Kidding season 2026 begins March 23rd this year and all of the babies should be on the ground by mid- April! We will have a list of potential goat buyers that have first pick of available 2026 kids for sale. There is no charge to be on our goat buyer list. If you are not on our list for this season and would like to be, please email us at: sherwin@mountainlodgefarm.com. We will contact potential buyers in April/May to set up a time to view the kids available for purchase. Our response may take a few days, due to lots of kids and moms to care for during this time, your patience is appreciated. This year we will NOT have a large number of kids available for sale, as we are staying in milk and are only breeding 19 goats to kid in 2026. Kids are able to go to their new homes if they are doing well on bottle and are at least 4 weeks of age. At this age they can switch to twice a day bottles and can be put on warm whole cow’s milk from the store. We recommend Pritchard red teats as this is what the kids are trained on. We like the kids to stay on bottle for at least 10 to 12 weeks (to allow adequate time for their rumens to develop). All female kids, and all Nigerian kids will be disbudded (horns burned off at early age), but all small eared boys (Lamancha and some crosses) will be allowed to grow their horns. These horned boys will make awesome pack. Experienced goat owners can talk to us about taking kids younger than 4 weeks of age. All our kids are raised on their dams for at least a week, then switched to bottle and raised in a pen with like-age goat kids. They are exposed to hay immediately and they have access to clean water. We want our dams to have an opportunity to be moms and teach their kids, and we want the kids to be friendly towards humans. This combination of dam and bottle raising seems to allow both of these things to happen. We do preventative management for coccidia, a parasite (kids are at risk of this from mainly 3 weeks to 4 months of age until they develop some resistance to it). We typically do not do any other worming treatment before they leave our farm, as we have found they usually don’t need it at this young an age, and we don’t want to develop parasite resistance. Our kids are immunized with CDT vaccine at 8 and 12 weeks of age (but deciding to immunize is up to the new owner). We will teach you how to trim goat hooves when you pick up your goats. We will also supply a sample of our hay and some loose Sweetlix Meatmaker minerals which we use on our farm when our kids are young. Males are not castrated until at least 10 to 12 weeks of age, and you can have them castrated later than this to allow their urinary system to grow even more and decrease the risk of urinary stones (which is life threatening). We will give you a pamphlet about feeding your goats and it is very important that you do not feed grain, or treats to boys without having a good understanding of the calcium/phosphorus ratio that could put them at risk of urinary stones.