Melissa and Rick Williamson

We started WillowMyst Ranch in July of 2004 with a herd of three Boer goats, Mama, Esperanza, and Larry. In January of 2005 we added Phyllis, Joy, Susie and Ruth. A week later Ruth begat Elmo.

In December 2006, all but four of our goats kidded. From that group we will be able to register six does (we had a ton of wethers) and two more from Constance who kidded in April 2007.

In April 2007, we had to make a decision about Missy’s job. We elected to take a promotion with Coke and move to the Dallas Texas area. Our goats have been through a lot this year. We moved to a nice 11 acre place between Ferris and Red Oak, south of Dallas. The goats have a nice pond and lots of grazing that they didn’t have in Lubbock, but there have also been some trials. There are either stray dogs or mean dogs that live in the area and we learned the hard way that in groups of two or more, they will attack the goats. We lost Julia, our pretty girl we got from Zap-Tex in Muleshoe, both of Princess’s boys, and Camewait. After the dog attacks and much fence work, we called John and Lynda Dodd, Just Kiddin’ Ranch, who we had purchased goats from in 2005. They were kind enough to give us their guard dog Molly, and two of their Maremma/Border Collie pups, Ling Ling and Hsing Hsing. Molly was pregnant at the time and had a litter of pups in October, from which we kept one little girl, so far we call her ButterBall.

We didn’t breed our goats for the fall since we were moving and didn’t want to cause more stress than they were already going through. But, in October 2007 we made another trip back to Sealy to John and Lynda’s and brought home King Solomon and four pretty does, Bonnie, Cream, JZ, and Razzy. Our luck continued to be bad and in November/December we lost Bonnie when her kid was born early and then lost Cream’s and Razzy’s kids at birth. So our only kid for the fall 2007 was born to JZ, we are calling him Simon (can you say spoiled??)

We are looking forward to 2008 with Sol on the job, we expect to start kidding in early March 2008.

The winter of 2008/2009 brought some bad freezing rain and cold fronts thru our area. During that time we lost Tina and Simon. Both had been sickly and couldn't tolerate the cold temperatures.

Spring brought us new hope with 18 kids born, 5 boys who we wethered, and 13 girls. We only lost one girl, which we consider a success after the last two years.

We plan to breed for spring kids for 2010 and think we already have an "accident" in the oven for Lucy. Magnum got out and he thought she was pretty special!!!

More to come.....