Kinder Goat Breeders Association

KGBA

Homesteading

Goats in Love: Rocket’s First Lesson

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My husband and I have a little hobby farm so that I can raise goats. At least that may be how he thinks of it. He doesn’t raise goats, although he has done a marvelous job of building things for the goats.

But I raise goats. It used to be that goats were the ugly step-children of farming but no more. Now the number of cute baby goat videos rivals cat videos.

But you can’t have cute baby goat videos without the romance of their parents. If you like baby goat videos, you need to know about goats in love.

In our goat herd, we usually keep our buck separated from the does so we can control when the babies come. 

One bright fall morning, one of our girls had put on her high heels, lipstick, and Chanel perfume before sashaying along the fence line she shared with Rocket the buck. 

Rocket got the message: she was in the mood. Rocket was always in the mood, so with great excitement, he pushed his manly head through the fence to sniff her fragrance. 

Hearts were drifting above their heads like hot air balloons. Once I caught sight of a little cupid figure floating overhead, I collected Miss Elinore and brought her into Rocket’s pen. She wiggled her hips and lightly danced from the gate to the fence line so that she could lean against Rocket. 

He raised his eyebrows in glee and snorted words of love in her ear. He’d have brought roses and chocolate if he’d known. This was just what he had hoped for. Love was in the air.

Except for one problem: Rocket’s massive head was stuck through the fence.

He pulled and twisted while Elinore was doing a pole dance beside him. She whispered in his ear, gave him little smoochies, leaned against his rippling muscles. More and more hearts floated past his eyes.

Rocket began straining against the fence. His front legs were like pile drivers pushing into the ground. His cheeks would have turned red from the exertion if not hidden by that masculine buck fur. The fence bowed with his manly strength.

No go. He was stuck.

The love of his life was slow-dancing at his side, and Rocket couldn’t get his head out of the wire. 

I’m not without compassion. I only watched this display for fifteen minutes or so before I went in search of some wire cutters.

I think Rocket’s first lesson of love was to avoid putting your head through places where it doesn’t fit. 

But I learned something that day, too: it is unbelievably challenging to cut wire when you’re laughing that hard.

By Kathy Brasby

Goat Buck Barn Design

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I really enjoy barn design, and I think a lot about the needs of my goats whenever I build. Here’s a sense of what I think about when I’m designing for buck housing. There are many, many ways to meet the needs of bucks, so this is just an example of how I do it. I live in the hills of western Massachusetts, so we have hot summers but not as hot as down south, and we are close to zero some winter nights.

I have a low tolerance for ongoing sexual harassment in my buck pen. I don’t want a buck to be harassed so much that he is constantly defending himself or hiding to avoid being mounted by other bucks instead of eating. There are a few ways I go about providing options to make life easier when bucks are housed together. I’m usually housing 2-3 bucks, and I think there is more jousting in this small herd than in larger buck herds.

Food access is important, so I have a few wall mounted small mangers as well as main manger in case there’s a buck that is low on the pecking order and needs to eat away from his stall mate(s).

I find it helpful to have platforms in many of my goat stalls. Platforms create small spaces underneath where goats can snuggle for warmth during cold spells and also create a space to jump up on to escape when being chased. A buck can avoid being mounted by another buck by retreating under the platform. I often use 4×4’’ posts for corners and 2x4s for the rest of the frame. I usually screw platforms to the wall using 4-6’’timberlocks so that goats rubbing against them don’t move them around.

Here’s what I chose to do for my recent buck stall redesign. Two bucks live in it, an older buck and a young buck. They take turns chasing each other but it’s mostly the young buck who is full of vim and vigor. I wanted to make sure that the older buck can find peace.

The main platform is 5×4’ and 30’’ high. This allows them to stand underneath it but not jump around under there. The platform is against the wall, and two sides are covered with pieces of OSB (oriented strand board). The open side of the platform is farthest away from the door to avoid winter drafts and summer bugs from bothering the bucks underneath it.

With a platform this high, I made a 24×24’’ step-up platform since my older buck would have trouble jumping up without it.

I tend to put water buckets up on a small platform so that it’s higher than butt height, and they can’t rub against it or poop into it. I have a full-size door to the outside but a small buck-sized door that can be used during cold/bug seasons.

By Kathrin Bateman

Pasture Management for a Healthy Herd

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A 10-acre sweep of pasture for our goats to graze in — what could be wrong with this picture? We can just fence it and let our Kinders graze, right? When we moved onto our property in the warm, humid Southeast (a temperate rainforest) in 2013, we found that it’s not that simple.

