Our Geese

One day, in early 2023, we were wandering around in the grocery store and Kathleen saw a deal sticker. You know, one of those yellow stickers that says something like “90% off!” So she checked it out, and without irony, it literally was >90% off of frozen geese. They were down to a dollar a pound from more than $10/pound, so of course, we bought a few. Apparently the store was having a hard time selling them and wanted to clear the freezer space.

A few months later Kathleen stuffed one of them with vegetables and roasted it in the turkey roaster, basting it in its own fat. She also scraped off some of the fat and roasted a pan of her home canned potatoes, and the result was… magical!

It was then we decided to keep geese.

After some research we settled on the Embden breed, as being well suited to developing a large carcass on grass without having to be fed grain their whole lives. Initially we bought 5 females and 5 males from two separate hatcheries in order to have, potentially, 5 viable breeding pairs.

Look how cute they are when they are little!

And the gosling is pretty cute also.

We brought the first two batches home and stuck them in a brooder. We banded the females with red leg bands and the males with green leg bands. Unfortunately, they immediately started trying to eat the green leg bands because they looked like grass, so we had to un-band the males.

They had a crazy appetite for grass right from the start.

We were unprepared for how fast they would get big, and had to change out the leg bands pretty frequently. In the confusion, one of the males also got banded red, so…

We’re not exactly sure of our flock distribution anymore.

Teh old chicken tractor came in handy to move them around the old orchard for a while, but they quickly outgrew it, and we had to let them out, first into the orchard only…

then out into the pasture itself.

As with all livestock, there is always an attrition rate, but with the geese didn’t start to drop until they were 6 weeks old on pasture. We lost four in very short order to a predator of some sort. This was about the time we were losing laying chickens as well, and the problems went away as soon as we cut the pasture down to give the birds better line of sight.

Nowadays they hardly need it. They are big, noisy birds, especially the two big ganders, and not much out there is willing to take them on. One of the red banded birds might be a gander because it is bigger framed than they other three, which would give us three and three. Unfortunately we don’t have a large enough flock right now to butcher any for thanksgiving or Christmas. So they are living on the pasture, roaming around, eating grass, and we hope enjoying life. We’ll see if they give us any goslings in the spring.