Friday Creek Farm
Feeding
Hay and Concentrates
The basis for your goat’s diet will be hay, pasture or browse or a combination of these. Goats are browsers by nature (like deer). While they will eat grass if nothing else is available, their preference is to eat a wide variety of vegetation such as weeds, leaves, bark, berry bushes, etc. When feeding hay, choose a good quality hay (grass, alfalfa or a combination of the two) that is free from dust and mold. Hay must be provided in feeders that do not allow the goats to climb into the hay. Once hay is soiled, goats will not eat it. The absolute best feeders we have used can be found on the Premier1 website. Plans can be printed or downloaded from their site. Goats will need to be supplemented with hay during the winter months. If your goats are on pasture, it is also a good idea to feed them some hay every morning before letting them out to graze, especially in the spring. This will help to prevent them from gorging on rich spring grasses which could cause them to bloat. We feed our goats essentially free choice, keeping hay in front of them all the time. We also use concentrates (also called grain, pellets, feed, etc.) as part of our goat’s diets. How much we feed depends on the goat’s age, condition and sex. Our dry does get no feed at all. Pregnant does get one pound of feed daily during their last month of pregnancy, lactating does get up to three pounds of feed and kids get free choice creep feed. Bucks get two pounds of feed daily, year round. We feed a pelleted feed to all of our goats. Our kids, bucks and lactating does get a 17% protein goat feed with rumensin (for coccidia prevention). We also use this as our finishing feed for meat animals. Does in milk who need a little extra fat get rice bran pellets added to their feed. On occasion, we use Calf Manna as a top dress for those kids and/or does that need a little more protein in their diet.
Make sure that there is enough space at the feeder for all of your goats. Goats can be greedy and pushy at feeding time and the smaller, less dominant animals can easily be pushed aside by the larger, more aggressive ones.
This is our preferred type of feeder. Plans to build them can be found here. http://www.premier1supplies.com/img/instruction/127.pdf
This is the inside of the same type of feeder, shown fully loaded with hay.
Creep Feeding
Creep feeding allows kids access to hay and/or feed without having to compete with the adults in the herd. We provide hay and feed in our creep feeder from the time the kids are a week or so old. They always have access to it. We start the kids off with a medicated Boer goat feed that contains Rumensin to help prevent coccidiosis. To get them interested in it, we top dress with Calf Manna, which has a stronger smell than the goat pellets. By the time the kids are 4-5 weeks old, they are eating well inside the creep feeder.
This is our creep feeder set-up. The kids enter through the spaces in the white gate.
This is a close-up of where the kids eat. They put their heads through the spaces in the blue head gate and eat out of the trough inside.
Minerals
All goats need to have a mineral mix available to them free choice. We use a variety of products to provide our goats with the minerals they need. The first product we use is a loose mineral, Sweetlix 16:8 Meat Maker. This is left out free choice for our bucks. We use the same mineral in poured tub form for our does and kids. This tub is called Sweetlix Roughage Balancer Tub. We prefer a tub for the does and kids, they seem to stay cleaner than the loose mineral. Additionally, the high molasses content of the tub helps to prevent ketosis in the does during pregnancy. Put out only enough of all of these loose products to last a couple of days. Goats will not eat them once they are “old”. By leaving out only enough for them to finish in a couple of days, you prevent waste.
Last but not least, you must provide your goats with fresh clean drinking water at all times. You can use anything from plastic buckets to water troughs made for livestock.
This is the mineral feeder we use to hold loose minerals for the goats. We have found that they stay cleaner and last longer in these feeders.
This is the poured molasses mineral tub we use for the does and kids. This one is made by Sweetlix. We also use one made by Crystalyx.
Mounting them upright like this helps to keep dirty goat feet off of the minerals