Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> I'll take any other goat advise you have also, cause I'm just getting
> started with goats. I love these animals!
> 

Rob,

This is the flip side advice on goats, you might as well have all sides, eh?

People who are "in to" something detail it to death, splitting infinitely 
smaller hairs over things that don't make the slightest bit of difference.  
As 
you Google advice on goats, or get it from us old goat people, keep this in 
mind.  Goatiana details are entertaining to goat people, what fun would it be 
to 
say, "Oh, it doesn't matter all that much what you feed them."  Yawn.  

A milk goat will give you some milk, quite likely plenty enough milk.  On a 
homestead what difference does it make if you get five pints a day or six?  
So 
do you really have a lot of motivation to go about obsessing over the 
minerals 
in the soil and milking records of the billy goat (the goatatericist will 
tear their garments and tell you that it is a BUCK and not a billy!!!!  And 
it's 
POUNDS of milk not pints!!!!  It's pounds because on commercial dairies they 
must weigh the tanks and trucks and can't actually measure the volume, on a 
farmstead it is pretentious) .... but do you really have motivation to obsess 
over the details for an extra pint of milk?  Yet, on an agribusiness model 
that 
sixth pint is life and death, the difference between the bottom line of 
profit 
or loss.   So agonizing over the details to get that last few ounces of milk 
is essential.

Goats will eat just about anything, so grass hay of reasonable quality or soy 
bean haulms or any such will likely give you plenty enough milk.  Will you 
fail raising goats if you make the second best choice?  No. 

Like hybid corn that was selected for years to give high yields with the use 
of herbicide and chemical fertilizer and yet yields no better than OP corn if 
grown organically, just like that a dairy goat line bred so much toward milk 
production that the billy goats (er, BUCK!!!!!!! you damn fool idiot, BUCKS) 
have teats only give that ponderous amount of milk on a concentrated milk 
diet.  
In most cases of a subsistence farmstead, this is impractical.   You may hear 
the old saw that really good milker will give more milk no matter the 
management.  Not so.  The advantage of the high strung super bred milker 
disappears 
when the goats are raised hardscrabble.

One thing though.  Don't breed your milk nannies (Aug!!! Rip!!!  DOES!!!) to 
Boer bucks and expect the offspring to be adequate milkers.  In my experience 
what you get is an inferior meat goat and and inferior milk goat.

So relax and enjoy the goats, and take any advice from goat experts with a 
small Siberian salt mine.