Foreword:
Over the past year, our focus at Imnaha Nubians has changed. We are transitioning to a family-centered hobby herd that emphasizes our own use and enjoyment of our goats, rather than selling milk or breeding dairy replacements. We are drastically cutting the size of our herd this year, selling nearly all our mature does while retaining our core animals and some of their daughters. What we were doing wasn’t working, and the following policies represent many hours of reflection.
Let’s be frank. We really enjoy talking to folks about goats, BUT we also expect people to value our time and treat us fairly. We expect people to behave in a businesslike manner when doing business, but I’m sad to say that hasn’t always been our experience.
Please don’t waste our time if you aren’t a serious buyer. We know how it is! We could talk about goats all day–and we would love to talk to you about them anytime, but don’t ask us to send you pages and pages of pedigree info, lab results, DNA reports, milk records, and photos when you have no intention of making a purchase. Please check out our webpage and Facebook pages. You will find most of that sort of information there.
Also, please have a plan for how you will pay for them. Do you go to the supermarket without money? Do you have it in hand when you leave home, or figure you’ll find some along the way? If you need to have a discussion with your significant other before making a commitment, please have that conversation before you call. We expect you to pay for animals and take them home in a timely manner. Don’t tell us you want to buy an animal and then expect us to turn away other buyers when you haven’t put a deposit on them.
Don’t expect us to spend our time and money feeding animals for you when you don’t have a plan to get them home. Feed is expensive, and our time is limited. It may shock you to realize it, but we spend well over $1000 per month on feed just for our small purebred Nubian goat herd (that includes a mix of several types of hay and grain, plus minerals). If we are feeding milk we produce to our kids, then we obviously aren’t selling it. If we were charging for the time it takes to care for all of them, well, you probably get the picture! That means we can’t afford to board numerous animals for free that were supposed to be gone to their new homes.
If you reserve a kid, don’t expect us to send you multiple snapshots and cute stories about your kid every week! Sam and I are both in our 70’s. We may be retired now, but we aren’t sitting around feeling bored. We are busy people here on our little farm! Even so, our sole income is our Social Security checks, unless we happen to make a sale, and trust me, we aren’t getting rich. We can’t afford to feed animals for you for months on end, because you don’t know how or when you can come and get them. All our costs have skyrocketed over the past few years since the pandemic. At the same time, many people expect to pay no more for goats than they did 10 years ago. How does that make sense? We had to raise our prices and change how we do things or just get out. Reality bites.
Thank you for understanding. Now let’s go have fun! Goats rock!
******
Sales Policies:
Matings on our annual Breeding List are tentative until confirmed and are subject to change without notice.
We offer 2 doe and 2 buck reservations per breeding.
We reserve the right to retain any animal we choose, for any reason, and regardless of reservation.
All sales are final.
We give priority to buyers who participate in ADGA Performance Programs, because we’ve made a sizable investment over the years in proving our animals. We have been on continuous DHIA since 2015, and nearly all our does have earned their AR stars—we’d like to see their offspring continue to do so. Many of our animals have been DNA-typed. Some have had DNA checked for Alpha S1 Casein, and we have cleared our herd of G6S. All our goats are G6S normal by testing or parentage. In addition, we have had our herd Linear Appraised several times, last in 2019, and we look forward to doing it again soon. We hope to participate in showing again, too, at least to a limited degree.
We do not sell horned kids. If horns are important to you, you must pick them up before they are disbudded.
We do not sell animals without papers or with registration applications at a discount. The only exceptions to this are the unregistered newborn buck kids that we sell as prospective wethers for 4-H projects, grazers, pets, pack goats, companion animals, or meat kids, etc. Those are offered as is at $50 each and may or may not be disbudded. Buck kids that aren’t immediately sold, are banded (castrated) at two months of age and sold at $1.50 per lb.
We occasionally have family milkers for sale at discounted prices. These are ADGA-registered does that have minor faults, but they still have nice kids and are decent producers. We generally price them at around $300, which is about what they would sell for at the auction. If you are interested in one, contact us and we will put you on our waiting list.
We do not engage in international sales outside the contiguous United States. Sorry! We don’t have the resources for that.
Deposits:
We require a $100 deposit, applicable to the purchase price, to reserve any animal on our breeding or sales lists. Until we receive your deposit, the animal is still for sale. Deposits are not refundable UNLESS the kid you reserved is not born AND there is no agreeable substitute, OR we decide to retain the animal. No exceptions. Don’t want to pay a deposit? No problem! Just buy them. You are always welcome to come directly to the farm to buy animals we have for sale or send us the necessary total funds. We accept most forms of payment. Please note that we will not refund money on cancelled sales. Any monies paid will be applied to our board costs and also reimburse us for opportunity loss while the animal was unavailable for sale.
Pricing:
Prices on the breeding list are for RESERVED NEWBORN KIDS ONLY. If you want to buy a weaned kid, for instance, it will cost $200 more to cover some of our costs of raising them. All our kids are separated from their dams at birth and bottle-raised, so you can take them home before weaning if you can bottle-feed and care for them. Prices for those kids are pro-rated. Kid prices start at $500 for a kid out of a first freshener and include the cost of registration, as well as the cost of DNA-typing for buck kids sold for breeding purposes. All kids are disbudded at about 2 weeks of age. Kids from proven dams are priced higher, depending on the doe’s achievements, such as earning her AR Star, Superior Genetics rating, Elite status, Very Good or Excellent Linear Appraisal, or finishing her Championship. Buck kids may be available from first fresheners if they and their dams meet our standards.
