option is to take the buck onto your property for a few weeks, which should insure that she is receptive to the buck for at least a few days of that period of time.  We had a lot of choices to make.

Evaluating changes needed to our aquaponics system

We love the success of many of the things we were able to grow once we created our year-round, insulated greenhouse extension.  However, we did run across some problems.  We were also worried about the efficiency and sustainability of the system.

1) First of all, we were buying food to feed our fish.  Ultimately, we wanted to be growing food for the fish ourselves.  Having to buy food didn't seem very sustainable.

2) Our fish were mostly Tilapia, which are tropical fish and need warm water temperatures.  They were given to us by a friend for free, which is one of the reasons why we continued to use them.  Tilapia are also fine to grow in high densities, which makes them desirable for many larger aquaponics systems.  We realized eventually, however, that we do not need as many fish as we were growing, so switching to a lower-density fish would still be fine for our system.  We were also spending a lot of money heating the water, especially during the winter time when temperatures drop below freezing and commonly in the negatives.  We have just harvested about half of our Tilapia with the ultimate plan of switching to another breed altogether.

3) aphids, aphids, aphids.  The benefit of subjecting your garden to the whims of natural seasons is that many garden pests cannot survive the colder temperatures of winter.  When you have a nice warm year-round environment for these pests to grow in, numbers can grow out of control.  When the aphids first became a problem, their numbers were already substantial.   Aphids especially loved hiding in the new, curly growths on our kale plants.  It seems like I spent forever rinsing all the little crevices of kale that I harvested before I could use it to cook with.  Often, we just pulled the most infested leaves out and fed them to our chickens (The chickens love the kale and the aphids equally).  We tried everything we could think of to control our aphids naturally.  We pulled them off the plants by hand.  We used water to spray them off the plants.  We bought lady bugs for the greenhouse (twice now), but the lady bugs didn't seem to want to stay around.  I even spent a considerable amount of money on purchasing a parasatoid species of wasp that lays its eggs inside of aphids, thereby helping to control numbers of aphids in a population.  We never noticed if the wasps had an effect on the aphid population.  However, I knew I was taking a chance with these, since it was recommended that the wasps be used to control populations that were still pretty small and manageable.  Ours was already out of control.  We even created our own spray of garlic and pepper, which we sprayed on the plants heavily infested with aphids.  This seemed to help, but the aphids came back in full force after the spray wore off.  An important consideration when spraying anything on plants in an aquaponic system is the potential effects on the fish, because the spray can make its way into the water supply.  This is why we didn't want to risk spraying a natural pesticide, such as neem oil on our plants.  Neem oil eventually degrades and has no known negative effects when eating vegetables that have been treated with it, but we didn't want to risk the potential immediate effects on the fish.

Because of these concerns, and our desire to consolidate the indoor space to use for other needs (such as housing our rabbits), we began a new round of revisions and modifications to the greenhouse space.  This what Brian is working on now.  We harvested 31 fish and consolidated the rest to one tank.  Brian is also working on ways to control evaporation and heat loss from our system.  We are also going to harvest the remaining plants, clean the system thoroughly, and start over again with new seedlings.  We are contemplating the best way to rid our system of aphids before planting anything new.  The best idea so far is to clean out all the beds with hot water.  Hopefully, this will kill the aphids in all potential life stages.  If some return, we may be able to control the numbers with predators (such as ladybugs or parasatoid wasps) as long as we introduce them early enough to keep the populations down before they grow out of control.

Adding on and Revisions (number 1) to the Aquaponics System

Once we realized that direct sun from above was the key to growing our plants year-round, we had to revise the system.  Our choices were to to either convert the upstair level of the barn to a fully insulated and winter-proof greenhouse or to add-on to the lower level of the barn.  After consulting an engineer, we realized the cheaper option would be to create a greenhouse add-on that sloped up from the lower level to combine with the upper level.  Brian had been spending time collecting used and recycled windows and doors from free sources, online trades and deals, and shopping at places like ReSource (an organization that recycles old and use construction and home materials).  Because of this, we already had a large supply of cheap insulated glass.  We bit the bullet and paid good money for good insulated polycarbonate roofing material.  This polycarbonate material is worth the money.  It is 5 layers thick, with 4 layers of air insulation between the layers.   It is also strong enough to withstand the snow and winds we get on our property... both in substantial amounts.  We also purchased wood and some other new materials (screws, etc.) for the structure.  However, our goal was to use as many recycled materials as we could.  We obtained old tires from several different local sources and lots of cans and bottles from friends.  We used these to construct the foundation of our greenhouse extension.

