What’s in Auntie’s Pockets? 🍌🐐

There are certain things you learn pretty quickly when you spend your days surrounded by goats.

One of them is: never underestimate how closely they are monitoring your pockets.

During Biggie grazing time, I almost always have a few homegrown bananas tucked away for whoever happens to wander over for a little one-on-one Auntie time. With 15 goats in the herd, it can be hard to sneak anybody a treat without alerting the masses—but every once in a while, somebody gets lucky.

During one of our recent grazing sessions, that somebody was Miss Pearl.

Pearl managed to snarf down all FOUR bananas I had brought with me. And if you know Pearl, you know four bananas would never stop her from loudly informing you that perhaps there should have been five. 😆 Pearl is our vocal girl. Whether she wants treats, attention, or simply feels that her needs have not been adequately acknowledged, she will tell you about it.

Her cousin Hansel, meanwhile, takes a more… physical approach.

Hansel is my right-hand man—or, as I usually call him when I’m with the herd, my boyfriend. 😂 He has perfected the art of wrapping those enormous horns around my waist and hips without actually getting me with them. It’s somehow both mildly inconvenient and incredibly endearing.

And Hansel knows there are TWO important pockets.

One contains bananas.

The other contains the shaker.

Our shaker is nothing fancy—an old peanut butter jar filled with orchard grass pellets. Val trained the goats to come to its sound long before teaching us this particular trick of the trade. When grazing time is over, I’ll first give them my best “GOATIE GOATS!” yodel. If they’re way out there, I cup my hands around my mouth, summon every bit of diaphragm I’ve got, and let ’er rip.

If that doesn’t work?

Shake shake shake.

And suddenly: GOATIE AVALANCHE.

Fifteen goats can cover ground remarkably fast when they believe orchard grass pellets are waiting at the other end. Usually I can dip, dodge and keep walking while they follow me home. Hansel, however, likes to use those magnificent horns to juke me, block my path and position himself for first access to the shaker droppings.

He is my boyfriend, after all. Apparently boundaries are complicated. 😂

Between the shaker and whatever happens to be hiding in my pockets, food is one of our best tools for managing a herd this size—and around here, few foods are quite as useful as bananas.

Bananas are actually one of our most useful crops here at ʻĀina Iki. We have an entire berm dedicated to them, with even more banana trees growing throughout the property. We grow them for everyone here—humans and animals alike—and they’ve become especially handy when it comes to caring for the goats.

And sometimes the bananas even harvest themselves. 😆

Joshua recently sent me this little video from one of our banana patches, where one of the trees had come down in about the most considerate way possible—landing perfectly across a fence post instead of taking out the fence. No damage done, and we got a beautiful rack of bananas out of the deal. Sometimes the ranch gives you a win. 🍌

And while the goats would probably argue that the highest purpose of any banana is simply being eaten, we’ve learned they can be pretty useful little caregiving tools, too.

If someone needs copper, for example, we take their measurements to estimate their proper weight, weigh out the appropriate copper dose, hollow out the end of a banana, tuck the copper inside, and plug it back up with the banana we removed.

Medicine?

What medicine?

This is clearly just a delicious banana, Auntie.

Of course, most bananas around here require no hidden agenda whatsoever. Sometimes they’re simply treats—and our goats have become remarkably good at figuring out how to position themselves for one.

Which brings us to Pac-Man.

He doesn’t rummage through my pockets like Hansel and Pearl. Instead, he has figured out that if he hangs back at the very end of the herd while everyone else heads home, he can become the last goat through the gate.

And the last goat through the gate gets a banana while Auntie closes it behind him.

Coincidence?

I’m increasingly convinced Pac-Man has trained me. 😆🐐🍌

Just another day of grazing with the Biggies.

Little Land, Big Heart. ❤️