Isle of Man Goat Farm in Kirk Michael has been holding a series of Kidding Chaos events, giving people the chance to go and visit and have a cuddle with this year’s crop of baby goats.

Clare Lewis and her partner Mike Walker are celebrating winning Champion Goat with their Anglo Nubian, High Tilt Gwen, and Reserve Champion Goat with High Tilt Gretel.

’We had a very successful show and I was even more chuffed to win with the cheeses,’ says Clare.

As we reported last year, Clare has been experimenting with making hard goat’s cheeses and the cheese that won at the Royal was one which had been liberally ’fed’ with Rioja then left to mature for several months. She says that she has, more recently, been making Parmesan-style cheeses, which traditionally use skimmed milk, but we will have to wait a while before we can try those - they need around a year to mature fully.

Although most of the goats at the farm give birth without any intervention, Clare usually keeps an eye on them just in case anything goes wrong. Two weeks ago Fanny, an Anglo Nubian cross, gave birth to triplets, with all three being born inside their birth sac.

Clare says: ’Luckily I was sitting with her, at about seven or eight in the evening, and I was there to help her through. Then, at midnight her twin sister, Fifi, also gave birth.’

Fifi and Fanny had been put to a Saanen Billy (male goat) because Clare and Mike didn’t have an unrelated Billy on the farm and Covid had made it hard to go to the UK and buy another.

This means that, although they are both black, their kids are very light in colour, like the Billy.

Clare says: ’Fanny is a big producer of milk. Despite feeding her triplets she still produces another four litres of milk a day for us.’

Unlike cows, goats don’t have to kid every year to produce milk. Fifi and Fanny hadn’t kidded since 2019, but milked through 18 months from their first lactation, producing more than 3,000 litres of milk between them.

Clare says: ’It’s the good genetics coming through on our home bred goats from our black Anglo Nubian Billy, Willsfield Flint.’

l If you would like another chance to go and visit the goats and kids, Clare and Mike are holding two open days in aid of Hospice this Saturday and Sunday (August 28 and 29).

More details on their Facebook page.