Goats and more from Roys Farm in South Africa

Thanks to monica b. for recommending roys farm in south africa. (www.roysfarm.com)

A great blog with more than just goats although recent posts have been about goat farming.

RECENT POSTS

• Goat Milk Nutrition
• How To Milk A Goat
• Feeding Meat Goats
• Meat Goat Farming Business
• How To Start Goat Farming Business
• Goat Farming In South Africa
• Goat Farming Business Plan For Beginners

What do I know about locally bred Malaysian Boer Goats?

Actually, not very much.

That is until I was contact by Azam at www.iagrotech.com asking if his blog could be self-recommended and added to our blog roll.

Azam, the truth of the matter is that I've nothing against farm bloggers who use their blogs in part to sell their product but if it's just a commercial blog and not very frequent, then, the answer is generally no.

For example I recently refused a link to a company blogging about their own no doubt excellent product which was pre-made plastic compost making machines - or something. The guy was very nice and polite and I feel a bit bad, but his blog didn't really hit the mark.

Nor does this one, but then, on the other hand, how often do you get to find out about Malaysian boer goats?

Not very often in my experience so for the goat lovers out there amongst you - of which I know there are many - I devote this to you:

www.iagrotech.com.

Our Plain and Simple Life: Just the day to day pathway of our plain and simple family, living a plain and simple rural life.

Our Plain and Simple Life was recommended to me by Back to Basic Living.

As always I wrote to the recommended blogger and was pleased to here from Deanna.


We are a simple living, homeschooling and life-skilling family of 11 in north Mississippi, living on 19.7 acres. We are slowly clearing and working to build our land to more usable status, adding animals and other items as we go.

Currently, we have goats and chickens (and a lot of dogs and cats!)

We plan to start building the fruit orchard on a small scale, our garden areas, and meat rabbits this year.

We are working toward being self-sustaining and self-sufficient here on our homestead.

Small steps every day, leaps and bounds in our dream vision. The way the world is moving, it only makes sense to get prepared to do things differently than we were raised.

Thanks Deanna. I'll be posting on your own recommendations shortly.

HELP SUPPORT FARM BLOGS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

A big ask I know, but if you can, please help me support my time on 'Farm Blogs from Around the World' by buying, reading and blogging/reviewing my book:

A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream


It's about urban downshifting to rural England (and a bit more).

I don't take any advertising on this site but your support would help me show my wife that this blog project is more than me just pursuing my obsessive interest in all things farming/gardening/smallholding!

Please support your local independent bookshop, but (yikes!) dare I say it...

A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream (Amazon.com)
A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream (Amazon.co.uk)

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Help support a goat farmer in France

Have you written to Farm Blogs From Around the World recently?

I received this email yesterday from a friend in my village here in France about a goat farmer who is farming in the area of France where we live and who is having the most terrible time.

I've done a translation and posted it below in English.

What this man needs is our help and there is an Association (with a blog http://www.cda-blog-asso.com/jeanhugueslechevrier) set up to help him.

If you are not in France and want to make a donation, you can send me an email at info AT ianwalthew.com

I am going to find out how people can make a donation from abroad and when I do, I will post here at Farm Blogs From Around the World.



EMAIL
From: A.
Date: 15 November 2008 11:44
To: Ian Walthew
Subject: Support for Jean Hugues the goat farmer.
__________________________________

Following numerous violent acts against Jean-Hugues Bourgeois since his setting up as a farmer in the commune of Teilhet in the Puy-de-Dôme, an Association to support him has been set up.

It has been set up by 20 inhabitants of the village (the others did not want to join it for "fear of acts of reprisal," according to the president of the Association, Christine Albert-Gauthier).

This Association is calling on everyone who has already supported Jean-Hugues or those that wish to join the movement, by becoming a member of the association.

Objective: act together to mobilize as citizens, something already begun by the bio associations in the region and the Confédération of Farmers of the Puy-de-Dôme, helping people, farmers or non farmers to join the movement.

Background to this story (which you can find on the blog of the Association Jean-Hugues le Chevrier, http://www.cda-blog-asso.com/jeanhugueslechevrier).

Since Jean-Hugues Bourgeois accepted to take on about 50 hectares of land belonging to Georges Message, a farmer nearing his retirement, Jean-Hughes' daily life has become a nightmare

During the night of 31 March/ 1 April 2008, a dozen of his goats were killed. On the wall there was graffiti: " La Boge ( the name of the farm) for farmers! Get out of here!"

