Raising Goats Naturally

by Deborah Niemann

  Tattooing and Ear Tags

  Registered goats must have a form of permanent identification. A microchip can be put on the underside of the tail, but not all registries accept this. This method requires a microchip reader, which is expensive, so meat and fiber goats usually have ear tags, while most dairy goat breeders tattoo their animals inside each ear. Because LaManchas don’t have enough external ear cartilage, they are tattooed on the skin on the underside of the tail, usually in the loose skin on each side of the bone. Green ink works for black goats as well as for lighter-colored ones.

  Credit: Glennis Tober

  Fiber goats like this angora from Spring Harvest Farm in Parkland County, Alberta, have ear tags for identification purposes.

  When you become a member of one of the goat registration organizations, you will register a herd tattoo, which is usually three or four letters unique to your farm. The herd tattoo is put in the right ear of every goat that is born in your herd. The personal identification tattoo is put in each goat’s left ear. It includes a letter that indicates the year the kid was born and a number that signifies the kid’s birth order. For example, the fifth kid born on your farm in 2018 would have K5 tattooed in its left ear. The dairy goat registries in the United States recommend L for 2019, M for 2020, N for 2021, and so on. The letters G, I, O, Q, and U are not used because they look too much like other letters and numbers.

  Tattoo pliers are available from most goat supply companies. I recommend getting the pliers with the auto-release mechanism because it removes the pins from the kid’s skin as soon as you release your grip. If you don’t use tattoo pliers with this feature, it can be stressful for human and goat as you peel the ear off the pins.

  Weaning

  On our farm, we never wean doelings that we are keeping. If they are being sold, they continue nursing until the day they leave. Some people feel that a kid should be weaned before it is sold. I don’t do this, however, because I feel its health will suffer as a result. The longer a kid nurses, the better. Unfortunately, weaning and moving are both stressful events that frequently result in increased risk of parasites, coccidiosis, or even stress-induced diarrhea. When a kid moves to a new farm, it can develop these problems, even if it has been bottle-fed and does not have the stress of leaving mom. It is still leaving the only home it has ever known. Goats do not like change, and some are more bothered by it than others. For that reason, I see no point in prolonging the amount of stress that a kid will unavoidably suffer as a result of being sold. Ultimately, it is less stressful for them to simply have one bad day where they go to a new farm without mom.

  Most of our goats don’t get terribly upset about going to a new farm, anyway, because they have already been subjected to regular separations from mother. After two months of age, a kid spends the day with its mother in the pasture, and they are separated overnight so we can milk the doe in the morning. This nightly separation could be viewed as preweaning. Dam-raised kids start eating when they are a few days old, and most are eating quite well and pooping little goat berries well before they are even a month old.

  Bucklings are usually separated from their dams by three months of age due to the possibility of breeding doelings in the herd. The odds of a buckling at that age breeding an adult doe are slim because they usually aren’t big enough. You can also keep bucklings separated for most of the day and give them a couple of hours with their dams daily for nursing. As long as the mother is not in heat, the risk of pregnancy is zero, even if the buckling were able to mount her.

  Because the stress of weaning can subject bucklings to coccidiosis and parasites, it is best to keep them separated from adult bucks and wethers. If you are keeping only one buckling intact during a kidding season, you can give him a wethered buckling for companionship during weaning. When you purchase a buckling, it is best to purchase either two bucklings or to get a wether as well as the buckling. But since a wether eats as much as an intact buck, you might want to buy two bucks.

  When weaning a doe kid or a wether, it may be necessary to keep it separated from its dam for many months before you can be sure that the kid won’t nurse again. Some kids will forget about nursing after a couple of weeks, but some may go back to nursing after a couple of months if the mother is willing and still in milk. I am not a fan of using teat tape to keep kids from nursing because of the risk of a tenacious kid accidentally swallowing it.

  Wethers being raised for meat will grow faster with the added protein and calcium in the milk if they are left with the doe to continue nursing until you are ready to butcher them. I really prefer the taste of milk-fed goat, so I wether kids at two months and let them continue to nurse until they are processed. A buckling being raised for meat will grow faster if left intact. Does of the Swiss breeds don’t usually cycle during the spring or early summer months, so you can probably keep a Swiss breed buckling intact and nursing for a few months, getting the highest meat yield.

  Barn Hygiene

  When I was new to goats and heard that you had to keep the barn clean to avoid coccidiosis in kids, I thought that was unrealistic. How can you keep a barn clean? It isn’t as difficult as it sounds. My benchmark is simple: if I’m not willing to sit down somewhere to play with kids, then it isn’t clean enough for kids. Just as human babies put everything in their mouths, so do baby goats. The more exposed manure there is, the greater the chance that a kid will check it out at some point by picking up manure with its mouth or nibbling at a piece of straw with manure on it. During the summer, stalls need to be cleaned out regularly by removing all of the bedding and manure and replacing it with clean bedding. During the winter, a thin layer of bedding is added regularly so that there isn’t any exposed manure. You may need to do this somewhere between daily and weekly, depending on how many goats you have in your space.

