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  • From: "Carrie Shepard" <outlikeelijah@gbronline.com>
  • To: "'permaculture'" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [permaculture] Goats herding
  • Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 12:30:28 -0500

Lisa,

I am raising goats on a small property. I have built 2 separate buck pens,
but truthfully, I let my buck out to friends to borrow his services and when
he's hereI let him run with the does most the time. He's home right now and
in with my does. We do have to be careful with strangers and my daughter
and I make sure we close the gate on him when we go into milk so he doesn't
surprise us with a butt when not expected. What I have done in the past was
to separate him near to breeding season and I pen the girls up in the barn
at night and let him out to exercise and browse, then put him up for the day
at morning milking time. This worked well.

I did have some of my young bottle fed nannies breed early last fall and 3
of the 4 gave birth to happy healthy kids and are giving me nice milk daily
now. The 4th one did not breed and has grown nicely and will be sold this
weekend. I'm trying to keep 5 to 7 does in milk and one buck and I'm not
showing goats. I keep them just for the healthy milk and extra meat for the
freezer from young wethers.

I've been experimenting with creating a living fence of edibles for the
goats on one 40 foot fenceline where we've watched the edge theory grow new
sandplums, new maples, silver maples, clover, and I've added jerusalem
artichokes, daylillies (I guess the leaves are fine but the tubers
potentially poisonous to goats), garlic, and now a running bamboo. I'm
hoping having the fenceline established will keep the goats from destroying
the plantings, but they can easily reach through and nibble some of the
plantings, and some things I want to spread into the pasture for them once
well established OUT of their reach first.

I also have grapevines and brambles and rather than letting the goats into
them, I take the prunings to the goats. It was reported I think last year
that the tannins in the grape leaves are a great wormer for the goats. I
only have 2.4 acres and my goal with the goats is a steady healthy healing
raw milk supply.

I do plan to again fence off the goat pasture into smaller rotating paddocks
for them as I have time, energy, and money to do so. I used to have a small
fiber flock of sheep and had fenced the one acre section into 4 sections for
my 8-12 sheep and that worked well for them. I didn't think I was going to
have sheep or goats again at one point due to illness and so I had taken the
fencing down. The illness is what got me into goats and now I wish I'd left
the fencing up <G>!

Hope this helps,
Carrie





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