Thanks to the solidarity and support of friends, Jean-Hughes succeeded in starting again. But the harassment didn't stop.

What followed were rumours (that he grew cannabis) and spiteful acts: a dead rat in his glove compartment, destruction of his electric fences, reinforced concrete metal rods placed in his field to puncture the tires on his tractor....

In August 2008, these acts of intimidation continued :
- during the night of 8/9 August a building was burnt down: his hay stock went up in smoke and his tractor was badly damaged;
- 22 August, Jean-Hugues Bougeois found a letter, left in his tractor, threatening the rape of his daughter, threats against his partner and death threats against Mr. Message.

After a calmer September, October saw a number of unexplainable acts:
- The night of 3/4 October, his barn was burnt. His remaining supply of hay and his grain harvest was completely destroyed, along with the building. Jean-Hugues Bourgeois received death threats in the post.
- At the beginning of December, we found out that one of his ewes had been killed by poison and others had aborted.

You'll understand that Mr. Bourgeois is completely crushed. He has had the courage to stay but not the money. We're going to let the authorities take care of the enquiry and and bring to justice the authors of these innumerable acts, but we're doing all we can to help Jean-Hugues.

If you're touched or disgusted by what has happened to Jean Hughes you can help him by one of two ways:

- make a donation: write a cheque to the Association Jean-Hugues Le Chevrier and send it to Association Jean-Hugues Le Chevrier La Boge, 63560 TEILHET, France
- become a member of the Association: membership costs €5 (cheques made out to the same name, sent to the same address).

Our telephone number is, if you are calling from outside France, ++33.6.79.09.54.80

This has been a comunique of the Association Jean Hugues le chevrier.

Please spread this message as widely as you can amongst your network.






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A Place in the Auvergne Recommends

My wife being Australian and having three Australian passport holding kids from 2.5 to nearly 7, I am always keen to find good farm blogs from Australia, to help keep the Australian in them alive and well, given we live in rural France.

So I am delighted to recommend Bredbo Valley View Farm, in New South Wales, Australian, which was brought to my attention by farmer/blogger Martyn. (Martyn has also sent me some great recommendations which I hope to post shortly.)

Sustainable - Ethical - Local – Valley View Farm is a small family farm featuring a rustic old tumbled down cottage on the plains of the Southern Tablelands, filled with animals both big and small – the cottage that is!.

Here's what Martyn has to say about his blog and farm:

I grew up in the Army, following Dad from posting too posting, 11 schools in 10 years. When he discharged we settled in the hinterland of the Gold Coast. My parents found a beautiful old dairy farm tucked away in a green valley above a crystal clear mountain creek and I lived there until I joined the Army.

I love the outdoors, I love the solitary, the feeling of self and the isolation of farm life.

My wife had a different up bringing, she is the youngest daughter of German immigrants, grew up in the South Australian outback and loved having her family around.

Farming is something that we both talked about and always wanted to do.

Around 2000 we started looking to move into the country, but as Australian real estate prices skyrocketed and rural property prices exploded we began to worry it would become way too expensive. So we jumped in boots and all. In hind site we probably shouldn't have bought a place in the middle of a drought - but hey, it was cheap.

So for the last eighteen months it's been adventure after adventure. We usually have more animals in the house then humans, it's getting that bad I have started calling the house the Barn.

The kids love the adventure, the wife loves the freedom and I love getting up early and fixing electric fences.

So what did we do on our farm?

When we started we had the brilliant idea of breeding free range rare breed pigs and growing heritage vegitables. We started with six pigs - I now have eighty, we have 15 hectares of oats, recently acquired 40 sheep and have been given three goats. The fun never stops.

Our Blog is a diary of our daily adventures, our ideas, hopes and thoughts.

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With goat, a rancher breaks away from the herd (IHT)

Bill Niman, who founded a meat company known for its humane treatment of animals, is on to other ventures. Above, he visits his goats at a partner's ranch in eastern Oregon.

