Please poke some holes in my goat project plan

I want to preface this with: These goats would not be pets, we are meat eaters, but if this can’t be done humanely for the goats then we’ll abandon the plan.

The problem is the solution right? Poison oak thicket equals goat meat? It seems like a permaculture solution but I’ve heard goats can be a headache.

We have 2 acres of oak/pine woods with poison oak covering around half of that. I’m hoping to get cheap adults in late spring, let them have at the poison oak and butcher them late summer.

We’d keep them in a 1/2 acre paddock with 4 foot fencing (2 strands of hot wire on top), and use cattle panels/tin roof for housing. Initial plan is to walk them to the woods each morning, tether them to a tree and walk them back to the paddock in the evening. It would probably be easier to set up their shelter in the woods but woods aren’t fenced. The oak and pine trees are large so I’m hoping safe from goat girdling?

The soil here is poor compacted clay, so the shrub layer is not super thick but in addition to the poison oak there is hawthorn, wild rose, Himalayan blackberry, snowberry, scotch broom, and native grasses/forbs for them to browse. The paddock has compacted clay soil as well so the grass doesn’t grow more than 2 feet high. Does this seem like enough to feed 2 or 3 goats?

Please poke some holes in this plan!

Hi eustis

Before I go into everything I wanna ask a few questions if I may.

Is the paddock temporary or are you planning to free range the goats during the day and have them come to the paddock at night?

Do you have access to hay/forage as a supplement to there days in the woods?

What breed are you planning to use?

Is your main goal clearing the forest floor and poison vine, or maximin meat production?


Gier

Hi Gier,

Please ask away!

I’ll return them to the paddock at night. During the day I’d use rope to tie them to a tree in the woods.

Yes, I can supplement a decent amount of hay.

Are some breeds easier to herd? Clearing the poison oak is the main goal, meat is secondary.

Eustis Mckenzie wrote:Hi Gier,

Please ask away!

I’ll return them to the paddock at night. During the day I’d use rope to tie them to a tree in the woods.

Yes, I can supplement a decent amount of hay.

Are some breeds easier to herd? Clearing the poison oak is the main goal, meat is secondary.

It’s late and I’m having some charging issues. I will definitely go into detail in the morning. But before I do…

I wanna leave you with this thought…. If meat is not your primary goal I would try two female milk goats and a meat goat or two depending on the amount of hay and forage you have around.

I would also look into canopy feeding to open up the canopy some.

Another thing. I’m not a fan of tying any animal up in a environment that it cannot be monitored constantly especially in the forest where anything can get caught or tangled in swivels and cause a suffocation incident. I would love for you to consider a single strand of electric fence string and a solar power supply….


Just some thoughts before bed and a more in depth look at your project coming tomorrow.

Have a blessed evening
Gier

If you do rotational grazing, the pasture should improve over time. Can you send some pictures of the pasture, so I can get a better reference point for number of animals that could be grazed on it? Whether or not the grass gets two feet tall, density is what matters.
The evening pen sounds fine, but I would suggest doing electric netting (specifically if you're doing rotational grazing) for the pasture time. Animals have a habit of loosing their heads when they get nervous, and you may end up with strangled goats tied to a tree because they freaked out (sorry for the gruesome picture). In an open space, doing a dog harness might work, but chances are they'd still get caught in it.
Is meat all you're after? If so, getting some meat whethers might work, but you'd be signing up for getting more again and again. If you want to be more self reliant, I'd get a billy (or find a billy nearby you can use) and get a couple nannies. That way you can eat the bucklings when they get old enough, but not have to source more whethers once you do. Boar goats are the traditional meat goat, but there are also other breeds available. The Spanish are technically a dual purpose goat, so you can milk the does, but they also have great meat production. They also grow a cashmere coat in the winter, so that helps with cold hardiness. Kiko goats are another more dual purpose-y breed that still has great meat production. Do some research about lots of different options before you settle on one, because each breed is very different, and the one that fits your situation best may not be the one you think. We started with Nubians, but didn't do a ton of research beforehand. Now, we're switching to a Nubian/Spanish cross, because the Nubians weren't cold hardy on their own, and couldn't handle the rough pasture without lots of extra supplementation. If we'd done more research, we probably would've figured that out and started with a different breed before we got so far down the road.

