Keeping weight on your goats
I suspect one of the
reason women love goats is because the caprine herd has the exact
opposite problem we have. As a goatkeeper, one of your primary goals is
to keep the weight on
your goats. Between intestinal parasites (usually present at low levels
but sometimes veering way out of control) and the energetic expense of
creating baby goats and milk out of grass, dairy goats have a bad
tendency to waste away to skin and bones. Enter my weekly bout with the measuring tape to reassure myself that our goats are in fine form.
Lamb
Chop has never given me any worries on the weight front, though. The
most I've been concerned about is that our buckling will get bigger than
his mother before his date with the butcher, making it impossible to
carry the lad across the creek to his doom. Barring that issue, he seems
bound to surpass his 11-month-old herdmate's size in short order. As of
this week, Lamb Chop has officially caught up with Artemesia; in fact, I
think he now stands a little taller at the shoulder.
Abigail and Artemesia, on
the other hand, worried me a bit in April, although I now think that
their weight "losses" then were merely an artifact of shedding their
winter fur. Less fur for the tape to wrap 
around
simulates the loss of fat. Regardless, I dosed the whole herd with
daily helpings of chopped garlic, which they all ate happily whether or
not they needed the herbal dewormer. Now both are well above their
winter weights, even without the furry padding.
I'm glad that I seem to be able to keep the weight on Abigail without adding grain
to her diet, but I'll admit that I'd probably get more milk if I fed
our doe more concentrates. As she started gaining weight on grass, I
started easing off the carrots, alfalfa pellets, and sunflower seeds I
was offering...with the result that milk production slowed down a bit
(from about 3 cups a day to about 2.5 cups a day). Bringing those
concentrates back up to previous levels (plus locking Lamb Chop away an
hour earlier in the evening) quickly increased milk back to normal, then
all the way up to a quart at my morning milking.
I suspect one of the dicey issues with dairy goats is deciding when
we're being greedy humans and pushing our goats too hard, and when it's
worth feeding a little more for a little more milk. Since I want to
experiment a bit more with cheese, I think I'll be greedy just a little longer.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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