× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! I like to dream about what the future holds for our little farm and the most important livestock we raise on it, the goats. I love all of my animals, but goats are my special pals. In terms of sustainability, they have the potential to give life to not only their kids and mine, but also to the chickens, pigs and dogs. If we can successfully provide their needs here on what we can raise, we can use their outputs to create sustainable food for the other animals that call Little Avalon “home.” While I thought it would be fun to share this with you, I think it’s equally important for Read More
Tag: goat
Physical Traits of an Easy Hand Milking Goat
× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! In the world of dairy goats, you’ll hear such descriptive terms as “butter soft udder texture,” “plump teats” and “open orifices” to describe a hand milking udder. In an online world where words must sufficiently explain such a complex experience as milking, we often fall short of really telling readers what the udder is like. This article attempts to break down the individual traits that come together to make a doe an “easy milker” versus a doe you might want to keep as a pet instead. I remember my first purebred Nigerian doe. I bought her as a 3 day old bottle baby and fell head over heels in love with Read More
How Much Does It Cost to Produce Goat Milk at Home?
× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! Among the many reasons for raising your own milk at home is the expected cost savings. I see remarks in various goat groups about how much more home raised goat milk is costing people, so this article is an attempt to break down the costs of raising your own goat milk to see where the money goes, which allows us all to make educated decisions on how to better manage our goats from a cost perspective. I wrote an in-depth breakdown of our personal costs to raise goats. The end result is that we need to sell about $480 worth of kids per doe per year to break even. This includes total Read More
Calculating Grain Costs for Goats
× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! We buy grain in bulk from local feed mills. It saves a lot over retail at the feed store, but the tradeoff is that we spend more time handling the grain and drive longer distances to get it. We have been going twice a year now, but I’d love to get bigger storage bins to allow us to make one trip per year. That the peas are in one town and the oats/barley are in another just complicates things. The current mix, which changes based on availability and sometimes our whims, is 3 parts barley, 1 part field peas and 1 part black oil sunflower seeds (BOSS). Our most recent purchase Read More
Costs of Raising Goats
× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! Our methods change frequently, so while these costs are accurate now, by next season we may be doing things differently. One thing is for certain no matter the method: raising goats is costly! Hay January begins kidding season, or it has the last two years anyway. The does are wintering in the barn and eating free choice second cutting alfalfa at $70/ton. Our price is drastically lower than market value because we buy at cost from a relative. Market rate is about $175 a ton. We winter about 6 months out of the year, so I figure 180 days of feeding hay at a rate of 4% of body weight per Read More