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Mark Miner wrote:Hi Tori,
If you choose not to band, the meat quality is better with a somewhat earlier/younger kill, avoiding adolescence. If you think you might not get around to it before they go through adolescence, banding will buy you time. A wether goat (castrated buck) can also be used as a pack animal if trained to it, but while some friends of ours have gone this route, we have butchered the male kids. We have kept a buck for breeding in the past, but it's easier to cycle through different bucks to keep the bloodlines good. Letting one of our own bucklings mature would require new doe genetics, which is more of a hassle.
If you have really high quality bloodlines, though, keeping the best one as a sire-for-hire could be a path.
Congrats on the successful kidding, and good luck!
Mark
Samantha Lewis wrote:Hello Tori!
I raise up the young males and harvest them when they are big enough. I do not castrate them. I just separate them from the females so they are no trouble and cannot breed.
Bryan Elliott wrote:Tori,
When we lived down in NW Oklahoma we had soapberries on our place. Deer really liked to bed down and hangout in the grove of soapberry trees.
Kc Simmons wrote:Does anyone have a source of seeds/nuts for Western Soapberry, for planting?
This is something I've been really wanting to grow, but I have had trouble sourcing the actual seeds to get started.
Elena Sparks wrote:Not sure how useful this response will be, seeing as I'm so late in responding, but I figured I'd pitch in anyways.
My first question would be where are you located? Your location, and the climate there, impacts a lot of those questions. If you get pretty cold in the winter, you'll either need a well build shelter (not heated, just secure and highly wind resistant), or more goats. You should definitely have some sort of shelter, and the more well built the better, but the more goats you have the less you need to worry about them in the cold. Goats stay warm by piling together much like penguins do, and so the more you have the warmer they will be.
As far as inputs go, I would give them a salt and mineral block, but I wouldn't give them much else until they're being milked. Obviously you should give them hay during the winter when they can't forage. Once they're being milked, a lot depends on how MUCH milk you want. We're moving more towards a cross now, since Nubians don't handle the extreme cold here very well, but I do have several years of experience with Nubians, as well as Spanish and Nigerians. If you want lots and lots of milk, feed them alfalfa and give them lots of treats during milking. If you'd rather not supplement heavily, then you won't get as much. I prefer sturdier animals and low inputs to super high production (personal preference, I won't blame you if you choose something different). Because of that, I only feed them grain/alfalfa during milking time. They only get as much as they can eat while on the stand. I'll supplement them with some alfalfa during the end of their gestation when we're coming out of winter, but other then that they only get hay when they're in the barn, and pasture when they're out with the rest of the flock. My neighbor, on the other hand, only feeds them alfalfa. No hay. Her Nigerians and mine produce WAY different amounts. High input means high output, lower input means lower output.
Anne Miller wrote:When I had goats they liked to forage grass because that is all I had.
Where I live now, I like to watch my neighbors goats. They have prickly pear, agarita, live oaks, other kinds of oaks and various native plants. Though since I only observe I don't know what they like best.
Aimee Bacon wrote:Goats love to browse, so the best thing you can do is make sure an area has multiple different plants growing in it. Glad to hear they are staying in their electric netting, mine always jumped over it. I have a pygmy and two nigerian dwarfs and they like totally different material. But they will all gladly eat the leaves and bark of all my trees. They also all love honeysuckle and poison ivy. They will eat grass but that would be the last choice.
Alder Burns wrote:One key to managing animals on forage is to have your system set up so that they have to eat at least some of everything there, rather than just their favorites. You can do this with relatively small enclosures moved frequently, or tethering, or cut and carry systems. The danger with a few animals in large enclosures is that, like little kids, they will eat the dessert first and then move on to the other things (or else complain that there isn't more dessert!) Over time only the least palatable and nutritious things will be left. This is part of the Allan Savory critique of the idea of overgrazing and that one problem with rangeland management is not too many animals, but too few, and not enough management. This is exacerbated by the fact that in many climates only a few of the forage species are evergreen, or in leaf when most other things aren't. If you are interested in primarily feeding your animals through the year from the site, you might even fence off groups of the evergreens (privets, honeysuckle, greenbriers, eleagnus come first to mind) and reserve access to these for the winter season.