(Chad Case for The New York Times)

By Kim Severson
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
BOLINAS, California: Bill Niman is not the rancher he once was.
Last year Niman walked away from the meat company he started in the 1970s with not much more than a handful of cattle and a political philosophy built on self-sufficiency.
Niman Ranch, which takes in annual sales of $85 million, was founded on the notion that the better an animal is treated, the better the meat will be. His beef was so good that in the early 1980s Alice Waters made it the first proper-noun meat on the menu at her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. His pigs, raised humanely by 600 family farms in Iowa, provide pork for the Chipotle chain's carnitas. Niman Ranch bacon, hot dogs and sausage fill grocery cases around the country.
But Niman is no longer a part of the company. Angry and discouraged after prolonged battles with a new management team over money and animal protocols, he left in August 2007 with a modest severance check and a small amount of stock.
He can't use his surname to sell meat, and he had to surrender the small herd of breeding cattle that lived on his ranch here, about an hour's drive north of San Francisco. The cattle were direct descendants of the ones he tended back in the days of counterculture, not profit margin.
But Niman, 63, is done licking his wounds. With a herd of goats and a young vegetarian wife he nicknamed Porkchop by his side, he is jumping back into the meat game.
"I think I am returning to my original roots," said Niman, who still lives in the little house he built on ranchland that kisses the Pacific Ocean.
Niman was raised in Minnesota, and moved to California to teach poor children. It was better than being drafted. In 1968, he headed north to Bolinas, a refuge for poets and intellectuals, to practice the counterculture movement's back-to-the-land philosophy.
He got his first cattle from local ranchers in barter for the tutoring his first wife, who has since died, gave their children. He has never left Bolinas, although now he watches over 1,000 acres instead of 11, and the land was turned over to the Point Reyes National Seashore.
He and Nicolette Hahn Niman, an environmental lawyer, were married five years ago, and now they are raising what they hope will be the best-tasting animals around. They have a handful of premier cattle that fatten only on pasture and a flock of traditional turkey breeds they personally chauffeured from Kansas to Bolinas last spring. Niman also has an organic pig project going in Iowa.
But he hopes goat will be the cornerstone of his comeback. That's in part because he has more of them around, and because he sees a wide-open market for pristine, pasture-raised goat meat. The guy is, after all, a businessman.
"I don't need to get 10 percent of the market anymore," he said. "I just want to be the best."
Chefs on both coasts are fast discovering his goat meat, although it is still available only in limited amounts, under the name BN Ranch.
In June, Niman stopped by Eccolo in Berkeley with a piece of shoulder, a loin, a leg and a rack of ribs. The chef and owner, Christopher Lee, now breaks down one or two of the 30-pound goat carcasses a week.
"It was succulent," Lee said. "It was mild. It was just perfect."
Like other chefs who have begun to cook with goat, Lee predicts a bright future for the meat.
"We've all cooked every part of the lamb a million times and we all know about grass-fed beef and aging beef," he said. "The goat is the next thing."
The meat Niman and a handful of other boutique farmers are producing is more delicate than the older, imported goat that is served at Pakistani curry houses, Jamaican jerk stands and taco trucks all over New York.
At a recent goat tasting in the Blue Hill at Stone Barns kitchen in Pocantico Hills, New York, Niman's young goat was compared to pan-seared and roasted loin and shoulder cuts from both a small Vermont grower and what the chef Dan Barber called "commodity goat."
The commodity goat was slightly musty and chewy. The Vermont goat was as tender and mild as lamb. The Niman goat was like lamb, too, but a lamb with a big personality. The meat was sweet and vegetal. The fat, what little of it there was, tasted rich but felt lighter than olive oil.
At Thyme for Goat, a recent collaboration between four goat farms within 25 miles of each other in Maine, goat is taking off, in a small way. People are attracted to the way it is raised and its healthful properties. Goat meat doesn't have the tallow of lamb, and contains about half the fat of chicken, according to a Department of Agriculture analysis.
"A lot of folks said nobody in Maine is going to buy goat meat," said Marge Kilkelly, who does marketing for the group. "We've found just the opposite."
The breed of goat is important. Like the Maine collective, Niman raises some stout, muscular Boer goats. But he is particularly fond of meat from lighter framed Spanish goats, which sometimes mix with the Boer.
"What Bill is so good at is the genetics," Barber said. "He's the master."
