A Guide to Choosing Homestead Goats
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When choosing goats, there are a lot of factors to consider. The obvious ones are: do you want them for milk, meat, or fiber? What about creating a farm business with them? Deciding on the right breed for your needs is important and can also affect how much food and land they’ll need. Use these tips to help you choose the best breeds of homestead goats for your farm.
One of the most exciting times in our beginning days of homesteading was when we first got goats. The excitement began beforehand as I researched the various goat breeds. It was great fun to pour over breed photos and descriptions, trying to decide which one I liked best. Initially, I was only aware of two kinds of goats—milk goats and meat breeds.
I learned these can be further subdivided into standard and miniature breeds. In addition, they can be classified as brush goats, feral goats, heritage breed goats, pet goats, show goats, and work goats (goats trained to pull a cart or carry a backpack). More recently, mid-sized, dual-purpose goats have entered the scene, particularly Kinders. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these.
Choosing Mixed-Breed Goats
Initially, we focused on what I called brush goats. These were inexpensive, mixed-breed goats to help clear the years of overgrowth on our newly purchased homestead. Later, I bought two purebred dairy goats, Nubians, and two Pygmies. I’ve also had Toggenburgs, Nigerian Dwarfs, Kikos, Boer crosses, and an Alpine cross. What I’ve learned is that not all breeds are suitable for helping us work toward our homesteading goals.
My husband and I chose the homesteading lifestyle because we love to live and work close to the land. We love living in partnership with the natural world around us, and our primary goal is to create a self-sustaining homestead. This includes several areas: energy, water, animals, and food—for feeding ourselves and our animals. Regarding goats, I have learned that not all breeds are equally suited for this.
Choosing Homestead Goats
Over the years, breeds of goats have been selectively developed with production in mind. Modern dairy breeds produce gallons of milk, and modern meat breeds gain weight quickly. For a commercial producer, these qualities are assets.
Commercial feeds have been developed to facilitate production and contain everything a goat needs in one package. These are convenient, but eventually, I had to ask myself how well all this fit into our desire to feed our animals from our land.
Kikos and Pygmy Goats
Our Pygmies, Kikos, and mixed-breed goats are examples of goats well suited to our needs. They do very well on forage and hay alone and are good choices for pasturing. Even when in milk, they keep their weight and produce well on pasture, with garden vegetables and homegrown herbs for added vitamins and minerals.
Our Nubians, on the other hand, are a type of dairy goat that has been selectively bred over the generations for maximum milk production. It’s true that they produce gallons of rich, tasty milk, but it also means that their caloric and nutritional needs are higher. It is a challenge to keep them in good body weight and condition when they are producing milk.
Reasons to Keep Goats
As I struggled to keep weight on my Nubian does, I finally had to ask myself how keeping goats fit into the big picture. Did I want them to supplement our income through the sales of goats or dairy products? Will I want to make a home-based business like making goat milk soap? Do I want to participate in promoting a particular breed through a breeding program and breed registry? Or did I simply want to meet the needs of my own family?
All of these are valid reasons, but each would make different demands on my life. I needed to decide which ones fit best into our plans for our homestead. It was that primary aim of self-reliance that helped me make that choice. Our aim is to be self-reliant in meat, milk, butter, cheese, and even manure.
Advantages of Goat Manure
One of the most important products that animals create on a homestead is manure. It’s not glamorous, but it’s something that you choose animals for since it’s food for the garden and fields. All types of farm animal manure are great for growing a self-sufficient garden, with horse and chicken manure being the most prized. However, goat manure has a lot going for it, too. We affectionately call them goatberries, and all breeds of goats make them! Bigger ones produce more than pygmy goats, as you can imagine.
Goat manure is a dry manure that’s relatively easy to sweep or shovel up from a barn floor or small enclosure. Though you can heap it up and compost it, it’s like rabbit manure in that it doesn’t need to be aged or composted before you add it to the garden. It won’t “burn” plants because its nitrogen and carbon elements are in about the same ratio. In fact, each piece, old or fresh, can work as a slow-release fertilizer pellet! Its NPK values are well balanced (N: 0.5-2, P: 0.3-1, K: 1.3), making it ideal for enriching soil for vegetables and fruit trees.
The only disadvantages of goat manure are that it’s a pain to collect in the field and that fresh droppings might have pathogens. If you compost it or apply it three months before planting, the pathogens die off, though. Making planting in goat manure perfectly safe.
Dual-Purpose Goat Breeds
While I’m happy to have extra goats to trade or sell, I’m not interested in growing a vast goat business. Nor am I interested in developing a dairy business. We do want goats for milk, meat, kids, and manure for the garden. I don’t need gallons and gallons of milk—just enough for our family’s use: for milk, cream, cheese, butter, yogurt, whipped cream, kefir, and occasional ice cream.
Understanding this has helped me tremendously. I’ve realized that the best types of homestead goats are heritage breeds, dual-purpose, or crossbreds. I admit that crossbred goats don’t carry the status of purebreds, but they do have genetic diversity and hybrid vigor. These are two qualities necessary for a small homestead. This realization changed my breeding plans. Currently, I am working with locally available breeds, Nubian and Kiko, in hopes of breeding goats that are better suited to our land.
Advice for Choosing Homestead Goats
Others, with different situations, will make different choices. Because we have the land, we are able to keep bucks to breed our does. Another possibility would be taking our does elsewhere to be bred. The miniature breeds, such as Nigerian dwarf goats, are ideal for smaller plots of land, even backyards if town ordinances allow. With their friendly, gentle personalities, they make ideal pets and provide creamy milk for the table and manure for the garden.
They won’t eat tin cans, as myth suggests, but being smaller, they do eat less. A milking doe may eat a cup of grain twice a day, less for goats that are neither milking nor pregnant. Packaged goat feed, purchased hay, surplus garden produce, and a good quality loose goat mineral make small goats manageable for a small family. Being herd animals, at least two are required. The good news is that they are not as noisy as the neighbor’s barking dog.
I still have my Nubians and still worry about their weight. In working toward our goals, I have learned a lot and have really come to enjoy the companionship of goats. They’re such funny, loving, and inquisitive creatures. Raising goats has been a process but an important one for our farm, and I’ve learned a lot about the different breeds. I hope this helps you decide on the right homestead goats for your farm, too.
This piece is written by Leigh from 5 Acres & A Dream. She and her husband are an empty nest couple who homestead five acres in the Southeastern USA. Besides their goats, which provide them with milk, cream, butter, cheese, meat, manure for the compost, and more goats, they have free-range chickens and a cat.
Nice and informative post. I wonder if you have sheep as well?
WoW !!! Very Nice Blog Post. Thanks For Sharing.