We had to dig into the hill next to our barn to create the new greenhouse extension.  You can see the tires used as the base of the foundation here.  We packed them thoroughly with soil (leftover from all the digging) to create a solid base.  We modeled this building structure off of methods used in building earth ships.

Brian is working on the frame of the extension here.  You can see it coming from the tire foundation..

We used recycled windows for the walls and insulated polycarbonate material for the roof.  The nice thing about this extension is the height of the structure.  It is tall enough at the highest point to combine the lower and upper levels of our barn.  We still had non-insulated polycarbonate roofing on part of the upper level of the barn as well.

Filling-in the space between tires with old cans and bottles.  We later added a layer of cement to the outside of these materials.  The soil packed inside of the tires and the air inside of the cans and bottles provide extra insulation.

Adding more bottles and cans.

Our new extension gave us more space, more sunlight, and an insulated space for year-round growing.  The following pictures were taken when we first started growing in this new greenhouse extension.  Our kale, collards, chard, peppers, and tomatoes did well.  We also had some success with lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, and a few other experiments.

And here is a link to a video of the system.  Sometimes, it is hard to see how things are connected from pictures alone.

video link

Creating a Sustainable System - Aquaponics and more - (The beginning)

Since our ultimate goal is to produce most of our own food, we have been interested in sustainable systems.  An aquaponics system seemed like a good place to start, since the idea of it involves creating a sustainable ecosystem that recycles its own waste, water, and nutrients in various ways.  If you've never heard of Aquaponics before, it is a combination of hydroponics (growing plants in a water instead of soil) and aquaculture (raising fish for food).  The concept is simple.  The fish release their waste products, which become nutrients for the plants.  By absorbing nutrients from the waste water of the fish, the water is filtered and can be recycled back into the fish tanks.

My partner, Brian, has a eerie ability to construct, modify and/or repair just about anything you can think of.  He can fix cars, build houses, and even help to heal your injured shoulder massage therapy.  With the exception of computers, he can create and repair just about anything.  Aquaponics, therefore, was something he immediately and somewhat intuitively understood the workings behind.  The biologist in me loves the idea of this system since a large part of it depends on understanding the intricate relationships between organisms and their non-living environments within an ecosystem.  My mind still struggles, however, with the mechanics of the system.  This includes creating a system that can distribute water to various growing beds in a way that allows the water level to regularly rise and fall within the beds.  The water then needs to be pumped back to the fish from the various storage tanks and recycled.  The water chemistry is fairly straightforward, but needs to be monitored regularly to be sure that the nutrient levels do not rise or fall too much.  The water also needs to be heated, since we live in the mountains at over 8000 ft of elevation.  Brian has built our current system by hand, using as many recycled materials as possible.  We have added and changed the system in increments.  Three years ago, we began converting the barn on our property to a space that was usable for aquaponics.  Here are a few photos of the process:

Our original plan was to put plants upstairs and fish downstairs, so we began with adding some polycarbonate material as roofing to part of the upper level of the barn.

Our first fish were goldfish.  We later added Talapia that were donated from a friend who is growing them.

We eventually took down the south wall of the barn and replaced it with free sliding glass doors we found on craiglist to create the large windows you see here.  This allowed us to have a heated and insulated space to grow the vegatables in the downstairs part of the barn.  The blue containers were 50 gallon recycled barrels that had been used to store soy sauce.  We obtained them from a container recycling center, cut them in half, cleaned out the soy sauce, and constructed grow beds from them.  The medium inside of them are expanded clay pellets.  In the winter, when the sun hit the barn at an angle, these windows worked nicely, but when summer arrived and the sun shone from directly above the barn, these grow beds were no longer receiving much direct light at all.

Our first round of growing vegetables in the system.

These lettuce plants were sitting on top of a Styrofoam layer that floated over a bed of water.  You can see the root system, which is usually submerged in the water.  Other plants grew in the larger beds (seen above) as the water level rose and lowered periodically. 

Although we were able to grow some fish and some vegetables with this system, we soon realized that there were some flaws.  (1) We used non-insulated polycarbonate material on the upper level of the barn with the intention of turning that space into usable greenhouse space.  Since we live at a high elevation, winter starts early and lasts late.  Temperatures drop into the negatives regularly.  The top floor of the barn, therefore, became a good place to grow plants only for the spring, summer, and fall.  Because of our insulated windows downstairs, we could grow year -round, but only had limited space for growth next to the windows.  (2) Furthermore, the windows did not allow for direct sun during the summer time.  We needed access to more sunlight if we wanted to grow some plants year-round.