  CHAPTER 12

  MILKING

  If you are bottle raising kids, you start milking the does as soon as the kids are born, and you continue milking twice a day, every day, until you dry them off. If you are dam raising the kids, the management is a bit more flexible, and it will free you from daily milking at least sometimes, although you should be checking the doe’s udder daily in the first few days to be sure the kids are nursing both sides evenly.

  Managing Milkers Naturally

  If a doe has a single kid, it is ideal to start milking her right away. Basically you’re the twin that wasn’t born. A doe produces milk in response to demand, and if only one kid is nursing, the result often is a fat kid and a low milk supply. By regularly milking a doe with a single kid, you will also avoid the possibility of her getting a lopsided udder if the kid decides it has a favorite side. You can put her on the milk stand twice a day, every day, without separating her from the kid. Or if you prefer to milk only once a day, you can separate the kid from her overnight and milk her in the morning. Separating the kid and doe by putting the kid in a dog crate in the stall with the doe reduces the stress of separation for both animals because they can still see each other. I usually start out separating them for only 8 hours and gradually build up to 12 hours over the course of a week.

  A doe with twins can be put on the milk stand once or twice a day and milked. If the kids are with her all the time, they can consume as much milk as they want, so you are only taking the excess. And remember, demand creates supply. You can start separating the doe and the kids overnight once or twice a week when the kids are two weeks old. Once you know how much milk the doe is producing, you may be able to separate her more often if she is producing a lot more than the kids need. I had a LaMancha that peaked at two gallons a day, so we could have separated her every night and taken a gallon, and her twins still would have had a gallon of milk during the day. A doe that is waking up her kids often and pushing them towards her udder is probably uncomfortably full, and it is a good idea to milk her at least once a day.

  What I Learned from Showgirl

  When we first started showing our goats, most of the other breeders
I met at shows were bottle raising their kids, and over the years many asked me the same question — don’t you have trouble with lopsided udders when your does raise their own kids? No, we never had a problem. Since this seemed to be such a big deal with other breeders, I came to the conclusion that my goats were just smarter than most! Then, after seven years, I was humbled.

  I stood in the barn in complete shock as a yearling doe walked away from me and appeared to have a one-teat udder. I knew she had two teats, but it looked like she had one teat hanging down from the center of her udder when I looked at her from behind. I quickly ran towards her and felt her udder, immediately finding a second teat flat against her abdominal wall. I knew what had happened. She had freshened a week earlier, and apparently Showgirl, her doeling, had been nursing on only one side, causing the other side to dry up.

  The lesson was reinforced a couple of weeks later when another doe gave birth to a kid that favored one side. But why hadn’t this been a problem previously? Well, we started out always milking does with single kids because we wanted the milk. As our herd grew and our supply of milk increased, we were no longer faithful about milking the single kid does. A kid can wind up with a favorite side shortly after birth if it nurses on only one side. That side gets soft, which makes it easier to nurse, so the kid starts avoiding the fuller, harder side, and within a few days, the other side starts to dry up.

  When Showgirl’s dam freshened the next year, the dried-up side started producing milk normally. Although she was great as a home milker, she would not have done well in the show ring as the two sides were not symmetrical.

  If a doe has triplets or more, I let her nurse them exclusively, and I don’t start milking for the first two months other than our once-a-month milk test. If I have an especially heavy producer feeding chubby triplets, I may start separating them overnight a few times at around six weeks, which is when production usually peaks.

  You can separate kids overnight and milk the dam in the morning, leaving them with her during the day, for as long as you want. If we want to make a lot of cheese, we separate the kids for a couple of days. On the other hand, if we will be going somewhere early in the morning, we may not separate the kids overnight so that we have fewer goats to milk before we have to leave. Most kids are remarkably good at keeping the mother’s udder close to empty. When we first start separating the kids overnight, we put each doe on the milk stand in the evening to be sure she doesn’t have a lot of milk, and in most cases, there are only a couple of squirts. If we discover a kid isn’t taking all of the milk during the day, we milk that doe in the evening to keep her supply up.

  Every few years, I have a doe that will refuse to let a kid nurse after a sibling leaves, or a kid that stops nursing after a sibling leaves. For this reason, you should put a doe on the milk stand twice a day for the first few days after making any changes such as selling a kid or moving a buckling to the weaning pen. You might also discover in the case of twins that each kid had a habit of nursing from only one side. If that’s the case, you will need to milk the absent kid’s favorite side daily to avoid the possibility of one side drying up.

  Teaching a Doe to Milk

  Teaching a doe to be a well-behaved milker begins long before she even gets pregnant. When we had only a few goats, none of the does ever received any grain unless they were on the milk stand. Now that we have a larger herd, we are not quite that organized, but the basic idea is that you should be interacting with the does on a regular basis from the time they’re born so that they trust you. If you don’t put them on the milk stand on a somewhat regular basis, avoid doing it only for unpleasant experiences such as deworming, injections, and hoof trimming. When a doe associates the milk stand with only those activities, it will be much harder to gain her trust when it is time to milk her.

