Although excess bucks are a fact of life with dairy goats, excess milk is not common with meat breeds. Because meat breeds have not been selectively bred for milk production, milkable teats, and good udders, very few meat goats make great milk goats. They also have shorter lactations than you find in better dairy goats. Because they are not bred for milk, there are no official milk records for these breeds.
However, if you look at kid finishing weights for does, that will give you a good idea of which ones are better milk producers. Just as pounds of milk per day will vary for dairy goats, weight gain of kids will vary based upon the dams. Serious breeders of meat goats usually keep records of kids’ birth weights, as well as weights at various stages, such as one month, two months, etc. Does may be culled if their kids don’t gain weight fast enough. Because the goal is to have as much meat as possible, breeders may also cull does that consistently have single kids rather than twins.
Credit: Jennifer Miller
This crossbred meat goat doe is a high-percentage Kiko that lives at Rush Creek in Illinois.
If you start with a couple of dairy goats and discover that you want more meat, you can increase the size of your herd so that you’ll have more kids for meat. You can also add a doe to your herd that is a meat goat and breed her to your dairy goat sire. Although the kids won’t be as big as if you were breeding her to a larger buck, they will be bigger than what you were getting when breeding the dairy goats.
Fiber Breeds
Although dairy goats should be able to provide you with as much milk, meat, and leather as you want, you might need to add Angora or Nigora goats to your herd if you want homegrown fiber. All goats produce cashmere as part of their winter coat, but the volume of the cashmere is very small and it must be separated from the coarse guard hair that makes up the majority of the goat’s coat.
Angora goats, which produce mohair, are smaller than standard-sized dairy goats but larger than the Nigerian Dwarf. Unlike sheep, which are sheared annually, Angora goats are sheared twice a year as their long curly locks of mohair grow to several inches in only a few months.
Credit: Christine McLaughlin
Angora goats like Tink, a doe, and her kids Artemis and Jupiter at Laughing Crow and Company Flower and Fiber Farm in California usually get to keep their horns because their mohair grows so long and is quite warm, and horns are thought to help them regulate their body temperature.
Angora does bred to Nigerian Dwarf bucks produce Nigoras, which are considered a dual-purpose goat that will yield milk and fiber. This is still an experimental breed, however, and milk production numbers are not available. If milk production is important to you, it is especially important to buy from someone who milks their Nigoras and keeps records. Fiber produced by Nigoras will be one of three types. It may be mohair, which is what Angoras produce, and it is considered fiber type A. Fiber type B is a blend of mohair and cashmere, sometimes called cashgora. Fiber type C is mostly cashmere.
WHILE WHITE Angora goats have been bred for centuries, colored Angora goats are the new kids on the block and have only been actively bred for a little over 30 years. A white Angora at our farm is registered as a white, but is a color carrier, which allows us to improve the colored Angoras. Thanks to these newcomers, fiber enthusiasts have other natural Angora colors to choose from such as black, gray, silver, chocolate, red, and variations of those shades.
So why are we so smitten with Angoras?
From a Commercial or Cottage Industry Standpoint:
• The luxurious fiber called mohair is highly valued worldwide by yarn and fiber enthusiasts such as fiber artists, hand spinners, knitters, weavers, and doll hair crafters. In fact, the word “mohair” is derived from the Arabic word “Mukhayyar,” which literally translates to “best” or “choice.”
• Mohair is desired for its rich luster, strength, and durability. It feels smooth, very much like silk.
• The mohair fleece grows about one inch per month, and Angora goats are typically shorn twice a year (sheep are shorn once a year), making them the most efficient fiber-producing animal in the world.
From Our Personal Standpoint:
I had been dabbling with fiber crafts in the first place. As far as starting a goat herd as a small business venture, we knew that we wanted goats that we could get to know and build relationships with here on our farm. Raising Angoras for fiber production allowed us to do that. We wanted sweet, kind animals, small in stature, that are easy to handle. Angoras simply filled the bill in every way. In full fleece, they may look like large animals. However, if you stand next to one in real life, you might be surprised to see that they’re actually one of the smaller goat breeds. Once shorn, they don’t stand much taller than our Nigerian dwarfs.
Angoras have sweet personalities and are wonderful mothers, another thing that was important to us. Both bucks and does are almost always allowed to keep their long, beautiful horns. Horns have living bone inside, complete with blood flow that acts as a cooling system for these animals, which are asked to carry a load of warm fiber for much of the year. Horned goats does mean choosing your fencing wisely so they don’t get caught up. However, we find that they do best with their horns on, and they carry them off beautifully!
— CHRISTINE MCLAUGHLIN,
Laughing Crow and Company
Flower and Fiber Farm,
Somerset, CA
If you decide to start crossing breeds, remember the buck must be from the smaller breed in order to avoid birthing challenges. An Angora buck can be bred with a standard-sized dairy goat doe because the Angora is smaller in size.