For about half the year, Niman lets the goats roam his California ranch. In the summer and fall, when the California grass is brown, they move to Oregon. He also works with ranchers raising two other herds to his specifications in California and Oregon.
Goats and cattle work particularly well together in a pasture. Goats don't like clover or rye grass, which the cattle love, but they make fast work of scotch broom, poison oak and other plants that can take over good grassland.
"Nature is so perfect," Niman said.
His longtime followers may be surprised that he is now raising his cattle entirely on pasture, without switching to a diet of grain a few months before slaughter.
He built Niman Ranch on the idea that raising a quality, year-round beef supply was like making dessert. You bake the cake with grass and frost it with grain. The method produces well-marbled meat with that traditional corn-fed flavor most Americans grew up eating. And it provides beef year-round. Animals that feed on pasture are fat enough to be slaughtered only at certain times of year.
But just as Niman Ranch was becoming a big, nationally recognized brand, Niman fell victim to a move toward meat purity that he and Orville Schell, his former partner, had started. Several chefs and food writers came to believe that a diet of corn was ruinous for cattle's health and the environment.
Although Niman's beef was quite different from conventional corn-fed beef, that he fed his animals with any grain at all was unacceptable to some chefs. Waters decided to drop it from the menu in 2002 and turn to more seasonal, all-grass options.
"It made me very sad but I just said we are at a moment in time and I just can't do this anymore," she said, adding that she "couldn't be more delighted that he's come back to his senses."
Still, Niman continued to build the company. He took on a parade of investors. A new management team took over in 2006, led by Jeff Swain, who had been at the company that produces Coleman Natural Beef, Niman's biggest competitor.
With the new team came changes, many of them made over Niman's protests. The company sold its custom butchering plant in Oakland and prepared to sell its high-end feedlot in Idaho. Niman Ranch began to purchase cattle ready for slaughter from feedlots over which the company had little control, a practice that Niman said was "against my religion."
Niman said feed standards dropped and animals were transported distances longer than 500 miles, which he said stresses them too much.
Swain said feed and care standards for the 400 head of cattle they process a week have not dropped. Contractors follow a list of protocols that are similar to those Niman developed.
And although some animals are being transported longer than 500 miles for slaughter, he said they are allowed to rest for 24 hours before they are dispatched.
The real issue, Swain said, is that Niman was a poor businessman. The cattle portion of the program was a money-loser, unlike the pork business, which processes about 3,200 animals a week. That remains unchanged, Swain said. "When we got involved, Niman would raise money and go through it and raise money and go through it," he said. "Any change to Bill's business model he didn't like. We needed to make the company financially sustainable."
The more Niman complained that the protocols he developed were being eased out, the more marginalized he became. Finally, Niman walked away, heading back to focus on the ranch where he has lived since the 1970s. Nicolette, 22 years his junior and a devout vegetarian, was there to comfort him. "It was such a dark time for Bill," she said.
While Niman fought his battles, his wife learned how to work the ranch. She also finished her book, "Righteous Porkchop" (Collins Living, March). It is part memoir and part exposé, focusing on her work fighting industrial meat companies as a lawyer for the Waterkeeper Alliance, Robert Kennedy Jr.'s environmental organization.
So how does that vegetarian thing work out? She accepts the role animals play in the human food chain, and he never pressures her to eat meat. She doesn't cook meat at home, but doesn't forbid Niman from throwing some chorizo on a slice of homemade pizza. He tends to go out for steaks, especially when he travels.
The one place they compromised was over a couple of her favorite cattle. She became emotionally attached, so he promised the cow and steer will not die for meat.
"You've got the rancher who came back home and the lovely, smart animal welfare girl who is 20 years younger and has really gone to work on him," said Betty Fussell, who writes about Niman in her new book, "Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef" (Harcourt, October). "It is the story of the cowboy and the lady, in a way."
Other people at his stage of life might be planning how to ride off into the beautiful Pacific sunset, satisfied with having made a real change in how people eat. But not Niman, who acts as if he's just getting started.
"It's the first time I've had a true partner at my side," he said of the last five years. "I feel like together, we are pioneering the next generation of animal husbandry."

