Well, I’m home sick today because I’ve come down with the flu. Still doing some paid work, but from the comfort of my home office instead of contaminating the university.
A quick walk outside to say ‘hello’ to the goats always makes me feel better, they are always pleased to see me and they always want a scratch behind the horn nubs.
Holly is particularly keen for a pat.
I suppose that some people don’t see the point to adopting a green approach to their lifestyle. I’m by no means a tree hugger and I am less interested in the state of the planet than I am the state of myself.
For me, the motivation is financial … I don’t like to spend a lot of money on stuff that I can do myself, and do better in a lot of ways.
I’ve been keen on getting some land for a long time, and buying our 4 and a bit acres has certainly given me a lot of what I want (although I would rather more land too). Our property has three 1 acre paddocks. The top paddock isn’t really usable at the moment as there is a lot of rubbish on the land that needs to be cleared, and the paddock is not flat (about a 15 degree pitch).
Each of the animals on our land have to be able to provide something for the table, directly or indirectly, if they have any place on the smallholding.
The chooks cost us about $25 per month in feed and they provide us with an average of 3 eggs per day (5 white leghorn hens + 1 Rhode Island red rooster). As we are not breeding the chickens, the rooster has to prove his worth. Fortunately, he protects the hens and improves their community, they don’t fight with each other nearly as much as without a rooster. Also, the chickens eat insects and weeds, so they are good workers. I sell the eggs at $5 per dozen when I have enough eggs. On average, I would sell about 3 dozen eggs a month. They cost me more than they make in direct income, however, they also save me another $5 per month in eggs and much more in pesticide and herbicides. The chickens also convert kitchen scraps into rich compostable chicken poo … which is excellent for the garden. Saving me even more money. The bottom line for the chickens save me about $5 per month or $60 per annum.
The goats cost a lot to feed, there isn’t any way to get around that. Each goat costs about $350 per annum to feed. If I breed a goat and sell the kid when it is about 7 months old, it has cost me about $200 to feed. Add in the veterinary costs (an average of $35 for worming injections and boosters etc.) and I am losing money if I sell at $200. Fortunately, I can get a little bit more than that for a dairy goat … but not much. I need to improve the quality of my goats so that I can improve their value. The does are class “D” at the moment, but I am breeding them up with better quality bucks to improve their kids. More shows and more knowledge is what I need to improve the quality of the dairy goat breeding program. A top quality buck can fetch >$3,000 and a good quality doe something less than that (these are prices that I have heard, but never had quoted). Each pairing costs me $80 per doe, so that’s another annual cost to factor in.
I plan to have about 12 does and keep the high quality does for breeding. If I breed all of the does in a year, then it is going to cost me around $960, feeding will cost me around $18,000 for the year and medical costs around $500. If each doe throws a pair, then I can look forward to selling the kids for about $18,000. I would still be losing money until the quality of the goats increases to a good level through higher quality milk production and conformation proven at agricultural shows. Goats normally throw twins, but can throw triplets as often as singles.
Also, the goats give milk, at a rate of about 500ml per milking. With 12 does in kid, that’d give me 6 litres of milk per day and that could mean quite a reasonable amount of milk for cheese. Cheese from goats milk earns about $16 per litre. From cheese, that’s a potential $17,000 income from cheese and milk products from about 1,100 litres of milk per annum. Alternatively, I could sell the milk directly at about $4 per litre ($4,380).
So, selling kids and milk would give me about $22,380, or kids and cheeses $35,000 from a cost of around $17,000. Not a huge profit, but there is room to improve by improving the quality of the goats. More land would let me breed more goats and increase profits.
The sheep are all about breeding meat for the table. The pair of Wiltipol sheep cost me $500 and won’t be ready to breed until next year. The sheep cost me almost nothing in feed. They eat the grass in the paddock and occasionally get sheep pellets ($25 per bag, per annum … pretty cheap). Annual shearing and drenching costs me $65. Mating the sheep will cost me about $160 per annum and I can look forward to four lambs per breeding season. Getting the lambs slaughtered costs me $70 per animal so it is going to cost me $345 per annum and will save me about $700 per annum in meat, so it will save me $355 per annum overall. I will be doing my own butchering of the lambs, so that has saved me another $120 per lamb.
What can I say, they don’t cost much, never escape … don’t need a vet. Seed costs around $30 per annum. The veggie patch also uses the composted sheep, goat and chicken poo and turns it into good food for the table. When I can afford the time to grow and tend the veggie patch, we have had some great harvests (mostly zucchini, cucumbers, rhubarb, potatoes). Growing vegetables doesn’t save much money, but it doesn’t cost much money either, so it is a good value thing. I haven’t done the sums on exactly how much money I am saving, so I can only guess. I reckon that it’s about $80 per annum.
All of the food that we grow, we know. One of the key benefits of this sort of smallholding is that we know exactly what has gone into the food that goes into our mouths. It has been our hands that have tended the animals and plants. The animals are treated humanely and with kindness. We know the animals from birth to death and we can be certain that no chemicals have been added. On top of that, our children have a much better appreciation of what goes into the food that they eat. Winner!
Well, this weekend is the annual federal meeting of the Dairy Goat Society of Australia and it’s on here in Tasmania. It’ll be my first go at attending one of these meetings.