One thing I should have mentioned is that we, and the land, aren’t in a position to take on dairy goats long term right now. A seasonal project is what this would have to be: get the goats late spring and butcher them late summer. Once we've established trees and perennials, we'd like to be self sufficient and keep a herd year round, but this would be a trial run.  So I guess meat goats are indeed what we’re looking for.

If portable electric fencing isn’t too expensive I’ll seriously consider it. Would a single hot wire really be enough to keep them in? One concern I have about electric fencing is the brush I’d like the goats to clear touching the fence and draining the charge or starting a fire.

Here is a picture of the paddock they would be kept in:

Hello!

I just wanted to poke some holes, hehehe.  I don’t recommend tying any goat out, much less multiple goats. That would be a recipe for disaster. One strand of electric wire will not hold them. Four will not hold them. If there is something on the other side of that fence that they want, six will not hold them. Trust me, I’ve tried it.

For your woods, I’d recommend getting electrified netting. It is temporary fencing that you can move as the area gets cleared, but you have to make sure the fence lines are cleared. The problem is that it isn’t cheap. Solar is even more.  

If you solved your fencing issues, be sure there are no toxic plants like maple trees, ferns, or oaks (white oaks don’t pose much of a problem). There are websites that go into detail about plants in your area.

Your paddock fencing looks and sounds great. You might consider adding a strand mid-height to prevent them from rubbing and stretching the woven wire out, and it will prevent them from trying to stick their heads through the fence and getting horns stuck.

Those are the biggest issues off the top of my head. Goats don’t eat tin cans. They are actually pretty picky, lol. My dairy goats were, lol. Prevention goes a long way!

Good Luck!
Jodie

Goats are great for eliminating woody, herby, weedy, plants. It's what they like to eat. Having said that, my experience is that goats are also very good at striping bark off of trees. My experience is you will quickly turn your woods into a dead tree woods if you pasture goats there. I wouldn't do it. They are great for clearing brush. They can improve your pasture for later use by cows or horses. But trees will suffer. -P.S. If you turn goats (or any other animal) into an area with poison ivy, etc. plants, they will get the poison ivy oil on their coats. And it will transfer to you. Be careful when you handle "infected" animals. Or you will regret it. That oil will last on them a long time.

Staking out or tying out goats doesn't ever seem to work, unless you have them on perfectly smooth ground with nothing for them to get tangled in.  You can't even have them close enough to touch noses with each other or they will manage to get tangled up when they have to fight over that one dandelion or leaf that they simply must have.  I have learned this from personal experience.  They will also knock over the water bucket as soon as you walk away.   If there is any brush or trees or roots, they will get tangled on it and then proceed to twist up the rope or chain until they nearly kill themselves or actually do kill themselves.   I have tried it several times, if you can't be right there, goats will attempt to find new exciting ways to commit suicide every day giving them a rope or a chain which just expands their options of how to commit suicide in a shorter amount of time.  

You paddock is awesome, it would hold goats probably, but there is nothing in there in that picture that a goat would want to eat, so they would probably figure out a way to get out even if they have to play dead to get someone to open the gate  so they can make a run for the underbrush.  Goats don't really like to eat grass unless they have no other choice. And that makes sense because goat parasites like to hang out on grass that is six inches or shorter.  Browsing is where it is at for a goat, and the harder it is for them to get to the food the better they like it.

I did the four strands of electric fence for rotational grazing......for a little while.  If you have great big tame dairy goats that are trained to an electric fence you might be able to keep them in until they run out of the tasty stuff that they really want.   Young goats will jump through the wires and since they aren't touching the ground when they touch the wire, they don't get shocked.  They think it is an awesome game.  Meat goats are pretty ornery and brush goats are going to be even more ornery.  If a goat gets it head through the wires then gets shocked they go forward, not backward. They will go through the fence and if they are a big goat they will take out the fence when they go through it.  