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French market pictures

Many of the bloggers on Farm Blogs From Around the World sell their produce at weekly markets.

I go to our weekly local market every Thursday, sometimes helping out my cheese making friends and neighbours, or selling my books in July and August, and as a customer virtually every week.

In fact, as a family of five, we do nearly all our food shopping at the market, save staples like rice and pasta, and some other meat which we get on barter or buy from a friend who produces organic beef or from our local butcher.

We also do other barter (e.g. hay for potatoes), have our own garden, orchard and chickens, and best of all, there is our very generous 86 year old neighbour Jean-Baptiste who has to be the best vegetable gardener I have ever met, and who gives us lots of produce and advice.

If you'd like to look at photos of our local French market here in the Auvergne, you can visit my blog A Place in the Auvergne and click onto the label 'Marche' or look for any posting titled a Thursday.

I started this blog at the beginning of the year (but the labels only later in the year, so again, look for postings from any week entitled Thursday) so you can see the produce, colours and crowds of the market right through an entire year.

For my follower The Dairy Princess in particular, here are some photos of the goats cheeses made by another of my local friends, photos you can also find at A Place in the Auvergne, Thursday, 11th September, 2008.

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Swiss farmers keep tradition of charcoal-burning (IHT)

By Jonathan LynnReuters
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
ROMOOS, Switzerland: In the remote hills and valleys of central Switzerland, mountain farmers are still making charcoal to a centuries-old method.
Charcoal, formed by removing water and tar from wood, burns with almost the same intensity as coal, and was once the main fuel for medieval glassmakers and blacksmiths, and a source of energy for Switzerland as it industrialized in the 19th century, until imported coal became available.
Its controlled production can be traced back globally at least 3,500 years. Now mostly used by the world's poor, charcoal in Switzerland serves mainly to grill food, for instance in barbecues.
Charcoal-burning, once a major cause of deforestation in Europe, largely disappeared from Switzerland in the 20th century, but experienced a temporary revival during World War Two when neutral Switzerland was unable to import coal.
It was never interrupted in the Napf region, some 30 km (20 miles) east of the lakeside resort of Lucerne, where it dates back to the middle ages, when glassmakers practiced their craft in the 13th and 14th centuries.
But the back-breaking lonely work is far from being a quaint tradition revived for tourists. Also practiced in some remote parts of former East Germany like the Harz mountains, it is for smallholding farmers a vital source of income.
The little village of Romoos, whose name goes back to an ancient Germanic word for tree-trunk, is at the heart of the area of steep hills and valleys, where tractors crawl along the slopes as the farmers and their wives mow and rake rich mountain grass for winter hay.
In hollows in the woods, farmers build charcoal kilns, the shape and size of small igloos.
INTENSE HEAT
Willy Renggli, head of the charcoal burners' association, shows how a kiln is built up.
On a spider-web base of tree trunks, one-meter long logs are stacked up in two layers around a central shaft or flue.
The best wood for charcoal is beech, but pine and other timber will do.
The kiln is topped off with smaller pieces of timber, then covered with branches of fir needles, and finally coated with a thick paste of charcoal grindings, ash and water.
A typical kiln uses about 60 "Ster" of timber, Renggli says. A "Ster" is a Swiss measurement corresponding to one cubic meter (10 cubic feet) of wood, weighing about 600-700 kilos.
Each "Ster" of timber yields about 100 kilos of charcoal.
It takes two men about three weeks to build the kiln, which will then burn for 12-18 days.
The charcoal-burner will spend the entire time by the kiln, camping out under canvas while it burns, says Renggli, 51.
Every few hours he feeds the kiln with charcoal chips, letting in air by piercing the charcoal paste covering and regulating the heat by sealing it again.
Around 50 barrels of chips will be used up in a single kiln.
"I can sleep 2-3 hours at a time. But I sleep as well as I do when I'm in my white bed up there," he said pointing up the hill towards his flower-bedecked traditional farmhouse.
Once the kiln is burning it can generate a heat inside of up to 800 degrees Celsius (1,472 degrees Fahrenheit).
But the charcoal-burner can walk barefoot on the kiln if the charcoal paste has been applied properly.
"I need about 500 degrees to get the charcoal process going," Renggli said.
If the charcoal-burner neglects tending the kiln every few hours, or misjudges feeding or aerating it, the fire may go out -- or the charcoal itself will catch fire, burning out with an intolerable heat.
As a result, the work is best done by a single burner who can monitor his kiln precisely.
"The charcoal burner who lights the kiln must burn it through to the end," Renggli said.
The Swiss authorities have tried to get unemployed people to work as burners in shifts, but they only produced one third of the charcoal a professional would have done, he recalled.
The work, though tough, is a useful sideline, even if it brings in only about a quarter of the earnings he gets from his farm -- a 10 hectare smallholding producing milk from nine cows and seven goats.
In addition, to make ends meet, Renggli and his wife have joined the agrotourism trend, taking in guests who want to experience life on a farm, and he helps out as the local postman.
The craft of charcoal-burning is usually passed down generations although Renggli, one of a dozen active burners in Romoos, says he learnt it from his neighbours.
But his son has already built and fired some small kilns with 5 or 6 "Ster" of timber.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/03/europe/OUKWD-UK-SWISS-CHARCOAL.php




