How to get
the most from your Goat

Goat Keeping

So you have decided to take the plunge and acquire your first goat. What breed should you choose? The Anglo-Nubian with its roman nose and large lop ears is the aristocrat. Coming in various colour combinations, its, milk has the highest butter fat percent-age so is favoured by many, but it may not yield as much in lacta-tion as the Saanen. The Saanen is white in colour, the largest of the four main breeds and consequently the heaviest milker. Then there are the Toggenburgs and British Alpines, similar in appear-ance although the Toggenburg is brown with white markings on the face and legs, whereas the British Alpine is black with similar white markings. All breeders will tell you that their particular breed is best, but the choice is yours.

Our first pitfall when entering the goat world was to buy a kid. Not that that in itself is a fault, but taking into account the time spent bottle feeding - they consume up to a pint of milk at each feed, four feeds a day --the price paid for the milk purchased from the previous owner, and then the price of the hay, fed at the rate of approximately half a ton per goat per year, it will be a long time before she starts to pay her way.

For the first two years of her life, the goat will not be giv-ing you any return on your original investment, because it is not until she is eighteen months old that she is mature enough to be mated. Then follows a five month pregnancy, and at last that beautiful day in Spring when you own not one, but two or even three goats, and the milk production starts. At this point comes the first-big decision. If she has a billy kid or kids, what do you do with them? Do you fatten them up and kill them for the freezer, or dispatch them painlessly at birth? If you fatten them, cook as for lamb, otherwise call the vet and get out the tissues. After birth, the kids can either be left suckling the mother until weaned, or put on the bottle, but they must be left with their mother for the first four days to have the colostrum in her milk, an essential part of kid rearing. Leaving the kid or kids to suckle the nanny means that, unless she is a very heavy milker, there will not be much, if any, milk for the house, until the kids are weaned, so most breeders resort to bottle feeding. However, after having a full bottle, kids are only too happy to top up from their mother, a practise to be avoided but very difficult to stop unless the wilful infant can be kept well out of sight, sound and smell of mother.

Now that the goat can give all her attention to producing milk for the house and unweaned infant, comes the problem of milking. Having read all about the technique in your, by now, well-thumbed 'Goat Keepers Manual', it is really a question of trial and error, but as long as you are gentle, the milk will soon flow. At this point, perhaps you should know of one of our pitfalls. When first milking our freshly kidded goat, I foolishly tied her with her head facing towards the open door and freedom. Milking was a new game for both of us, and she soon discovered that when she had given all she felt like giving at that time; she could make a sudden bolt for the door and freedom, upsetting milk and milk-maid alike. Iwas forced to remonstrate with her rather severely, and for the first couple of weeks milking proceeded with the goat wedged into a corner of her pen, my shoulder pinned against hers, and her tail facing the door and those beckoning open spaces. I was boss and once that was established, she would allow anyone to milk her, as long as her tail always faced the door. An aid to peaceful milking is to feed the goat her concentrates at this time. On average a milking goat will consume 2 lbs of concentrates a day, a mixture of cereals, molasses and minerals, all essential to provide for the goat's considerable energy needs.

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