Great 4-H projects! Yes, they certainly were the gateway drug for me! So true on the escaping!! I have boer goats and nigerian dwarf goats and they are both true escape artists, i had a 18 week old boer buck get out of his pen and was following my cat down the drive way!!.
I have a little kids play set in with my dwarf goats and they love it. I am going on my second year with goats and hope to have many many more.
We have over forty goats and we maintain them on our working farm. I disagree with most of your points. Our goats love hoof trimming. From minutes after birth we teach proper manners. Touching every part of the goat, putting them on the stand and running them through the paces. Hooves, udders, ears, temps etc. Ours rarely escape. Unless the gate is left unlatched, they stay in the pens. Higher, shorter, reinforce.. Staying one step ahead by watching for potential routes, leaping from shelters, shimmy up trees etc.
High quality, good genetics and dedication in breeding and milking practices keep theses great gals going. With the exception of a few weeks in the fall, vigilant grooming keeps our bucks from getting rank. Good livestock shampoo and a hose is all it takes.
The bucks love playing in the water! In the winter, big human size wipes combat any raunchy smells. Our eight bucks are housed together and for the most part are little gentleman! Parasite control is a snap.
Our goats stay parasite free and it only takes about half an hour every few months.. Above medication control, sanitation…Keep things clean! Muck often, haul away! If these things are problems for others perhaps a hard look at ones herdsmanship would provide clues how to reduce these problems.
We continually evaluate how our farm is running, making sure we are utilizing our resources for optimal production. Dear T What kind of goats do you have? My goat normally hate water and getting their feet trimmed.. I do have to agree if you have good fencing your goats should not be able to get out, but sometimes they do find a way.
Thanks for all your tips and info! I really do like the tips that you have and will be trying them very soon. Our goats are trained early. Literally as we are drying the birthing goo we play with udders, mess with the feet, wiggle the ears, take their temp. So they get used to it and they enjoy it. We know Sundays and Thursdays this gets done. Catch mole hills before they become mountains! The water too if the weather allows is weekly and in the summer, almost daily. The parasites. Every single animal is treated for parasites before entering the property.
This is critical! Before the land was ours it was poorly managed. So it required diligence. Working with our vet we came up with the protocol.
And we repeat the treatment seven days later on the dot! Herd management is seriously about staying one step ahead! As for what we use on the goats, Sub Q Ivermectin and safeguard for the goats. We also add natural controls to the diet like pumpkin seed etc.
The next step in preventing muck, muck, muck! We were mucking almost every single day in the beginning! We burned the straw. Kill the bugs! We used straw and shavings. Now we have things to where we muck the first and fifteenth. I once was in the ER, but made the family go home to muck! Deep layers of straw on top of deep layers of shavings. I do mean deep! But it works, all the critters stay clean and dry and the job is easier this way!
These are just a few things we learned in the beginning, and we are still learning. I do agree they are the gateway. I started with one goat, one dog, one cat, one bunny…soon it exploded and we have over critters.
All of them have names, all of them loved! We plan on expanding again next spring! I would love to share from my mistakes! I really just LOVE goats and have learned to make it a little less trouble. Dear T thank you so much for all the tips, i am very new to this and still getting started, i call my goat mentor all the time in a panic trying to figure out what is wrong with one of my goats :.
What does the pumpkin seeds do?. I also have rabbits and a dog and am getting some chickens in the spring. Where do you buy the wormer you use on your goats? Thank you agian for all the info. We buy the wormer from our farm and feed stores.
The local and chain stores both carry them. I priced checked and even eBay has both, but I was wary of buying from an untrusted source. The ivermectin is expensive but BAM!
Worth every penny! Both of them can be used on multiple species so it was a great investment and the cost per dose is relatively small. Some pasture areas we were able to burn, not sure if that helped or not but it seemed like a thing to try. Also the grass was so overgrown and tangled it was a way to quickly take it down and look for nails, fencing and whatever else that might hurt kids or critters. The other pastures we raked and raked and raked!
Just like the mucking! Mostly we just keep things as clean as possible. Rotating pens helps too, the mini Juliana pigs, the big sow, goats, and baby cow rotate periodically. Pumpkin is great for ridding pets of pests. I would love to offer help anytime you need. We had a preacher that raised goats, and he gave the kids a nanny and 2 babies.
Then, a buck. Soon, another nanny. Next thing I knew, we had goats out our ears! But, they did exactly what we wanted them to do—ate the brush off of our 13 acres.
Yes, Buck was stinky. Yes, he did get out a few times. Instead, goats got us. Is this what they spend money on now, figuring out whether goats can tell the difference between smiling and frowning faces?! He also readily acknowledges that the results will come as no surprise to goat farmers, who are well aware that goats are pretty smart.
With nearly 1 billion goats in the world, McElligott wants to make people realize the benefit of treating them nicely. Goat and sheep specialist Susan Schoenian , at the University of Maryland Extension, has questions about the study. So perhaps the goat study serves as a reminder that a smile is appealing to human beings as well as to ruminants. These sheep were trained to recognize photos of celebrities like Emma Watson on a computer screen.
Then they were shown two images, one of a celebrity from the earlier test and one unfamiliar. And they definitely opted for Watson. You want to know what is really going on these days, especially in Colorado. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
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Animals , Plants. By Dave Levitan on April 1, Dave Levitan. Non Necessary cookies to view the content. Sign up for your Modern Farmer Weekly Newsletter. Notify of. The goats did fail in one respect, however.
During another trial, the researchers allowed other non-trained goats to observe the smarty-pants goats as they accessed the food reward. But when those peeping tom goats were given the chance to then solve the puzzle themselves, they were no better at figuring out how to get at the treat than goats that had not been given a visual hint about the solution. This could mean that goats prefer to learn on their own, the researchers write, or it could just be that goats have either lost or never possessed that particular social adaptation—being able to learn by watching others—that animals such as dolphins excel at.
There's more going on here than you might suspect. Photo: Nomodus photos Goats are members of a diverse group of mammals called ungulates.
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