Mayhem and Midway crash kidding season like they own the midway
AVA, Mo. — While the humans of Ozark’s Treasured Acres Farm were busy being respectable at the fair — one milker in the ring, Sables hustling toward another class, phones dying in the heat — kidding season staged a last-act encore back home.
Two doelings. Out of Talache’s Cr’eme De Menthe and Talache’s Hardee.
Hardee, the farm will tell you if you stand still long enough, was lost earlier this year. That is the sort of sentence that makes a barn go quiet. So when his last girls arrived in the middle of fair week, the names were not going to be Petunia and Pearl.
They named them Ozark’s TAF H Mayhem and Ozark’s TAF H Midway.
Professor Gruff, who claims to have reviewed the naming committee minutes (there were no minutes; there was coffee), called it “the first act of honest taxonomy in dairy goat history.” Mayhem is the one who already treats a water bucket as a suggestion. Midway is the one who looks at you as if she has already priced your corn dog.
The same week, the farm’s traveling squad refused to be a footnote. Ozark’s TAF BF Selene — one Nigerian Dwarf milker, one trip, no entourage — took first in the two-year-olds and then Grand Champion Nigerian Dwarf. “Sometimes one is all you need,” the farm wrote, which is either humility or a dare. Ozark’s TAF RE Chasing Victory picked up a junior yearling first and Reserve Grand on the Sable side. Back at Ozark Empire Fair, Miss America took Grand Champion Junior Doe among the Dwarfs; Chasing Victory went Best in Show Junior Doe for the Sables.
Button, our kid reporter, asked Selene for comment. Selene was eating. The interview is considered complete.
What the ribbons do not say, and what the late kids do, is the part the Arkatype crew came for: a small family farm in southern Missouri still running the whole circuit — ADGA, AGS, NDGA, milk products, show string, and a kidding calendar that does not care whether you packed the show box. Fair season and kidding season are not opposites here. They are roommates who steal each other’s hay.
Mayhem and Midway will never remember that they were born while the truck was gone. They will only know that their names sound like a Saturday night and that the people who came home smelling of shavings and funnel cake thought they were a grand finale.
The official 2026 kidding season at Treasured Acres is closed.
The unofficial one never is.