Now, I attend meetings and workshops all week for work, and I can’t say that I particularly relish the thought of spending more time in meetings for leisure. However, I guess that having more involvement in the goat shows and timetables will be beneficial for me and for my goat breeding schedule (as well as giving me greater access to breeders with FAR more experience and knowledge than me).
My lovely wife and I have also signed up to participate in a Dairy Goat Judging course so that we can go along to the various agricultural shows, where goats are being shown, and lend a hand. This is another way that I think that I can improve my knowledge of goats and goat husbandry while getting in touch with even more of the goat breeding world.
Hopefully, this weekend will help me to further my knowledge and get more of an insight into the society.
This is a short video of our goats in the paddock. Not doing much other than eating lucerne and wanting a scratch.
Well, Holly has come home from Aunty Shelley’s today, she is looking very well and I think that she has had a good holiday. Shelley thinks that Holly was served on either 6th April (by Tyson) or 27th April (by Cochise) so her due dates would be either 3rd Sept. or 24th Sept. if she was served.
Shelley has suggested that I reduce the goats feed, since Holly was a little overweight. We’re dropping the goats feed back to a morning feed of their normal mix of grain, lucerne chaff, carrot or apple and molasses and then a biscuit of lucerne hay in the afternoon. I expect that the kids are going to complain about the reduced rations … but what the hell.
Ideally, I will fix the fencing in the bottom paddock so that I can give the goats some more space. Until then, they live in the kidding paddock. The main problem is the amount of browse available in the kidding paddock.
As soon as Holly came home, she decided to re-establish her position in the herd, and took up butting Minnie straight away.
It’s nice to see Holly home, I’ve missed her. My lovely wife, on the other hand, has not missed being pushed into the barbed wire fence by Holly … she is after-all a big goat for her age.
The roost went into the coop yesterday and it appears to be a hit with the chooks.
Now the chickens are back to using the nesting boxes rather than just laying on the floor of the coop (because of the difficulty getting to the nesting boxes.
Of course, the chickens always like getting into the coop after a clean-up so that they can scatter the hay from one end of the chicken run to the other.
A while back, I cut a sally-port into the side of the chicken run so that the chickens can free-range during the day (after they have laid their eggs), and since then, the eggs have improved quite a lot. Here in Tasmania, we don’t have to worry about foxes … just birds of prey, so the chickens can free-range well into the late afternoon. They are getting much better free range food (bugs and plants) and they appear to be much happier.
This is a picture of the old coop. It was fairly small and the run was lined with crushed limestone.
Their current chicken run is an old swimming pool enclosure, giving them roughly eight times more space. The chicken run is more open as well, with only two high walls and two walls that come up to 3’, the rest of the two open walls are made up of chicken wire and nylon netting. The chicken run is completely enclosed with nylon netting making a roof to keep the birds of prey out. We have Wedge-tailed eagles, Peregrine Falcons and Brown Hawks. So far, we have not lost any chickens to predation.
All in all, the chickens like their new life in a bigger chicken run.
Well, I want one … enough said? No not really, I guess. I have a wether and he is getting bigger all the time. I have read a bit about using goats as working animals on the farm and I think that it would be good fun for both me and the goats.
Goats are gregarious animals with so much personality and inquisitiveness. Like dogs, they are also very happy to please.
There are two paths you can follow … pack or draught.
Goats, it seems, can carry about half their body weight on their back without too much trouble. The most common form of pack for a goat is a cross pack. This is, basically, two “X” frames that are joined in at the crossing by a beam. The packs hang from the two up-standing parts of the X and there is a belly strap that keeps the thing from slipping under the goats feet. Pack training a goat is all about getting the goat to be OK with the thing on it’s back to the point where the goat can all but forget it is there.
Training follows a fairly simple process of first training the goat to the lead, and then training the goat to the pack. Training for the pack (so I have read) is done by first attaching a belly strap, then adding a light weight onto the strap (such as a blanket) and then increasing the weight slowly over time. Goats are clever and will get the idea pretty quickly if they are given suitable rewards (food).
I have lots of firewood that I need to collect around my property, and it is too steep for my ride-on mower to get into the top paddock for this … so I will be training my wether for pack work. At the moment the wether, Darius, is six months old, so it’s about time for me to start.
Goats also make great draught animals. A goat can pull roughly twice it’s weight when the thing it is pulling is properly balanced. I think that a four wheeled draught vehicle (wagon) would be far superior to a two wheeled vehicle (cart) because the goat does not have downward or upward pressure from the vehicle as well as drag weight. There may be other reasons that you would want a cart … but I can’t think of any good reasons.
My plan is to make a light-weight wagon using steel tubing from discarded bicycles and casting joints and other bits in aluminium.
Training a goat to pull a vehicle is more complex than pack training. You have to train the goat to the lead, train the goat to pull, train the goat for voice commands, etc. so it isn’t quite as easy. I think that I will train Darius for pack work first, and then when he is comfortable with that, I’ll train him for draught work.
There are a bunch of websites out there where people are already doing the things that I want to do here. Check out the North American Pack Goat Association (http://www.napga.org/) for info on pack goats; Harness Goat Society (http://www.harnessgoats.co.uk/) for info on draught goats and their attendant kit; you can also check into the Cart_Wagon_Goats Yahoo! email group (http://pets.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/Cart_Wagon_Goats/) for people who have some excellent discussions on this topic.