We will notify you when your reserved kid is born. Kids must be paid in full by 1 month of age, and older animals that are sold must be paid off within 30 days of initiating the sale. If they are not, we will cancel the sale and offer them to other buyers, and you will forfeit your deposit and any money you may have paid. PLEASE NOTE: We will not call to remind you. We will send you ONE REMINDER via email or Facebook Messenger if a deadline for payment or pick up is approaching. Owners of any animals still on our premises after six weeks of birth or sale will be charged daily board at $5 per day until they leave.
Board:
We charge $5 per day to board animals, We can’t afford to care for animals for free. All charges for board must be paid before the animal leaves.
Transport:
We do not deliver animals to their new homes. We can oftentimes arrange to meet you partway if you live in the Pacific Northwest to save some distance driving, but we encourage you to pick them up in person, if possible, so you can meet their relatives. We also do not ship kids by air, because we are six hours away (each way) from the closest airport capable of shipping them. If we are aware of any private parties willing to transport your animal, we will let you know, so YOU can contact them. Otherwise, we recommend Culver Family Transport or Red River Transport for professional shipping. PLEASE NOTE: We have not used them ourselves. Our recommendation is based solely on reviews from people we know who have.
Buyers are responsible for all costs involved in transporting their animal to its new home. At the very least this will involve a Certificate of Veterinary Inspection (CVI), if traveling out-of-state, which is good for 30 days. Some states require additional lab tests plus the CVI to be sure the imported animal has a clean bill of health. Kids may also require a crate for transport, unless the buyer provides their own. We will arrange for the necessary tests, but it is the buyer’s responsibility to pay for them. All costs incurred preparing animals for transport must be paid before animals leave.
We are not responsible for any animal’s health once it leaves our premises.
Animals must be transported in safe, adequate, enclosed vehicles, and we reserve the right to refuse transport in vehicles we deem unsafe. We recommend using an enclosed van, trailer, or a canopy on your truck. Small kids will need a crate. Expect to provide them with hay and water if you are travelling any great distance.
–Effective as of August 1, 2024
Kid Raising:
Our kids are bottle-fed from birth, disbudded, tattooed, and given a routine series of three injections of CDT (Clostridium perfringens Types C & D, plus Tetanus toxoid). All newborn kids also receive an injection of Tetanus antitoxin at birth to prevent navel ill. Because Leptospirosis is a problem in our area, we give a series of two injections of Lepto-5 vaccine. Mature animals receive an annual booster of CDT and one of Lepto-5 every 6-months, on the advice of our veterinarians.
We do not feed pasteurized milk, unless we happen to run short and have to buy pasteurized whole cow’s milk from the store, and we don’t feed replacer, believing that real milk, raw or pasteurized, is best for kids. We went to great pains to not bring in any infected or carrier animals when we started our herd in 2015, and we still insist any addition must come from a historically negative herd, as well as test negative itself for all common diseases. Our bucks and does have routinely tested negative for CAE/CL/Johnes’, brucellosis, and tuberculosis for many years now, so we feed our kids the same milk we drink. We normally wean buck kids at 3 months of age (when they are removed from the doe herd) and doe kids at 5 months. Kids have access to top-quality alfalfa hay from birth and are actively eating a small grain ration by weaning (we do not creep feed). All of our animals have free access to plenty of fresh spring water and to either Purina Goat Mineral or a custom loose mineral ration similar to Sweetlix Meat Maker, which was formulated by our veterinarian. They also go with the main doe herd at an early age and learn to browse on the hill up behind our house, which they have free access to anytime they wish.
We do not preventatively treat kids for Coccidiosis, being advised by our veterinarians that we should treat them with Co-Rid only when there are symptoms to avoid fostering resistance. Last year we only had to treat one kid once for cocci. We fortunately do not have a problem with internal parasites in our area, since it is very dry throughout the year and there are also extremes of hot and cold weather seasonally. We prefer to deal with internal parasites using proven management techniques and individual testing, rather than routinely deworming the lot of them. External parasites occur occasionally and are treated with UltraBoss pour-on, which is dairy safe. We routinely de-worm animals we sell with Ivomec drench before they leave for their new homes.
All kids are disbudded between 1-2 weeks of age, depending on when their horn buds pop up. We use the Rhinehart X-50 dehorner to do this, because it gets hot enough to do the job quickly and efficiently with the least amount of trauma. Expert research studies have shown that disbudding kids quickly at an early age is the least traumatic and most satisfactory way of removing horns. We do not raise horned kids. For anyone. Been there, done that, won’t do it again.
Buck Kids:
Buck kids are routinely banded at 2 months of age and become wethers, unless there is a reservation on them. All registered buck kids we sell are DNA-typed at our expense, because after January 1, 2024 ADGA requires buck kids to have DNA-typing on file before their kids can be registered. Unregistered buck kids are not generally tattooed, though they may be disbudded if they are older than 2 weeks old.
If you have any questions, please contact Dianne at dianmiller1@live.com. Thank you!