Turns out, that’s not a good long-term plan. Goats actually prefer 60% browse from shrubs and trees. (They eat fallen leaves like potato chips.) We needed trees and bushes and bramble canes to satisfy our goats’ nutritional needs and preferences. After browse, they’d like to eat about 20% “weeds” and 20% grass. They benefit from herbs, brassicas, legumes and (nontoxic) weeds in their pasture. Our picturesque old cattle pasture does not look at all like the smorgasbord they are after.

Not only do we need to add variety to our sea of grass for nutritional reasons, we also need to manage the hazard of letting our Kinders graze in a climate that sees rainy springs and moderate-to-high annual rainfall. Wet grass in warm weather is the perfect environment for parasites that can afflict and even kill our goats. The worst culprit is the Barber Pole worm (Haemonchus contortus), a parasitic nematode that sucks blood out of the gastrointestinal track. The longer goats graze a particular section of pasture, the heavier the parasite load in that pasture becomes, until parasites become a serious management problem.

Here are the factors that contribute to parasite woes:

  • Warm, wet weather
  • Grass that’s less than four or five inches tall in favorite grazing spots (Larvae wiggle up wet blades of grass.)
  • Too many goats concentrated in a space
  • Goats left to graze in one area too long
  • Parasite resistance to dewormers

Pasture Rotation

Fortunately, there are ways to combat the parasites that dramatically reduce the need for chemical dewormers, and one of these is pasture management. If an area is small, one solution is to eliminate pasture altogether, keep goats in a dry lot, and bring them their food (hay and Chaffhaye, cut branches, garden crops raised for goats, grain mixtures formulated for goats, minerals). Make sure they don’t eat off the ground.

A key practice, if goats will be grazing, is to avoid overstocking. If your goal is a self-sustaining system, you’ll do better to keep only the number of goats you can feed from a parcel of land. The more crowded your goats are, the more trouble you will have with parasites, and the more you’ll have to buy to feed them.

Implementing rotational grazing helps immensely to combat parasite loads. You do not want your Kinders always grazing under their favorite maple or apple tree over in the south corner of the pasture, until the grass is only three or four inches tall there.  Ideally you would have them grazing an area for just 4–5 days, but that’s hard to pull off. More practically speaking that time might extend to 2–3 weeks. You want them to move them along before most parasites have time to complete their life cycle. (The life cycle of the Barber Pole worm is 21–25 days. A larva deposited in pasture hatches in about 5 days.) And you want to move your goats before they eat all of their favorite things out of a pasture, leaving only the less desirable plants to grow in their place.

Once you’ve moved your goats to a new grazing area, you want to “clean” the pasture they have grazed. You have two allies on your side: time and other species that can consumer parasites without incurring harm. A pasture could sit for a year and still have some viable parasites, but not nearly as many as it had initially. Keeping goats off an area for 6–8 weeks helps considerably.

Utilizing Other Species

Chickens run with goats or after them will break up goat pellets, exposing eggs to the sun, and will consume some of the parasites. Our goats and chickens already hang out together. They aren’t susceptible to the same strains of Coccidia, though they are both susceptible to Cryptosporidiosis, which can be a problem for both chicks and kids. We’ll take the risk for the benefit. Our chickens sleep in a separate space, and we have a fun time devising ways to keep them out of the hay feeders, which apparently look more inviting to them than their nesting boxes do. The two species like being together.

Horses or other equine grazing an area after the goats do will eat larvae with the grass. Horses are not hosts for goat parasites, so they are essentially “cleaning up” after the goats, and vice versa.

Haying

Haying after goats leave an area helps, too, as the haying process mops up and kills most of the parasites. The short grass post-haying also exposes parasite larvae and eggs to hotter, drier conditions that can kill them. Haying, though, also pulls a lot of minerals and nutrients off the land—there’s that to consider. (We are faced with the task and expense of re-mineralizing after our own land was hayed for years.) We cut our pastures twice a season, for two reasons. First, our goats avoid very tall grass—they’ll stay in the barn and eat pricey hay instead. Also, by cutting our pasture, we are controlling horse nettle, a toxic plant. But we let the grass lie where it falls.

With parasite management in mind, we are planning a rotational grazing system with enough small paddocks that we can keep goats grazing in a single paddock for 2 weeks and then move them along, not to return to that paddock for 2–3 months.

Planning a System

We’re fencing a large section of our pasture with RedBrand sheep and goat fence. (Coyotes visit occasionally, and we don’t trust electric fences to be infallible.) We will initially rotate goats within that large section of pasture using movable electric fencing, but we will gradually make permanent paddocks. If we were still young and energetic and had lots of time, moving electric fence might be an ongoing option. But we are time-challenged and getting older, and we want to be goat keeping when we are 80. We are building infrastructure now while we can to make things easy for ourselves down the road.