  WE HAVE A fairly new small farmstead creamery. Our first year in production, we milked 20 Nigerian Dwarf goats and 3 LaManchas. Our main goal with our herd is milk production for the business, so we decided to take most of the kids away from their mamas when they were young. We bottle-fed them so we could use the milk for cheese. Our pasteurizer has a 100-liter (26-gallon) minimum so we wanted as much milk from them as possible.

  We started the kids off on individual bottles with Pritchard nipples and then transitioned them to lam-bars after a week or so. In addition to colostrum in the beginning, all bucklings were given milk replacer, and doelings were given mostly raw goat milk with a top-up of replacer. We did it this way because we knew that raw goat milk is best for growing healthy kids. We raise the doelings to add to our milking herd; bucklings go for meat. We also had several does kid later in the season, and rather than starting up the bottle-feeding again, we chose to leave those kids on their mamas and separate them at night, milking the mama once a day in the morning.

  Separating kids completely before weaning age is not something that we will do again. There are several reasons. The first was that the kids weren’t as healthy as the ones who stayed with their mamas. They didn’t grow as fast, and we had issues with scours, most likely coccidia because it cleared up when treated. The second reason was the amount of work. Preparing formula and then cleaning up the buckets and nipples afterwards was annoying. The third reason was milk volume. Although we did get more milk from the does because we were milking them out twice a day, their overall production was less than the does whose kids were left on them, plus we were feeding some of the does’ milk back to their doelings. Getting the extra bit of milk was not worth the impact on goat health or the increased workload for us.

  This coming milking season, we will start separating the kids at night as soon as we feel is reasonable, depending on size of the kids and number per litter, and we will milk just once in the morning. This might give us a slower start to our cheese-making season as it will take a bit longer to collect the 100-liter volume requirement, but the payoff will be in more milk throughout the season and healthier kids.

  We’re still relatively new to all of this, and we’ll continue adjusting our feeding/milking program as necessary because having healthy animals is an integral part of having a healthy business. Plus we love our goats and want to do right by them.

  — MARIN WADDELL of SalayView Farm, Lang, Saskatchewan

  There are a number of different ways to acclimate young does to milking. In some cases, a doeling will follow its mother into the milking parlor and nibble on grain or hay while its dam is being milked. The doeling learns from her that the milking parlor is a great place to be! Unless I need to milk her sooner, the morning after a young doe freshens, I lead her to the milk stand to give her grain. If she doesn’t already know the routine and jumps on the milk stand on her own, I hold the pan of grain under her nose and let her get a bite or two. Then I start moving it towards the milk stand, finally holding it above the milk stand to encourage her to jump up there. Some does follow along eagerly, but with others it might take a few minutes. Even if I don’t want to milk the doe, I gently handle the udder and teats while she is eating the grain. If the udder has blood on it from the birth, this is often a good time to wipe it off using a warm cloth. I continue giving the doe grain on the milk stand once a day for the first week or two after she’s kidded, or at least until she runs for the stand and jumps up on it like an old pro.

  The sooner you start milking a doe after she kids, the more likely it is that she will be cooperative, especially if she is a first or second freshener. Since singles are fairly common for first fresheners, and does with single kids should be milked daily, it often works out well. Goats thrive on routine, and if you routinely milk them when they are nursing kids, they will view it as normal. Most experienced milk goats that have freshened a few times are willing to let you milk them when they are nursing kids.

  If you wait a few weeks to start milking, it could be more challenging. Kicking and lying down are the two most common problems people face when milking new goats. Using hobbles on a standard goat is a common solution for kicking.
If you have Nigerians or miniature dairy goats, you might be able to hold one of the hind legs in the air or have a helper hold the goat’s hind legs while you milk. Holding one leg up usually works better than trying to out-muscle the doe and hold both legs down. If a doe lies down on the milk stand, you can put something tall under her chest, or again, if it’s a Nigerian, someone might be able to hold up her back end while you milk. Most does will calm down for milking somewhere between a day and a week after you start milking them.

  Some people complain that when does are dam raising kids they may hold back their milk. I know it seems like that’s happening when you can feel that the udder is not empty, but milk is not coming out. However, the doe is not purposefully holding her milk back. A goat udder has a cistern, which holds milk that has already been produced. As the name implies, it’s a storage tank. It does not take oxytocin release to get milk out of the cistern. However, only about 50 to 80 percent of the milk is stored in the cistern. The rest is stored in the alveolar compartment, which does require oxytocin to release the milk.31 Studies have shown that oxytocin is released when kids suckle, but the milk ejection reflex is impaired during hand milking unless kids are present. Plasma studies in goats and sheep have shown that oxytocin increases during suckling but not during milking.32 In another study with nursing kids, they found that oxytocin levels only increased when a doe nursed her own kids. If they forced her to nurse an alien kid, there was no oxytocin release.33 This means that it has nothing to do with technique or the difference between suckling and milking. Many nursing humans have found that if they are having trouble getting a milk ejection reflex with a breast pump, they simply need to start nursing their baby on the other side. Oxytocin is also known as the love hormone, which means that even though our goats may love us, they don’t love us nearly as much as they love their kids.