Goats

Choosing your goats

Start from the job. Dairy breeds like Nubians, Alpines, and LaManchas turn feed into milk and demand milking on a schedule, twice a day, every day, in kid season and out of it. Meat breeds, Boers and their crosses and the hardy Kiko, grow fast on forage and ask less. Fiber breeds, Angoras and cashmere types, pay in fleece. Spanish and brush goats are the survivors: less production, more independence. Whatever the job, buy healthy animals from a tested herd, ask about CAE, CL, and Johne's testing, and quarantine newcomers before they meet your herd. Two goats minimum, always: a goat alone is a goat in distress, and it will tell the whole county.

Fencing and housing

The fence is the whole game. Goats test fences the way water tests a roof, patiently and at the weakest point. Woven wire at four feet with a strand of electric on the inside, or well-maintained multi-strand electric alone, are the fences that hold. Gates get latched like you mean it, because goats work latches. Housing itself is simple: a dry, draft-free shelter with good ventilation, deep bedding, and room to get out of the rain, which goats hate with a purity other livestock never match. Feeders and waterers belong where they cannot be stood in, because they will be.

Feeding browsers

Goats are not small cows and they are not lawn mowers. They are browsers: they want leaves, brush, bark, and weeds, eaten at head height while moving, and they waste hay like it is their job, because pulling it onto the ground and refusing it is built into the design. Good hay in a feeder that limits waste, loose minerals formulated for goats (they need copper, which sheep minerals do not provide), fresh water, and baking soda offered free choice cover the baseline. Grain is a tool, not a staple: right for late pregnancy and lactation, dangerous in excess, and a urinary calculi risk for wethers and bucks when the calcium to phosphorus balance goes wrong. New feeds get introduced slowly. A goat's rumen is a fermentation vat, and it does not like surprises.

Health basics

Hooves first: trim every four to eight weeks, more often on soft ground, or feet and legs pay for it. Parasites second: the barber pole worm is the herd killer across the warm, wet South, and the working tools are FAMACHA scoring (checking eyelid color for anemia), fecal egg counts, rotational grazing with long rests, and deworming only the animals that need it, so the drugs keep working. Learn the normal goat so the sick one stands out: off feed, separated from the herd, grinding teeth, a rumen gone quiet, drooping ears on a bright breed. Bloat, pneumonia after weather swings, and trouble at kidding are the emergencies that reward a keeper who notices early. Every herd needs a working relationship with a vet who actually treats goats, established before the emergency, not during it. Vaccination against the clostridial diseases (CD and T) is the standard baseline most herds run on.

Kidding season

Gestation runs about five months, and a prepared keeper has the kidding kit ready before the first due date: towels, iodine for navels, a scale, bottles and colostrum or replacer for the kid whose dam cannot or will not. Most does kid without help and prefer an audience of none. Your jobs are warmth, a dry pen, colostrum inside the first hours, and records: who was born to whom, when, and how much they weighed. Disbudding, castration, and tagging decisions get made by the herd's purpose and made early, not improvised late. Kids grow fast, dams get checked for mastitis and milk fever in the dairy herd, and the whole season runs on sleep deprivation and strong coffee, like every birth season since farming began.

The daily rhythm

Twice a day, every day: feed, water, eyes on every animal. The walk is the diagnostic. Who came to the feeder slow, who is standing apart, whose rumen looks wrong, whose kid is not nursing. Goats reward attention out of all proportion to its cost, and punish its absence the same way. That is the whole secret of the species, and it is not really a secret.