Caprine Outing

I don't have any pictures to go with this post but here's the summary of what we did this weekend (Sept. 19-20).
Every other year Cornell sponsors a Caprine Outing. They rent out a girl scout camp and people sign up to come for the weekend to participate in all-about-goat workshops. The first night we had a potluck dinner with all kinds of goat products cooked in. The workshop we participated in was on different goat dairy setups presented by Carol Delaney from University of Vermont. The biggest thing I took away from her presentations was the best information is in French and from Quebec and France, with Quebec having a very strong up and coming industry that is trying lots of new things.
The next day we participated in a bunch of different workshops on nutrition, pasture management, parasite management (worms are REALLY interesting!) and a few other things (they had other more "fun" workshops like how to make goats milk fudge, a variety of cheeses, soap making, goat packing, felting etc). We ended the day by taking an intensive artificial insemination class. It was pretty interesting and now we know how to do it, we just haven't decided if we're going to invest in all the equipment yet. Maybe when we get a bit bigger.