Who's Here and Why
Or, how we choose the breeds we raise.
In general, we try to stick with heritage or endangered breeds. Heritage basically means that they're older breeds and could have been on your great grandparents farm. In the past few years we have also been gifted or bought various animals that are not in one of those two categories. If you want to know how we acquired all of our animals, that can be found under each specific type of critter. I would suggest checking them out, because they're very funny and I even rereading them.
We also enjoy the company of three cats, Speck, Speckel, and Spot, who are in charge of pest control, and a Dwarf Hotot rabbit named Nibbler who is given authority to keep an eye on the cats whenever we're not home. In spite of his over site, the cats like to spend time trying to figure out how to get into the aviary of zebra finches.
In general, we try to stick with heritage or endangered breeds. Heritage basically means that they're older breeds and could have been on your great grandparents farm. In the past few years we have also been gifted or bought various animals that are not in one of those two categories. If you want to know how we acquired all of our animals, that can be found under each specific type of critter. I would suggest checking them out, because they're very funny and I even rereading them.
We also enjoy the company of three cats, Speck, Speckel, and Spot, who are in charge of pest control, and a Dwarf Hotot rabbit named Nibbler who is given authority to keep an eye on the cats whenever we're not home. In spite of his over site, the cats like to spend time trying to figure out how to get into the aviary of zebra finches.
Cows
I'm going to start with the biggest and go to the smallest. And since we don't have horses or equine of any sort that leaves the cows.
Pigs
I'm going to go ahead and add pigs here even though we don't currently have any. We chose the breed here very specifically. When we were looking for pigs, we knew we wanted American Mulefoots (a little bit more about the breed can be found in the pig section). We traveled a couple hours and got a trio. As you might imagine our herd grew from there. We never got another breed, although Glenn thought about crossing some at some point. If we are ever to get pigs here in Maine, this would be the breed we get again because the meat is so good.
Goats
The next are the goats. We were originally going to get fainting goats because they were highly endangered. Then they became very popular and had a resurgence. This is another instance where we didn't intentionally choose the breed. We got alpines because of a trade and nubians from a friend who couldn't handle goats. (They have a tendency to escape their designated areas.) This is another very entertaining story.
Sheep
We currently have two breeds of sheep. We have katahdins and shetlands. The katahdins were because we wanted a meat sheep and were a pretty good breed. Other than that, I'm not sure that much went into it. We weren't planning on getting shetlands when we first got sheep, but because I wanted to show them in 4-H and full size sheep were just too big for me, we found a couple shetlands who proceeded to take over our katahdin herd. Now that I'm bigger, and we haven't done a great job with finding wool markets, we're probably going to start moving back toward all katahdin.
Poultry
Even though we have had or still do have several kinds of poultry, I'm going to put them all here because we don't have as many as we once did.
* I guess I'll start with the geese. We started out with Gray Saddle-back Pomeranians. We had some issues with them though, so they didn't last long even though they were our endangered breed of choice. We wound up with a big mixture of several different breeds, some of which we never could quite figure out. (The Chinese were the worst, in my opinion.) At this point we only have one goose left and she really would like a pond and a friend.
* Chickens. We started out with only certain breeds and would try really hard to get eggs only from pure breeds to hatch and so forth. As you can imagine, in the year leading up to our move, that ended very quickly. At this point, we have fewer chickens than we might need and there's a lot of different breeds and crosses in there, most of them being young ones that we got from the hatchery last summer.
* Guineas. The meat is really good, but they're also probably the most annoying bird alive. Except for maybe peacocks. (I've always wanted a peacock and mom has always said no.) We got them originally to eat bugs and roam around. Then the females would go lay nests in places we couldn't find them, but where we could find a pile of feathers the next morning. At this point we only have one guinea who might even think he's a chicken by now. Although I'm sure he helped limit our tick population.
* I guess I'll start with the geese. We started out with Gray Saddle-back Pomeranians. We had some issues with them though, so they didn't last long even though they were our endangered breed of choice. We wound up with a big mixture of several different breeds, some of which we never could quite figure out. (The Chinese were the worst, in my opinion.) At this point we only have one goose left and she really would like a pond and a friend.
* Chickens. We started out with only certain breeds and would try really hard to get eggs only from pure breeds to hatch and so forth. As you can imagine, in the year leading up to our move, that ended very quickly. At this point, we have fewer chickens than we might need and there's a lot of different breeds and crosses in there, most of them being young ones that we got from the hatchery last summer.
* Guineas. The meat is really good, but they're also probably the most annoying bird alive. Except for maybe peacocks. (I've always wanted a peacock and mom has always said no.) We got them originally to eat bugs and roam around. Then the females would go lay nests in places we couldn't find them, but where we could find a pile of feathers the next morning. At this point we only have one guinea who might even think he's a chicken by now. Although I'm sure he helped limit our tick population.