Does
The number of goats you need will be determined by which breed you choose and what you plan to do with the milk and with the kids that are born. The amount of pasture space you have may limit your options. If you need two gallons of milk or more per day for consuming as fluid milk, one of the Swiss breeds, such as Alpine or Saanen, would be a good choice. Excellent milkers in those breeds can produce a couple of gallons a day at their peak, gradually declining to around a gallon a day, which they can produce for a few months.
Ten months is a standard lactation period, but some does will milk for a couple of years without rebreeding. If you want does that can milk for extended periods, be sure to buy from someone who milks their goats for an extended period of time and keeps records. Keep in mind that first fresheners produce less than mature does and that individual production can vary tremendously between goats of the same breed. For example, the range for Saanens in 2016 was 940 to 6,740 pounds for 285 to 305 days, according to the American Dairy Goat Association. This is why it’s important to buy from someone who keeps milk records. Don’t assume that a huge udder has a lot of milk in it. While you can’t hide a lot of milk in a tiny udder, a goat with a big udder could be a great producer, or she could have a meaty udder.
Why Do We Talk About Milk Production in Pounds?
Official milk records are reported in pounds and tenths of pounds of milk, rather than cups, quarts, or gallons. Weight is used because it is far more accurate than eyeballing a measuring cup or canning jar, and if you are hand milking, odds are good that there will be foam on the milk, making it harder to figure out the exact amount visually. Milk is a little heavier than water, so a gallon of milk will weigh between eight and nine pounds, depending on the percentage of milk solids, such as butterfat.
A breed with high butterfat is the best choice for making a lot of cheese. The high butterfat level increases cheese yield but generally comes at the cost of lower fluid milk production as breeds that have higher butterfat tend to produce less milk. The Nigerian Dwarf has the highest butterfat, averaging around 6.5 percent over the course of lactation, but they average only a quart or two a day. Miniature dairy goats, which are a hybrid created by crossing a Nigerian Dwarf buck with a standard breed doe, and Kinders have butterfat that is about as high as the Nigerians but produce more milk. Nubians have butterfat around five percent, although they have
the lowest overall production of the standard breeds. Other standard breeds of dairy goats average around three percent butterfat, which is similar to whole cow milk sold in the store.
You Can’t Have Just One...
Remember that goats are herd animals, which means you need to have at least two so that they have a friend who speaks the same language. Keeping them with a pig, sheep, or horse is not the same. Pigs communicate by biting and horses by kicking. Although it may appear that goats and sheep speak a similar language, they don’t. Sheep run at each other with their heads down to butt heads and establish dominance, whereas goats rear up on their hind legs and come down to butt heads.
Buying a single goat is asking for trouble. I have received plenty of phone calls from people who bought a single goat and then frantically searched for another one. A lonely goat will be the world’s best escape artist because it is looking for a friend. One woman said her goat wanted to live on her front porch, which meant it was hard to keep the poop and pee cleaned off. Another said her goat would jump on her car and dance around. One caller was terribly afraid that her horse was going to kill her goat. In spite of the fact that the horse kept kicking at it, the goat kept sneaking into the horse’s pasture for company.
Although there may be solo goat success stories, it isn’t worth trying. Goats do not unlearn bad behavior. Once a goat starts doing something, it will likely teach the trick to its new friend when you do bring in another goat. There is simply no reason to buy a single goat. It takes just as much time to care for one goat as three or four, and most reputable goat breeders refuse to sell single goats to homes where there are not already other goat friends.
If you plan to use the extra bucklings for meat, the standard dairy goats obviously produce larger kids and therefore more meat, but how much goat meat do you want versus milk or cheese? The Nubian is one of the meatier dairy goats, so if you want a lot of cheese and meat, this breed might be a good choice for you. The Kinder gives you high butterfat for cheese and almost as much meat as Nubians, but is easier to handle because it’s smaller. Saanens, Sables, and Alpines will provide lots of meat and fluid milk. If you want cheese or a smaller amount of milk but no meat, the Nigerian Dwarf might be a better option. Extra Nigerian Dwarf bucklings can often be castrated and sold as pets because of their small size, although they can also be butchered.
Bucks
To make milk, a doe has to get pregnant and give birth, which means you need access to a buck — or at least a buck’s semen. For many people this means buying a couple of bucks to breed the does. However, some people don’t want to buy a buck or can’t have a buck for some reason, such as living in a city and being limited by zoning that allows only two or three does. You might also be worried about the odor of a buck bothering you or your neighbors if you have a small piece of property. There are a few options for those without a buck.
You can buy a bred doe, but that will work for only the first year. After that, a buck can be leased and brought to your property for a month or two. He stays with the does and breeds them when they come into heat. On the flip side, you can wait until you see your doe in heat and take her for a date at the buck’s farm. Some breeders will also provide boarding for a doe to stay at the buck’s farm for a few weeks if you are having trouble figuring out when she is in heat. However, most breeders do not offer buck service because of biosecurity issues (concern about bringing contagious diseases onto a farm). This is something you can discuss with breeders when buying does from them. Some will breed does that were born on their farm, even though they won’t offer buck service to goats that were born elsewhere.
