I vividly remember the moment the farmer we bought our first herd of goats from left our driveway, their empty trailer rattling behind them. I had spent countless hours researching, reading books, and watching YouTube videos, feeling confident that I was fully prepared with all the knowledge there was to know about what to consider before buying goats.

But as I quickly learned, there are some things you only truly grasp through personal experience. Each milestone brought its own set of challenges and valuable lessons.

Reflecting on my journey, there are key things I wish I had known before diving into goat ownership - beyond the common mistakes that are easy to avoid with a little research. Sharing these insights, I hope to help those of you considering your first goats to be a bit more prepared than I was.

Here are the essential lessons my goats taught me, from the unexpected quirks to the crucial care tips that don’t typically make it into the guides.

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Get Organic Bedding and Hay

Avoid Grazon

Grazon and other herbicides can contaminate your garden soil, making it difficult to grow certain crops if you plan to use your goat manure as compost. Contaminated manure can stunt or kill sensitive plants.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think too much about this when using my goat’s straw bedding in my garden. It’s been a few years, and certain crops like peas still don’t even germinate the beds where it was applied. As someone who gardens organically, knowing that there is herbicide contamination in the soil is heart breaking.

According to NC State, herbicides “can remain active in hay, grass clippings, piles of manure, and compost for an unusually long time…. some field reports indicate that complete deactivation and breakdown can take *several years….*When mulches, manures, or composts with residual herbicide activity are applied to fields or gardens to raise certain vegetables, flowers, or other broadleaf crops, potentially devastating damage can occur”

How to Find Herbicide-Free Bedding and Hay

• Finding truly herbicide-free bedding and hay is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Organic farms or suppliers specializing in untreated hay are your best bet.
• Many small farms will use organic practices but not be certified organic. In this case you’ll have to ask what they apply to their field and trust them.
• Ask fellow goat owners who use their manure in their garden where they source their goat’s bedding and hay - but be sure to see if they’r ehaving trouble in the garden first.

Not All Hay is Created Equally - Understand the Different Types of Hay

Nutritional Value and Benefits

• Grass hays like timothy or orchard grass are good for maintaining adult goats.
• You can mix in some alfalfa for pregnant or lactating does.

Soil Mineral Levels

The soil where hay is grown affects its mineral content. For instance, selenium-deficient soils produce hay with low selenium levels, which can impact goat health.

As an example, Puget Sound Goat Rescue mentions that hay grown in eastern Washington has higher nutrition value than hay grown in other areas of the state.

How to Choose the Best Hay

• Avoid hay that is dusty, moldy, or has a lot of stems.
• Ask other local goat farmers where they source their hay.

Invest in Good Genetics

Health and Productivity

Traits such as milk production, resistance to disease, and temperament can all be influenced by genetics.

If you want goats so that you can be self-sufficient in dairy, for example, then it’s important to understand the role genetics and past history play when purchasing a goat.

When we bought our first herd of goats, we didn’t think to ask about their milking records or for estimates of how much milk they gave during previous kiddings.

The range of milk that a doe can produce is quite vast. For example, according to data from the 2019 Dairy Herd Improvement Registry, a Nigerian Dwarf on average yields 795 pounds of milk a year.

But a poorly bred doe of the same breed can yield just 220 pounds of milk a year, while a prize-winning milker can yield 2110 pounds of milk a year!

This becomes more impressive when you realize that a much bigger goat, like a Nubian, yields an average of 2018 pounds of milk a year.

Nubians aren’t free of the wide variations in milk yield, though. In fact, their range is bigger - from 510 pounds a year all the way up to 3840.

If your goal for your goats is a yield of dairy, you could have 7 low producing Nubian goats or 1 top producing Nubian goat. Of course, 7 goats cost more to maintain and take a longer time to milk than just 1 goat. Even having a couple of “average” Nubian goats is far better than several low producers.

We had to make the tough decision to sell off more than half of our original herd. In a way, this worked out well for us because the goats we chose to sell were mean to our young livestock guardian dog that we were training to protect the goats. We kept the two youngest does from this herd, just to see what their milk production was like. Then, we purchased young Nubian does from prize-winning lines and known genetics. Coincidentally, these does were raised around several livestock guardian dogs, and so they have always been friendly to our dog.

Finding Reputable Breeders

• Seek out breeders with strong reputations.
• Look for those who perform regular health screenings and maintain detailed records of their goats' lineage. Herds should be free of Johne’s Disease, CAE (Encephalitis) and CL (Lymphadenitis).

What to Look For

• Features: Look for goats with bright eyes, smooth coats, and good body condition. A healthy goat should look alert and active, much like a sprinter ready to dash off the starting block.
• Terminology on Ancestry Charts: Learn the basics of reading goat pedigrees. Terms like "Sire" (father) and "Dam" (mother) and abbreviations for milk production records are key. Think of it as reading a family tree but with performance stats.

Common Goat Pedigree Chart Abbreviation Meanings

• ⭐ = Goat has earned their milking star, meeting milk weight standards for their breed and age
• B = A buck with a dam who earned her milk star
• GCH = Won Grand Champion
• SG = Superior Genetics, in the top 15% of goats
• Goat’s Name in Green = Goat naturally does not have horns

Decide If AGDA Is Important to You

Does it Actually Matter?

AGDA registration can add value to your goats, making them more attractive to buyers who are looking for specific breeds or milk production records.