Enhancing Browse and Pasture Species

We will create “fence pockets” along paddock fences and within paddocks using goat panels attached to posts at either end with carabiner clips. That’s where we will establish our brambles, shrubs and trees for goat browse. We will develop pastures that offer not only grass, but rye, turnips, chicory in cool seasons, and cowpeas, sorghum, soybeans in warm seasons. Sericea lespedeza and Birdsfoot trefoil (like chicory) are legumes that reduce parasite loads, but they are harder to establish, so we’ll consider small plots of those.

Cultivating Parasite-Resistant Goats, Not Resistant Parasites

Once a new pasture is fenced and ready, the temptation might be to worm everybody one last time and then move your Kinders onto clean pasture. Again, that turns out to be a bad idea. The only surviving parasites would be those resistant to the dewormer you used. You would be introducing only “Super Worm” breeding stock into your new goat pasture. You are better off deworming only those goats that have a parasite problem so that parasites that have developed resistance breed with those that haven’t. Your herd will probably carry a few parasites; the load needs to remain light.

Feeding your goats to keep them in good body condition, especially pregnant and lactating does, is vital to controlling parasite loads. The more kids a doe has, the more nutritional support she will require. A depleted goat is far more susceptible to parasites than a well-nourished one. Protein in the diet helps heal tissues damaged by parasites, and adequate copper and zinc help your Kinders to fight off parasites. Cottonseed meal as a supplement is also effective in reducing parasite loads by half or more.

If you have a goat that you are having to treat regularly for heavy parasite loads despite optimal nutrition (including adequate copper and zinc), that goat is simply more susceptible, and you should consider the option of culling that individual from your herd. Tracking fecals and using the FAMACHA method of assessing parasite loads, you’ll likely find that your herd reflects the general rule—20% to 33% of the goats have 80% of the parasite problems. You can, through culling, develop a herd that is reasonably parasite-resistant, so that good management practices such as good nutrition and pasture rotation minimize parasite issues.

To sum up, as parasites of one kind and another become resistant to one dewormer after another, your best defense for your beloved Kinder herd will not come in a bottle. Your battle plan will be threefold: (1) maximiz­ing your herd’s health and resilience through good nutrition, (2) reducing pasture parasite loads through optimal grazing management, (3) culling selectively, if individual goats need treatment again and again. Here’s to your happy and healthy herd!

By Elizabeth Sweet

Recommended for Further Reading:

  1. “How to Grow Worms (Or Not),” by Steve Hart (http://www.wormx. info/growworms)
  2. “Goat Pasture and Browse: A Permaculture Approach to Raising Healthy, Productive Goats,” by Chris Ostrander (Google author and title for PDF download.)
  3. “Tools for Managing Internal Parasites in Small Ruminants: Pasture Management,” by Linda Coffey and Margo Hale for ATTRA. (Google author and title for PDF download.)
  4. “Management of Barber Pole Worm in Sheep and Goats in the Southern U.S.,” by Joan Burke (https://attra. ncat.org/downloads/goat_barber_ pole.pdf)
  5. “Barber Pole Worm War,” by Jonathan Dohonich, DVM
  6. (http://www.rosehillvet.com/print_ version.php?articleid=68)

WHAT IF IT RAINS

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85. WHAT IF IT RAINS – PASTURES

Today let’s play a little game of ‘what if’. As in ‘what if it rains’? What if your pastures and hay meadows green up and grow. Should you graze? Stay tuned.

What if it rains? What if it rains enough for your pasture to green up and grow enough to graze? Will you succumb to the temptation?

As tempting as it may be to give your animals some nice green grass, resist that temptation. If you do graze, it might do more harm to your grass than if it did not rain at all.

How can that be? To understand this risk, we need to review what happens when a dormant plant starts to grow. When a dormant plant starts to green up and grow, like in the spring following winter or after a rain during a drought, the plant mobilizes nutrients from its root system to energize the initial growth. This process actually weakens the root system and the plant temporarily. As the plant grows and produces more leaves, those leaves eventually harvest enough sunlight energy to replace the nutrients used during the green up process.

However, if some of the leaves are removed by grazing before they replace the nutrients used during green up, the plant will try to mobilize even more root nutrients to restart the process. At this time of year, though, the plant actually needs to increase root nutrients for winter survival. If grazing prevents that from happening, plants will go into winter in a very weakened condition. Some may die. And those that survive to next spring will grow very slowly until they have recovered from the multiple stresses of drought and untimely grazing.

So do yourself and your pastures a favor. Decide right now that no matter what happens this fall, you will not graze green growth again until next year. Pasture survival may depend on it.

86. WHAT IF IT RAINS – ALFALFA

Many dryland alfalfa fields have been sitting dormant for many weeks. If it rains heavily, how should you manage any cuttings if that alfalfa begins to regrow. Stick around.

If it rains very much in the next few weeks, dormant alfalfa is going to start to regrow. If that happens, what should you do?