So that brings us to the electronet option.  Yes, electric netting can work with goats.  You can use rotational grazing with goats using electric netting.  It works great in smooth grassy pastures, but what they don't tell you is that trying to use electric netting in a brushy woody area is a huge pain in the neck, the ass, the legs, and will sorely test your patience.  Even if you use a brush cutter to clear a path so you can put in the electric netting and so it is  not being grounded out by brushy vegetation touching it, it catches on everything. It will catch on every root, branch, rose bush, old piece of fence, protruding branch etc.  You can make it work but let me tell you it is a pain. Hence me no longer using electric netting.   And if you don't have a really good fence charger and proper grounding for the fence charger the electric netting will not keep them in. i used the positive negative stuff from Kencove. It worked pretty good. I used three portable ground roads and a portable solar battery powered charger ( patriot) the biggest I could afford at the time.

Now you might think that I hate goats. I don't. I have 40 adult goats mostly registered or percentage registered Kiko goats ( a meat breed) and a few dairy goats that I use for milk.  I actually like goats most of the time.
We have close to 30 kids already with more to come in this spring. Heck, I am bottle feeding 7 kids right now.   But sometimes, they try your patience.  I cuss them out a lot, i am pretty sure the neighbors think I used to be a sailor.....I have spent a lot of time trying to keep them from committing suicide by sticking their head through things and getting stuck, cattle panels suck.  I once drilled holes in one of my does horns and wired a board to her horns so she couldn't stick her head through the fence and get stuck.  Hey, it worked.  No blood was shed except mine when I got scratched up removing her from the fence for the umpteenth time. I have since covered that field fence with pallets so the goats cant stick their heads through to eat the rose bushes on the other side.

I gave up on the electric netting.  I sucked it up and permanently fenced in all of my fields with either cattle panels ( yes, I am still covering those in pallets so the goats wont stick their heads through) woven wire goat fence, and high tensile fence with six wires with every other wire hot and the other wires are grounded. I have a huge electric fence charger it has a lot of joules and if you touch the fence, you think you have died. And sometimes you are pretty sure you have at least lost consciousness. I wish I could have put the goat fence up everywhere but I couldn't afford it and couldn't afford to bulldoze around everywhere so I could stretch the goat fence although the electrified high tensile fence works very well. I put most of the fence in myself with a little help from my husband.  I put in 7 rotational grazing pastures. I also graze horse and some steers in there. If you can keep goats in, keeping horses and steers in is a piece of cake.  I still have a roll of electric netting, my husband doesn't want to get rid of it. I would like to sell it and never touch the stuff again.  Oh and I have some fence made out of pallets.  The pallets work pretty good. If you put the pallets so the boards are vertical/ perpendicular to the ground the goats cant use them to climb up on. I get free pallets so I use them a lot for projects.

Oh and another thing, if you get poison ivy be careful. Goats seem to love being petted or want to rub on you after they have been eating poison ivy.  Then you will have poison ivy when they transfer the oil from the poison ivy onto your skin.  Happens to me every year several times a year.   And yes, they will eat poison ivy and roll in it and climb through it to reach that amazingly tasty rosebush.  

Yes, goats can girdle trees, but they don't usually bother older really big trees. Mine wont mess with oaks or maples when they are big. But they will seek out certain trees and strip the bark off and eat it.  Mine will kill cedar trees. They will eat all the green stuff on a cedar and then strip the bark off and no more cedar trees.  They love sumac. I have no sumac in my pastures.  They will devour elderberries and blackberries. I don't think I have any blackberry bushes left in any of the goat pastures.  And I used to have blackberry thickets you could not get through.  They love rosebushes, but you have to leave them in the area and let them graze it really hard to kill the rose bushes.  I use my wild rose bushes as goat fodder so I try to move them so they don't kill the rosebushes just keep them trimmed back.

anyhow, good luck, goats can be fun. they can be entertaining. they are very tasty too and they have great tasting milk.  But they can be a lot of work and they are hard to confine.

Thanks all, this is exactly what I was looking for, if not hoping hoping for. I think we’re going to put our plan on hold until we’re ready to permanently keep a herd, and then maybe hair sheep are better suited to this site.

Establishing a food forest is our main goal right now and it would be devastating if goats demolished all our saplings.

I definitely got the message about tethering off goats, and when we do get goats or maybe hair sheep, we’ll use either electric or wire fencing.