Prospective goat owners may be hesitant to have a buck because they have heard horror stories. Genetics can play a role in personality, so talk to the breeder of a potential herd sire about his sire’s personality. While standard-sized bucks can be a challenge to handle, Nigerian Dwarf bucks tend to be more mellow. Because they weigh one-third to one-half as much as a standard buck, they are also easier to handle.
You might also consider artificial insemination (AI). Although semen costs far less than a buck, a tank for storing semen will cost considerably more than all but the most expensive bucks, and you will need to have the tank recharged regularly so the semen stays frozen. You would need either to have an AI technician inseminate your does for you or learn the technique yourself. Success with AI is usually not as good as with a live buck.
Registration
The largest dairy goat registry in the United States is the American Dairy Goat Association, which has registered more than a million goats since it was founded more than one hundred years ago. The American Goat Society and Canadian Goat Society (CGS) are two smaller organizations that also register dairy goats. The registries keep track of goat pedigrees. They also sanction goat shows, license judges, administer classification and appraisal programs, and create criteria for goats to earn milk stars on 1-day and 305-day milk tests.
You might think that you need purebred, registered goats only if you plan to show, but keep in mind that it costs as much to feed and care for an unregistered animal as it does to care for a registered one. There are some distinct benefits to buying registered goats even if you plan to raise goats only for your family’s milk and meat needs.
▶ Unregistered goats may be poor quality. Reputable breeders will not sell an animal with papers if it has a disqualifying defect. Therefore, you could be buying a goat with a defect or a goat whose parent had a defect.
▶ Kids of registered goats can be sold for more money than kids of unregistered parents.
▶ Registered goats may have documented show records, evaluations, and milk tests that will help you determine whether you are buying good-quality animals.
▶ Registered goats have pedigrees so you can see how their parents and grandparents performed in the show ring and in milk testing.
But do you need show-quality goats if you are planning to use them only for milk? The short answer is no. Goats from champion parents may not necessarily produce more milk than goats from parents who never set one hoof into a show ring. Great conformation and milk production do not always go hand in hand, although it’s great when they do. Given the choice of a doe from a finished champion that would cost the same as two does from a goat with a great milk record, the smarter choice would be to buy the two does from the great milker for the same price. Very few people show their goats, so kids with champion grandparents and great-grandparents do not necessarily sell faster or for a higher price than kids without champions in their pedigree. Although you might be excited to pay top dollar for a goat with champion parents, remember that its kids will be the grandkids of the champion goats, diluting the genetic inheritance. To command top dollar for your kids, the goats that are the parents of those kids have to have proven themselves in either production or the show ring.
What’s “Show Quality”?
The phrase “show quality” does not have any official definition and can mean something different from one person to another. A show-quality kid might be defined as one from champion parents, or it might simply mean that it does not have any disqualifying defects. The bottom line is that you can’t tell when a kid is two or three months old whether it will grow up to become a champion.
If you are planning to milk your goats, you should buy from someone who milks and keeps barn records or is on official milk test, also known as DHI, which stands for Dairy Herd Improvement. Herds on official test will have their milk weighed and tested for butterfat and protein monthly. If you don’t have a tester nearby, you can get certified yourself and enroll in owner-sampler testing, although an official tester will still need to come to your farm once a year for a verification test. Each dairy goat registry has its own milk performance testing program, and you can get more information from them about how to get started, as the rules are slightly different with each registry. DHI can be expensive for people with small herds, but owners can still keep barn records, which means they recor
d the daily weights to track their goats’ production. There is no way that anyone can tell with accuracy whether their goats are good milk goats if they do not milk them for extended lactations, which are at least eight to ten months.
Pedigree
The alphabet soup that surrounds a goat’s name on a pedigree can be confusing for people new to the goat world. What do all those letters, pluses, and asterisks mean? And does it really matter?
Although letters vary between registries for similar achievements, the letters at the front of a goat’s name usually signify the goat’s championship status and sometimes its milk status. Letters after a goat’s name signify milking records and classification or linear appraisal scores. For example, ARMCH Antiquity Oaks Carmen *D VG is a master champion (MCH) with the American Goat Society, and she has an advanced registry (AR) milk star, which means she earned her milk star on a 305-day test. The *D means she earned a milk star, which could have been a 1-day test or 305-day test, and the VG means she scored “very good” when classified. If she had not earned her master championship, which requires at least three show ring wins against at least ten goats at each show, there would not be anything on her registration papers to signify that she had earned a 305-day milk star, rather than a 1-day milk star. Breeders who are on year-round testing usually have milk records on their websites or can give you the numbers so that you can see exactly how much they have milked in the past.
When breeders have goats that are dual-registered, you may see letters from both registries in the animal’s name, such as ARMCH Antiquity Oaks Carmen *D 1*M VG. In this case, Carmen has also been on milk test with ADGA and earned her milk star with that registry as well. Registration papers for each registry contain only the recognition earned with that registry. It is only on a farm’s website or in advertisements that you will see a name listed with letters from both registries.
Raising Goats Naturally Page 4