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Dwindling forests pose a severe threat to Kenya (IHT)

NAROK, Kenya: Joseph Nkolia, a Maasai goatherd, pointed dismissively at two shallow pools, the only water in a parched stream west of the Kenyan town of Narok.
"It rained yesterday and look at it," he said. "Two years ago it used to flow strongly through here. Now I often have to get a lorry to bring water from Narok for us and our animals, and it costs a lot." His flock went by without bothering to drink the scant brown water.
The stream is a tributary of the Ewaso Ngiro, one of 12 rivers fed from the Mau Complex, the biggest Kenyan forest and a vital water collection basin in the west of the country.
Destruction of the woodland by rampant illegal settlement, logging and charcoal burning threatens severe damage to the Kenyan economy with an impact on energy, tourism, agriculture and water supplies for cities and industry.
A familiar Kenyan saga of corruption, illegal land grabs and the use of state resources to buy votes has destroyed a quarter of the 400,000-hectare, or 988,000-acre, forest in the past decade, with an impact that may be felt as far away as Egypt.

The Mau was broken into 22 blocks by human settlement over the past century but the real destruction began in 1997, when large plots were given away by the government of former President Daniel arap Moi to win votes in an election.
"My life will be completely ruined if I cannot get water for us and our livestock, our land will turn into a desert. We will all die," said another Maasai, Moses Mundati, standing on sunbaked ground that the Ewaso Ngiro once flowed across. As he spoke, people brought yellow containers to gather water from the narrowed river beside him.
But if the saga is familiar, the recent reaction is not.
Kenya's new coalition government set up a task force in July to reverse the destruction of the forest, which the United Nations Environment Program says could cost the tourism, tea and energy sectors alone at least $300 million.
"Such an extensive and ongoing destruction of a key natural asset for the country is nothing less than a national emergency," Prime Minister Raila Odinga said.
So drastic is the problem, the inauguration of the 60-megawatt Sondu Miriu hydroelectric project in western Kenya has been delayed because of inadequate water flow. The $260 million Japanese-financed project was designed to depend on water from the Mau and has only a small storage reservoir.
As high oil prices push Kenya to look for alternative energy, experts say water from the Mau, if it is preserved, could generate nearly 60 percent of current national capacity.
Lake Nakuru, center of a popular game park, and Lake Natron in Tanzania, breeding ground for the Rift Valley's famous flamingos, are both receding. "If we don't take action, in 10 years Lake Nakuru will be gone," said Francis Nkako, head of the local development authority.
The rivers fed by the forest's giant moisture reservoir and generation of rain also supply Lake Victoria, source of the Nile, and two other Kenyan lakes.
Revenue from tea, a leading export for Kenya, has declined while tourism, is also under threat, after already suffering a 23 percent drop because of a bloody post-election crisis earlier this year.
"This is destabilizing the environment to such an extent that it has a huge impact on economic development at a national level," said Christian Lambrechts, a forestry expert with the UN Environment Program. "It is basically a suicide process."
The government stance changed drastically this year when first the finance minister, John Michuki, and then Odinga, the prime minister, were flown over the forest. Officials say they were shocked by the huge scars in once densely wooded areas.
Officials say Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki - bitter rivals until their power-sharing deal ended the political crisis - are united on the issue. But saving the forest is likely to be painful: Lambrechts estimates there are 25,000 squatters in the forest.
"We are not going to go anywhere," said Nicodemus Yegon, one of thousands of people living in the southern Maasai Mau block who say they have title deeds to land in what officials say is protected forest. "When God descends, he will find us here."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/business/forest.php

A Place in the Auvergne

A Place in My Country
Ian Walthew

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Hidden Haven Homestead

Apologies to Peggy for not posting sooner about her blog, which was recommended to me by Lynda Hayes, at Food, Fun & Farm Life In East Africa

Hidden Haven Homestead is the blog of Peggy and her husband's "very small farm".

They raise registered Nubians along with chickens, geese, ducks, rabbits and dwarf goats. All have names. They do raised bed gardening and Peggy also makes and sells goat milk soaps, candles and lotions.

And here's one of their goats!

"Washday"

"Babie Goats"

"Diva"

I'm not quite sure how I feel about dressing up goats, but each to their own!

http://www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com/
http://www.ianwalthew.com/


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