Peace!

Eustis Mckenzie wrote:

If portable electric fencing isn’t too expensive I’ll seriously consider it. Would a single hot wire really be enough to keep them in? One concern I have about electric fencing is the brush I’d like the goats to clear touching the fence and draining the charge or starting a fire.

Here is a picture of the paddock they would be kept in:

We use fences from Premier One, and rewire them so they work better for brush and grasses. We run it off of solar power as well, so after the initial rewire and setup it's fairly easy to maintain, and doesn't cost tons in electricity. They generally cost around $150 for a 100'. A single wire would not be enough to keep them in. It's good for horses or cows, but sheep and goats are way more prone to testing the fences and learning how to jump over or go under the fence. The only issue we've run into with them is animals pushing the netting and getting stuck in it. That could happen with any fence though.
We have lots of dry grass and brush in our pastures, so I totally get the concern of starting a fire. That's part of the reason we ended up rewiring our fences, and now they do much better with shorting issues. Initially we went all out and mowed every perimeter before setting up the fence and it still had tons of issues. Now we just set the fence up, and with the rewiring stuff we did really helps cut down the number of shorting issues we have, and knowing how to effectively test for shorts cuts it down even further. A lot of it is trial and error, so you won't know the perfect setup until you try it. We have a bunch of tricks for fencing effectively, so I can go more into that (and how to rewire and set up a solar charger) if you're interested. Shorts are easier to address if you set up the fence and then test it. It's rather unusual to have a short big enough to start a fire (at least we haven't had any huge issues in the multiple years we've used them).

Looking at your pasture I have two thoughts. Firstly, it really needs to be grazed heavily, there's a ton of dead growth that needs to be eaten back. And second, it would work really great to do rotational grazing on it. You're trying to balance two things in your pasture when you decide how many animals you can keep. The first is parasite management, and the second is pasture management. For parasite reasons, you can't re-graze a pasture for 21 days after they've grazed it. After the 21 days, it's about how much regrowth you have. You want the grass to have at least three new blades per plant before you can re-graze it. If you pull them in every evening and feed them hay, you could probably run about 3-5 (maybe more, depending on how the pasture responds) goats on your pasture, keeping in mind the two principles I mentioned. We ran ten sheep rotationally on just under an acre of irrigated pasture before we moved here and expanded our flock size. We couldn't do that many until we'd done intensive grazing for a few years though, because it took that long for the previously trampled pasture to become healthy again. Your pasture looks really undergrazed, so you'll probably be able to keep the goats on a single paddock for more than a day (depending on your paddock size) in order for them to eat it back sufficiently. In rotational grazing there's a principle called the one third rule that helps build back soil health faster. They are supposed to eat a third, trample a third, and leave a third. On really undergrazed pastures it's best to have them eat more than that, but there's the guideline.
Lastly, unlike normal grazing methods, rotational grazing results in better pasture the longer you do it. Out here, the pastures have been so heavily grazed that they are desertifying. But pastures that have been rotationally grazed have at least twice the carrying capacity just because the ground is so healthy! If you're willing to take the time and effort to do intensive grazing, you're helping yourself in the long run because it means you will be able to have more animals on your pasture than before, and the grass will be way healthier! Here's a really great book on regenerative grazing: The Soil Health Handbook
I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions!

Well you asked for some holes to be poked…

The first hole that I can see - some goats don’t respect electric fencing at all. 4 foot high fencing should be fine as long as it is tight.

If you do want to use electric fencing, it’s possible to select your herd over time to keep only the goats that work well with the fence, but for starting out I think it is too much of a gamble to rely on electric fencing.

Tethering - some goats are better at tethering than others. Even if you have ones that tether well, check on them several times a day to make sure they haven’t kicked over water buckets or gotten tangled.

An alternative to tethering, depending on how close your neighbours are and if you have anything unfenced that they could damage, is to get them used to the paddock first, and get them used to a particular time of day when you call for them and feed them treats, so that they know you, know that you have food, and know what the sound of you saying “here goats” means. Once they are used to you, lead them out to the place you’d like eaten each day to free range, leave them there, and then call them back at food time for the night. The downside of this approach is that they will wander wherever they like, so they may not eat your unwanted plants down as much as you’d like.