It’s akin to having a pedigree dog with AKC registration – it often commands a higher value.

Impact on Breeding and Selling Goats

• Registered goats often sell for higher prices. However, if you buy unregistered goats and later decide registration is important, you cannot retroactively register their offspring.

In my experience, when it’s a “seller’s market,” ADGA goats command a higher price and sell quickly. However, I’ve also noticed that when it’s a “buyer’s market,” it’s difficult to find sellers willing to invest in the extra cost of ADGA registered goats.

Mini Goats and MGDA

Miniature goats have their own registry, the Miniature Goat Dairy Association (MGDA). Consider this if you are interested in breeds like Mini-Nubians.

Breed Standards

Sometimes a goat that is fully registrable may not meet the breed standard due to minor faults. This can affect its value and suitability for breeding. For example, even tiny deviations in ear shape or coat color can disqualify a goat from being registered.

Think About Weather When Breeding Goats

Goats gestate for around 150 days, give or take a week depending on their breed and other factors. When breeding your does to bucks, think about what the weather will be like around 5 months from their “date.” Is it possible that you’ll have a heat wave during that time? Have you had a few unexpected frosts in early April? Take this into consideration - baby goats born during extreme cold or heat are exposed to risks that goats born during “ideal” times wouldn’t have to deal with.

Cold Weather

We had a set of triplets born in April, and the runt of the litter was often too cold. Heat lamps are risky (fire hazard), so be prepared to bring weak kids inside to keep them warm.

My solution was to wrap up our tiny, shivering goat kid in a hoodie and snuggle her like a baby kangaroo in a pouch. She became a member of our household in a way - even our cats took a liking to her. We bottle fed her, and she’s still thriving even if at a very small size.

Hot Weather

Some goats, like my first pregnant doe, may postpone delivery to avoid extreme heat. She was a whole two weeks late! I’m thankful that she didn’t kid during the 120 degree days we had, but I felt bad when I saw how huge her baby was. It was a tough delivery that took ages. In the end, though, mom and baby were healthy.

Breeding Isn’t Always Successful on the First Go

Multiple Heat Cycles

Sometimes goats conceive on the first try, but other times it might take several heat cycles. Patience and persistence are key.

Mini Nubian Challenges

Breeding mini Nubians can be tricky due to size differences. You might find yourself assisting a Nigerian Dwarf buck on a Friday night, which was not something I expected!

Imagine the hilarity of playing matchmaker and realizing you need to give a little boost to love…

False Signs

Sometimes a goat might show no signs but be carrying kids. Once of my goats did not show signs of being pregnant until 1 week before she delivered. I like to joke that she was only pregnant for a week - we were so certain that she wasn’t, especially when comparing her to another obviously pregnant doe. Yet, they kidded just 2 days apart!

Other times she might look pregnant but really not be. For example, one of my goats always looked pregnant, but we knew she wasn’t since she wasn’t run with any bucks. Right now we have another doe that is lactating 6 months after we dried her up from her last kidding. Since we thought she was pregnant, we worsened this “precocious udder” by giving her extra grain!

Horn Safety

Goats with horns can be dangerous to each other and to you. Horned goats might get stuck in fences.

Handsome, a young buck that we had, always got stuck, to the point where he would unfortunately nearly hang himself from the fencelines. I kept the door to our house open and would go running whenever I heard him screaming. It wasn’t fun.

Goats Thrive on Routine

Goats are creatures of habit and thrive on routine. They will scream if you’re late with feeding or milking, and any changes can cause the whole herd to panic.

If you’ve never heard a goat screaming, it might be helpful to look up some videos of this, especially with your potential goat breed. In my experience, Nigerian Dwarf screaming pales in comparison to the high-volume levels that a Nubian goat can reach.

I swear my goats wear watches because they always know when it’s time for them to be let out of their stalls in the morning and go to bed in the evening.

Big Temperature Swings Can Cause Pneumonia

Large temperature differences between day and night can cause pneumonia in goats.

For instance, during a heat dome, one of my goats got pneumonia because daytime temperatures were 120°F and nighttime temps were 70°F.

During excessive heat, keep your goats in a shaded area - even if that means keeping them inside and supplementing their feed with extra hay to replace grazing.

Goat fencing isn’t always so straight forward

We bought a portable electric fence for our goats so that we could move them around our pasture. We didn’t realize that goats needed to be trained on the fencing and that long grass can render the fencing totally ineffective.

I cannot count how many times we had the fence trampled down by the goats - at that time, a herd of Nigerian Dwarfs, so they weren’t huge in size. It was especially traumatic when one of our goats got stuck in the fence when it was live and we had to rescue her. Luckily we were home when it happened.

Since that point in time, we have used only regular fencing or kept the goats out of areas where they could potentially damage crops.

Check out my comparison of different goat fencing types and their costs and effectiveness if you're curious to learn more on this topic.

Goats are really the GOAT

Reflecting on my journey with our first goat herd, I realize how much more prepared I could have been if I had known these key lessons from the start. From understanding the importance of organic bedding and hay to recognizing the value of good genetics and the complexities of breeding, each insight has been a stepping stone towards becoming a more knowledgeable and effective goat owner.

Yet, these experiences are what make goat ownership so rewarding. They teach you patience, adaptability, and the importance of ongoing learning. Now, I'm off to make some goat milk cheese!

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