Goat's Feeding Practices-Part 1

In my last post about "Goats As Ruminants" I explained about the four stomach chambers and how you know if the Rumen is functioning properly.

In this post I will give an outline on their feeding practices.

Roughage:

Fiber comes from roughage such as hay, browse, pasture, and crop residues. Goats are browsers by nature and prefer to forage brush lands or pasture containing a variety of plants, but limited land, rainfall, and winter weather prevents them from obtaining natural forage, so it is necessary to feed them hay. Legume hay such as alfalfa or cover is the best of the common forages. They are higher in total digestibility, rate of digestion, and is richest in protein, vitamins, and most minerals. Mixed legume-grass hay, if cut early, is also fairly good, but is generally the poorest quality.

The type of hay you need depends on the goats you are feeding. Milkers require good legume hay for better milk production.

Feed hay free choice, a little at a time, because goats tend to scatter and waste it. Just feed less and more often. This ensures that it all gets eaten. On an average, a goat will consume 2.5 to 3% of it's body weight each day.

Alternate Forms of Roughage:

If you don't have access to good hay, you will have to make up for it with other fibrous feedstuffs. An option might be large pelleted hay. Not the small type fed to rabbits, to ensure adequate fiber length. Pelleted hay is expensive, but goats don't waste it by picking through it and it, and the higher nutritive value offsets the grater cost by allowing you to reduce supplemental feeding.

Other fibrous feedstuffs include cottensilk hulls, citrus pulp, and beet pulp. You can also store silage during the summer from grass clippings, or shredded cornstalks. Sunflower seeds are another excellent source of roughage, with being high in protein, vitamins, minerals, and energy.

Of all types of roughage, though, goats like to browse.

Browse:

Goats were foraging for themselves way before we put them into fancy barns and hand carried their rations. You will save money and time if you take advantage of their ability to eat coarse weeds and woodsy growth for atleast part of their roughage intake. The milkers also like to browse, but some types of vegetation,especially wild onions and garlic, cause off-flavors in milk.

Also keep a herd from seeking out poisonous vegetation. Avoid letting them come in contact with plants that have been sprayed with pesticides. Ornamental shrub prunings are another source of poisoning. Some plants are poisonous only at certain times of year, others always are. Wild cherry and oak included- toxic substances become concentrated in the wilted leaves, to which goats are unfortunately attracted, so in some areas it is necessary to prevent browsing in the autumn when theses withered leaves pile up on the ground. The toxic evergreen mountain laurel, for instance, becomes attractive to goats in winter when most other vegetation has died off.

I don't mean to alarm you, I just want make you aware of some of the poisonous plants. The good news is that goats are less subject to plant poisoning than other types of livestock. The older goats become familiar with poisonous plants and avoid them. It is the younger ones that sometimes get into trouble unless led by an experienced animal.

Symptoms of poisoning are vomiting, frothing, staggering, cries for help, rapid or labored breathing, altered pause, trembling, convulsions, and sudden death.

Pasture:

As I mentioned before, goats are basically browsers like deer, but they will make use of pasture, if available. Providing quality pasture is a good way to keep up milk production and keeping down food cost. If you have steep, rocky, droughty land that is otherwise usable, seeding it to pasture will provide grazing for your goats.

I guess that pretty much covers the roughage part of feeding practices. Will get into other feeding practices in a later post. As usual, I hope this has been informative.