To avoid the ringbarking of trees, giving them access to either a goat mineral lick that contains good amounts of copper, copper as a free-choice mineral, or a DIY mix (eg 4 pounds dolomite, 1 pound copper, 1 pound sulphur, 1 pound kelp) will help them get them the copper that they would otherwise try to find in tree bark.

Hair sheep are 80% as good as goats at clearing brush, and are infinitely easier to contain.  They're called hair sheep because they have hair rather than wool, and they shed it naturally each spring.  Mine have done an amazing job on my blackberries.  It's not perfect, I still have to clear the big woody canes, but it's surprisingly effective.

I provide a mineral salt mix free choice for my goats. It contains  plenty of copper and zinc in amounts specifically for goats.  It will kill sheep. I get the mix at Premier 1 supplies.  My goats will still ring bark a tree that they like to eat. Like cedar, and some others.  If they are bored and they feel like munching a tree they find tasty they just work on it especially in my winter pasture. I have to keep the goats in the winter pasture from November to May so I can allow the pasture browse to recover. If I rotated the goats through the pastures all winter there would be nothing left in the spring, summer and fall for them to eat as they would have killed everything.  There is no wild rose bushes, black berry vines, black raspberry vines, sumac, or anything but a few large trees that they don't like to eat the bark on remain in the winter pasture. Mature wild cherry and Maple  and oak seem to be something they don't gird.

Actually in my rotational grazing pastures for spring summer and fall, there are basically no black berry vines or black raspberry vines.  I do still have wild rose or multiflora rose bushes in the rotational pastures, but only because I view them as fodder and I move the goats when they have browsed back the rose bushes.  Almost all of the invasive honeysuckle bushes are gone. Just a few of the tallest ones are left and the only reason those are alive are because the goats can reach the tops and they don't seem to like the bark on the invasive honeysuckle bushes.  

Now, I am using rotational grazing with about 30 does and their kids during the spring summer and fall.  So it is not a small flock of five or six or even ten goats.  Wethers are sold off as are some does and doelings each year.  Bucklings are also sold if they have a high enough rate of gain, good conformation, don't need dewormed, and they have to have good feet that don't need trimmed.  If they don't they become wethers and then are sold.  

I graze horses and steers after the goats are done in a pasture to help remove parasites from the pasture.  The horses and steers like to eat sumac too. Hence no sumac in the pastures.  Luckily the goat mineral is good for the horses and cows too. They love to eat it.  I can't have sheep  where I provide the mineral so I just don't keep sheep in our farm.  

I know you said you were tabling your goat plan, but I think you could do it if you want to.  We rotationally graze hair sheep (36 currently) and dairy goats (7 currently). We have a decent perimeter fence and use electric net as close to year round as snow allows as well. If you are talking a few goats, I think they would do quite well in an electric net fence and I think you'd be quite happy with their help clearing poison oak/ivy, etc. You could get dairy wethers super cheap and if it doesn't go well, you aren't out too much. They won't grow super fast nor be meaty like a Boer or Kiko.

They do need decent fencing before they arrive. We rotationally graze hair sheep (36 currently) and dairy goats (7 currently). Boer goats are better weed vacuums. Mine will and have girdled established fruit and maple trees but they do not do that to our mostly white pine woods. Keeping them satiated helps with that a lot, and keeping the stocking density correct is important, easy with just a couple goats. Ours do quite well in an electric net fence and I think you'd be happy with their help clearing poison oak/ivy, etc. Agree with the above- don't plan on handling them much if they are clearing poisonous stuff- definitely no milkers!

My sheep went in and grazed our woodlot (it's about an acre of planted pines and mulberries and the understory was invasive honeysuckle and garlic mustard with some poison ivy. It takes repeated grazing to kill that stuff. The idea is every time it germinates or leafs out, it gets grazed back and eventually the roots are too depleted to continue and they die. Or you go in and manually pull the weakened plants. It will take several grazings over several years to get there. Every bit helps!

Our woods are nearly cleared now. It's such a relief to not have a river of garlic mustard or any worry about poison ivy.