We’ve been busy with farm infrastructure for the past 2 years we have not had the cashmere we’ve collected processed nor have we attempted to sell any of it. This is a process we just haven’t had much time to explore.
We’ve been talking to two other farm owners who are interested in breeding the Wood line. Since last year’s kids were sired by several different bucks that were both known and unknown, we wanted to have a better understanding of the quality or fineness of each individual’s cashmere.
You might be thinking, how can they not know who sired some of the kids…Without getting into too much detail, we purchased several more of the Wood goats when the remainder of the goats were sold from the Wood farm the summer of 2017. Lacy was one we purchased and she came to us pregnant. We know that there were 3 bucks and DNA testing eliminated Abraham who was a Weinheimer Buck, which means that Lacy’s kids were a higher percentage of Wood than we had thought they might be. We also had Jacob here on the farm temporarily. He was a 75% Wood buck and we know that he impregnated 3 of our does.
So we collected hair samples of all the goats that we had not tested yet and sent them into Yocum McColl in Colorado in December. I received the results of the testing on January 11, 2019. It’s interesting but also shows that the goats have very nice cashmere that ranges between 11.1 and 15.9 mean fiber diameter This is great information to know and we will be evaluating this information to help us in our breeding program as well as making better decisions on who to sell to the people we’re setting up to breed the Wood line.
Below is one of the test results so you can see what they look like.
