Let's pretend for a second that you get the courage to try something new.  You decide to start your very own meat goat operation.  You're ready to learn and grow your farm, but the curveball that follows was never even a thought in your mind!

Josh Betcher, owner of JB Farms, shared with a group of students from the Integrated Arts Academy about how his operation grew almost overnight with little preparation in place.

In January 2021, Farm Camp Minnesota connected a horticulture class and culinary arts class to JB Farms.  A few years prior, wwners Josh and Sara Betcher had a few goats that they added to their farm to be used for 4H Goat Showing.  Their farm started with crops and they decided to add a herd of meat goats in the fall of 2020.  What they didn’t know was that their original herd of 100 was going to grow much faster than expected!

In his introduction to his goat operation, Josh explained that they purchased 100 goats from a farm in Texas in September 2020.  They made sure to get goats at 2 different ages so they could plan out their breeding schedule (50 goats born in 2019, 50 goats born in 2020).  It was their plan to breed half of their herd to start kidding (or having their baby goats) in the spring of 2021 and the other half to kid later that summer.

Well, as we all know, 2020 was the year of the curveball! Josh and Sara found out about a few weeks after their goats arrived that they had little ones on the way!  You can only imagine their surprise when they learned that their goats would be kidding during Minnesota’s coldest months of the year!

Time to pivot!  Josh shared that there was no time to think about what to do, instead, they just had to act.  They first called up the vet to check out which goats were bred and when they would be due. They decided to use Josh’s shop to house their birthing pens because those babies would need heat if they were going to survive the winter. They improvised 3 birthing pens with heat lamps, hay and a camera system to monitor the mamas and babies.