By MARIA SCANDALE

At Goatmare Farms, 11 babies came a little early this year.

“The boy goat, Rascal, umm, got loose,” explained Connie Shinn Lohr.

“He’s responsible for the shenanigans,” she said, giving a tour last Saturday at the goat farm that enlivens the 10-acre Pineland-scape belonging to her and her husband, Bill, at 1361 Pancoast Rd. in Warren Grove.

Seeing a visitor in the stall, 140-pound Rascal promptly began bumping horns with the gate that separated him from this reporter.

“He’s going to show off,” Lohr pointed out.

Luckily, the 50- and 60-degree days in this soft winter are agreeable to Rascal’s “kids,” who basked in the sun in pairs as their various mothers kicked around the farmyard.

“I’ve been out here in 14-degree weather, bottle-feeding,” recalled Lohr, who knows all 52 Nubian-mix and pygmy goats by name. If they needed special care, a few newborns have been sheltered in the kitchen of the family’s house, she said.

As she was chatting about this, a goat was nibbling the reporter’s vinyl jacket.

“Juliet,” chided Connie. “No, don’t eat the boots.”

Juliet more aggressively moved to the bright plastic camera bag. Goats can see in color, we now remember among the fun facts that Connie had told us. Good thing they have only bottom teeth – another fun fact.

Bill and Connie Lohr’s place in the pines is a world apart from Connie’s inherited co-ownership of Wally Mitchell’s restaurant in Surf City – but only a 20-mile drive away. Connie and her brother, Cliff, are partners in the LBI breakfast-lunch landmark that was formerly run by their parents, the late John and Lisa Hilkert.

Connie is also an active volunteer with Friends of the Southern Ocean County Animal Shelter; she organized a fundraiser that made $9,000 in five hours at the Surf City Firehouse last August. She and Bill are both animal lovers, but they came about it in different ways.

“I was born and raised on Long Beach Island,” she said, “I married a man who had goats.”

Bill’s family bought property in Barnegat Light in 1966, but he grew up in Northeast Philadelphia. It was his aunt who had a farm in Pennsylvania who nurtured the livestock idea. “I bought the property here when I was 21,” he said. “I wasn’t here two weeks and I had a goat. And it grew from there.”

“How do you not fall in love on a daily basis?” Connie had asked a baby she was holding. “Tell them why I have so many?” (It licked her face.) “This is why! Because I can’t get rid of ya!”
But what do you do with 52 of them?

Mainly, Goatmare Farms is “a hobby,” Bill answered. Occasionally, a goat sells at Harker’s Auction in Tabernacle, or on Craigslist, or through the new Facebook page, Goatmare Farms.
Most buyers are looking for the Nubians for healthful goat’s milk. Pygmies are for pets, some goats for stud, occasionally for meat.

“We mostly breed ours for dairy,” Connie said. “But we don’t milk them. That’s very labor-intensive, very costly.

“Occasionally, the bucks will go for meat, but I don’t deal with that; my husband does. I refuse to. But it is the number one consumed meat in the world,” she added, naming regions such as the Middle East and Central America.

Goatmare Farms’ farthest-ranging sale, distance-wise, was three hours away, and that was for a stud goat.

“I’m not trying to make money. I just enjoy having them,” remarked Bill. Goats have “more personality,” he declared, than most other animals.

He re-purposes industrial shipping containers, which he finds online, into secure, divided stalls. The containers flank a driveway that separates the more landscaped part of the property from a fenced-in corral closer to the woods.

“It offsets costs a little bit when you sell some of the babies, or rabbits,” he added, gesturing to cages holding the Trianta breed. “Unless you had it on such a large scale commercially, you’d never pay for it. But all the babies that we don’t keep, we’ll sell off and use the money to put back into hay and feed. And get more.”

In Sickness and in Health;
Farmers Deal With It All

As Bill drifted into Saturday noontime talk with a neighbor, Connie finished acquainting her visitors with Elvis, Hansel and Gretel, Gracie and the other baa-ing residents.

“Babies are a lot of work,” Connie acknowledged a question. “You don’t know who’s going to get rejected.”

She explained concerning one: “She had to be raised inside. Her mother rejected her. Her mother is that brown goat over there, Sophie, and it was her first time being a mom. And first-time mothers sometimes don’t know what to do, and she didn’t know what to do. So, Juliet became my house pet.”

Directing the words now to the friendly animal, which was crowding us, Connie affectionately added, “We won’t tell everybody how you chewed my drywall and ate the Sheetrock a little.”
Birthing took a wrong turn for another goat, a 5-year-old mother that had accomplished it many times before. The result disheartened Connie, as she looked upon Hazel this last Saturday in January.

“She’s probably going to be put down this week. She had a breech birth and the baby died inside of her, and she’s got sepsis,” Connie said, adding that the veterinarian came and delivered the baby, but the infection seemed to have gotten ahead of the medicine. “We’re treating her with antibiotics and with two shots a day, but she’s not responding. Sorry, Hazel, honey; we tried everything.”

Coaxing Hazel to eat went so far as making a mash out of molasses and rabbit pellets, which is compressed alfalfa, and trying to wash it into her throat with a syringe. The effort was not successful, and the veterinarian would probably be coming this week to put the animal down, Connie concluded.

Meanwhile, another goat standing beside her was due to give birth any day.

Bill and Connie’s protective duty is heightened by other natural dangers. Yes, there are coyotes in the woods, Connie said. “I’ve seen them in my yard. But they don’t seem to bother the goats too much.”

Some of the flourishing native plants are fatal to the goats if eaten. Little Minnie was chewing a dead oak leaf, and that was OK.

“Contrary to popular belief, goats don’t eat everything,” Connie insisted. “But there is a lot of greenery that is indigenous to this area that is highly poisonous to goats. Mountain laurel, which grows wild around here, will kill a goat. Same thing with rhododendron, azalea, wild cherry.”
As attached as Connie gets to the creatures, sometimes there’s a male that’s just got to go.
“You learn to distance yourself from the males because you know that you can’t keep them,” she said, shaking her head at Rascal as he inserted his horns into the fence mesh and yanked upward.

“He’ll take that fence right out of the ground,” she said. “He’s on Craigslist for sale.”
The price is $125. If he were papered, he might command a price between about $350 and $500, she said.

Rascal persisted. “Hey! Bill,” she called.

But the herd has granted the couple many hours of “entertainment” as well.

“It’s so nice and quiet out here. We sit out on the table on the hill and just watch them; they’re so entertaining.”

mariascandale@thesandpaper.net