Have you heard the one about the goat farmer? (From Free Press Series)

Have you heard the one about the goat farmer?

There's an essential requirement for successfully farming goats which can't be passed down through the generations, or picked up from reference books or taught at any agricultural college.

Gary and Jessica Yeomans, who keep a commercial herd at Pant Farm, Llanvethrine, say you should never go into goat farming unless you have a sense of humour.

"They're great escapists," Gary explained. "Given half a chance they'll chew through binder twine, rope, pipes and cables, jump hurdles and open gates.

"It can be quite a problem when they're kept as pets or on smallholdings. Farming them commercially, of course, is quite different. You invest in the right fencing, make sure there's nothing 'tempting' for them to pull apart and so on. But you still get characters. We nicknamed one kid Colin, after Colin Jackson, because she was such a good 'hurdler'!"

Gary and Jessica, who got married last September, currently have 250 cross-bred British sanaans and British toggenburgs, including 150 milking nannies each producing 600-1,000 litres of milk a year.

"You manage them like cows in the sense that they come in to the parlour for milking twice a day. You only need to rattle a feed bag and they're there! They like being milked.

"In other ways they're like sheep - although sheepdogs are scared of them because they square up to them!

"They always kid under cover. Generally they don't have any problems. We get quite a few twins and triplets.

"The time-consuming part is getting them on to the bottle and from that to the teat in their pen. The teat is connected by a pipe to a vat of milk, giving them ad lib access to milk all day so, once they've got the hang of it, they thrive very quickly."

Jessica, who's a self-employed farm assurance inspector, takes time off to help out at this busy time of year.

Some of the young billy goats are sold as pets, others go to slaughter. The females are kept to augment the herd.

"Generally goats are easy to keep. The two main problems are the weather and worms. They hate the wet, so they spend the winter in sheds where they're fed on a mix of maize and grass silage. And they have to be kept on very clean pasture for the rest of the year because they're intolerant to worms."

Before setting up his own farming business Gary had worked on his parents' dairy farm near Monmouth, which has since changed to beef and sheep.

"I decided to go into goat farming partly because it's based on quotas rather than subsidies and I thought it was a safer bet for the future.

"I'm learning from experience all the time. I visited several well-established farms on the continent to see how they managed their herds. I then bought 100 young female goats from the same herd in Somerset - the best way to start out because it minimises the risk of disease.

"The milking machine came from a manufacturer in Holland."

Goats' milk has become increasingly popular as an alternative to cows' milk, particularly for children and adults suffering from problems like asthma and eczema.

"The fat content is the same but the globules in goats' milk are smaller which makes it much easier to digest," Gary explained.

All the milk produced at Pant Farm is delivered to Abergavenny Fine Foods, where it's pasteurised and bottled or made into cheese before being distributed to the main supermarkets.

"Until now I've been concentrating on getting the production side up and running. I also have a few heifers, which will be the basis for a herd of suckler cows, and 200 sheep.

"The next step will probably be to introduce artificial insemination to the goat herd, using top billy goats from France to improve the genetics."

If the trend towards goat farming in the UK continues, however, Gary accepts that it will no longer be a 'niche' market and the price producers currently get for their milk will drop accordingly. He thinks the way forward then would probably be for him to pasteurise and bottle the milk himself.

Whatever serious business decisions have to be made, the antics of the goats will keep providing light relief down on the farm.