Nigies are sweet, and somewhat easier to manage than the larger breeds like Saanen, La Mancha, etc (mostly because they're 1/3 the size!).
The amount of work goats take is VASTLY dependent on whether you milk them or not. Our two wethers are hardly any work at all at this time of year - take them a pail of hot water when I bring out the chickens' water in the morning, throw a bale of hay into the feeder every 2-3 days. In the summer, they're even less work - keep the water full and move the pen regularly so they have fresh forage to eat. The transition between can be finicky, as too much fresh green stuff when they've been on hay all winter can cause some really serious problems, but just like horses you limit their access to fresh pasture at first and gradually increase it until their systems can cope.
Dairying is a WHOLE DIFFERENT ANIMAL. I'll assume that you'll be doing something much like I did, milking by hand for just one or two does, rather than opening a full-blown multi-goat mechanical milking parlor with auto-filtering, cooling tanks, and high-powered industrial dishwashers. We had La Manchas, and while I've been told that dairying with Nigies is a bit easier as you can leave them for a weekend without quite as much risk of serious mastitis, their teats are smaller and unless you pay well for stock specifically bred for hand-milking (I can put you in touch with a couple of breeders I know, that do breed for hand milking in their Nigies) they can be really difficult to milk by hand, especially if you have large hands. My daily routine with our two La Manchas looked like this:
6:30 up and get dressed, make tea
7:00 assemble milking crate - stainless pail, 1/2 gallon jar for pouring off into, filter, udder cream, basic first aid kit for daily health check
7:15 feed & water, fill hay feeders
7:30 take first goat to stanchion, milk
7:45 (once I got it down, at first milking out the first doe took more like 30-45 minutes) return first goat to pen, take out second goat to milk
8:05-8:10 done milking, second doe back to pen. back to the house to filter milk, and wash dairying dishes.
8:30 finish dishes, dairying dishes MUST air-dry for sanitation's sake so they're ALWAYS out in the dish rack. Once a week they must be scrubbed thoroughly with special acid-based dairy soap to remove calcium deposits that can harbor bacteria and cause the milk to spoil rapidly.
Start the whole thing again at 7:00pm, 365 days a year - you can fudge a bit on whether it's an exactly-12-hour window, but skipping a milking with the larger breeds is just begging for problems with mastitis - which means you have to milk 4-8 times per day, can't drink the milk, and often need to apply antibiotics (which is not easy to do, since they must be injected through the teat orifice into the mammary gland) for up to 3 weeks before you can drink milk again. Mastitis, left untreated, can go gangrenous and kill a dairy doe surprisingly quickly. It doesn't matter if you're sick, or it's cold, or whatever, the goats have to be milked - I milked goats twice on my wedding day.
Two La Mancha does, one "first freshener" (i.e. her first year lactating, when they produce 1/2 what they will the second year) and one second-year doe, provided so much milk for our family of 5 that we couldn't keep up with it, even making cheese every other day and having a toddler. Aside from milking, you have to DO SOMETHING with the milk - and while a gallon a day doesn't sound like much, unpasteurized goats' milk starts to develop a "goaty" taste after 4-5 days in the fridge, and can only be used for cheese, pudding, or other applications where heat is applied for the first 48 hours, after that the proteins start to break down and if you heat it, the two proteins that aren't present in cow's milk (capra-somethings, can't remember exactly) will denature and the taste is LIKE WHOA GROSS. That's why so many people hate store-bought goat's milk - it's been cooked AND stored for weeks on the shelf, neither of which are friendly to it tasting like anything other than the south end of a northbound buck in rut. We kept the goats for several months, mostly to have the raw milk for the baby, but eventually my husband developed the ability to "taste the goat" in ANY dish that had goat milk or goat cheese in it. It got to the point where I was trying SO HARD to use up all the milk that I was putting milk, yogurt, or ricotta into just about everything, and he was scared to eat anything I cooked for fear it would taste like goat butt.
There are tons and tons of people out there who love their dairy goats, love dairying (the milking, I actually didn't mind at all - it was quiet, and the does were well-trained and friendly, quite personable animals really - it was all the associated work of milking I grew to detest), and love the milk and cheese. For us, it turned out that buying raw goats' milk from the farm down the way for the baby was a lot less work, and our time is better spent on other projects (chickens! solar panels! greenhouses!) than on goats.
I'd be happy to point you in the direction of some local breeders I know whose dairy animals and practices I'm personally acquainted with, or answer any other questions you may have. I loved my goats, but the amount of work vs. the amount of food just wasn't economical for our family, especially once my husband put his foot down about eating goat products!