To be honest, I really don’t know. We are kind of in uncharted territory with newer alfalfa varieties and this severity of drought.

It might depend on when that rain occurs and if it becomes enough to support regular growth rates. Since we are approaching the usual winterizing season for alfalfa, I think alfalfa that has been virtually dormant the past few weeks should be allowed to grow without any harvest at least until mid-October.

About the only exception to that recommendation might be to consider a salvage harvest or a stimulation harvest.

A salvage harvest would be a situation where your alfalfa has gone fully dormant due to drought, there is enough standing growth to harvest economically, and that standing growth is starting to drop leaves. It doesn’t matter if it rains or not. Harvest shouldn’t hurt that stand and harvest will give you some needed feed.

A stimulation harvest would involve cutting off any standing crop immediately before or as soon as possible after a heavy rain to encourage new shoots. Regrowth then may develop a little faster without the influence of a standing crop. It isn’t necessary to cut off the standing crop to get new growth but it might help.

It’s been a tough year for alfalfa. Without rain, some of it may not survive the winter. But with rain we must be careful to allow the plants adequate time to winterize. Maybe then, next year will be better.

87. BALING CORN OR MILO STALKS FOR WINTER FEED

Your corn is getting combined. Now you are wondering if you should bale some of the stalks. Is it worth it? Stick around.

What are corn stalk bales worth? Let’s first look at it from the cost stand point.. Nutrients removed by stalk bales may need to be replaced with extra fertilizer. Using this year’s prices, stalks may contain over fifteen dollars worth of nitrogen, phosphate, sulfur, and lime per ton.

Corn stalk removal also can reduce soil organic matter, increase erosion risk, and increase soil water evaporation. Nebraska research shows that the decline in dryland corn yield or the increase in irrigation needs costs about ten to twenty dollars for each ton of residue removed.

Labor and equipment costs average over thirty dollars per ton, and baling stalks tends to cause more wear and tear on equipment than other baling operations. Totaled together, these costs amount to at least sixty dollars per ton of corn stalks removed.

So, what are corn stalks worth as a feed? Some folks suggest the dollar feeding value is midway between that of straw and prairie hay. But feed value of stalks varies greatly, and cattle tend to waste more of it. If you bale the entire field you may only have three to four percent protein and less than fifty percent TDN. Harvest just the tailings in the two or three rows behind the combine and TDN increases to the lower fifties and protein to about five percent. But test to make sure. And don’t forget to test for nitrates this year.

Are baled corn stalks worthwhile? Maybe so this year considering how expensive other alternatives might be. But first make sure they fit your feeding program without damaging next year’s crop production.

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Bruce Anderson

Extension Forage Specialist

Department of Agronomy & Horticulture

University of Nebraska

Lincoln, NE 68583-0910

Voice: 402-472-6237

Fax: 402-472-7904

Email: banderson1@unl.edu

Dam Raised or Bottle Raised

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I suppose I should say that this is the breeders preference but if you are selling Kinder stock then you might want to consider the buyers thoughts.

For my husband and myself this is very important because in general dam raised kids are not nearly as gentle are easy to handle as those raised on a bottle. We are in our 70’s and 80’s so animals that are easy to handle is quite important. We have owned both so we know first hand just how these animals act as kids and into adulthood. Those Kinder raised by their dams are never as gentle and trusting as those that are bottle raised. We have one older doe in our barn right now that was dam raised and to this day she is not nearly as easy to handle as the other older doe that was raised on a bottle. We have two doelings in our barn right now with one being raised by her dam and one raised on the bottle. The young doe that was dam raised is quite a challenge when trimming hooves, worming and etc..

I often hear breeders say that leaving kids on the dams is the natural and best way. It may be the natural way but it is not always the best way. When raising Kinder kids give some thought to the buyers that you plan to sell these animals too. I would almost always give more money for a bottle raised kid than one that was raised on their dam.

Here is a little hint that has worked for us: When wanting the dams to raise their kids then only leave those kids with their moms for the first week to ten days then  move the kids to a separate area. Twice a day bring the does to the kid area and turn them in for the kids to nurse. Just as soon as they have finished nursing open the gate and doe will be very happy to return to the barn leaving her kids in their kid quarters. Doing it in this way the kids will become yours ( much more friendly)and they will also be able to be raised by their dams. It has always worked for us.

CUSTARD PIE

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4 eggs slightly beaten
1/2 cup of sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla
2 1/2 c. milk, scalded
9 inch unbaked pie shell
Dash of nutmeg

Thoroughly mix eggs, sugar, salt and vanilla. Slowly pour in hot milk. Pour into shell at once. Sprinkle nutmeg over the top and bake in preheated oven at 475 degrees for 5 minutes. Reduce heat to 425 degrees and bake for 10 minutes or longer if necessary.