Transcription
You ready to hear the saddest statistic we may have ever shared here on Home Study? 90% of goat owners report having lost a goat to something other than old age. That's really sad. That means most of us who own goats are going to experience some really heartbreaking death. The sad truth is, although they're super cute, they can be really hard to keep alive. That's why we talked to Deborah Neiman, the author of *Raising Goats Naturally* and *Goats Giving Birth*, all about these major problems facing goat owners and how we can overcome them.
Yeah, I thought everything about homesteading was going to be easy, because people have been doing this since the beginning of time. So how hard can it be, right? Right. So I thought, oh, this is all going to be so easy. So let's tackle these three major obstacles with Debra. She shares some expert advice on how to keep our goats happy and healthy.
Recently, we went to the Home Study Community to learn a little bit more about what were the biggest challenges facing the goat owners in our community. What ways were goats dying? We found four ways that most people's goats were dying. One of them was labor and delivery, and we're going to cover that in a different episode all about just kidding, pregnancy, delivery. The other big three ways goats were dying we're going to discuss in this episode, and we're going to start with number three and work our way to the number one way that goats unfortunately are dying.
So number three, the way that 27% of the homesteaders in the Home Study Community mention losing goats was just problems related to feeding and nutrition. Debra gave some fantastic advice to make sure that you're getting your goats the good basic nutrition right out of the gate.
Just a quick reminder, the podcast that you're about to watch is actually an excerpt from the full-length unedited version, which can be found in the Pioneer Library. It's about twice as long as what you're going to find here on YouTube. If you're a Pioneer, there's a link below to that version. Go ahead and click that; it'll take you directly over to the extended version. And if you're not a Pioneer, but you want access to everything in the Pioneer Library, there's a link below for that too.
Now, basically, I always tell people, just start with proper feeding for the goats you have and a good mineral. A good mineral is one that is available free-choice 24/7. It is a loose mineral, not a block. 90% of the blocks that are out there are mostly salt. There is no way in a million years that a goat is going to get enough selenium from a block with one PPM selenium. You know, somebody told me, oh, well, the person who sold me my goat said the best minerals, the one your goats will eat, so like that sounds good, right? But it is so wrong, because and this is where people are like, oh, well, I had loose minerals, the author, and the goats weren't eating them, but they're licking that block all the time. Yeah, they're licking the block all the time because they can't get enough minerals from it. If you look at a good goat mineral, it tells you that a goat is going to consume between a quarter and a half an ounce a day. You are probably never gonna see that goat consume that mineral, and if you only have three or four, and you put a couple pounds out there, you're gonna think, oh, they're not eating it, wow. And then you put the block out there, and they're licking it nonstop, and you're like, oh, this is what they need, and it's like they're not getting what they need, which is why they're licking it all the time. We actually prefer with our cows loose mineral too; that's uh, just for getting good absorption and making sure they're getting what they needed, even blocks; we try to avoid blocks with the cows too.
Okay, you mentioned feeding, Debra. When we first got into goats, everybody said, oh, you're getting goats, good; you can feed them garbage, right? Right. Have you heard? I've heard that one. Oh yeah, I've heard it all. There is no one-size-fits-all food. Bucks and wethers just need a really good grass hay. Alfalfa has too much calcium and protein in it; they don't need that; they're not growing babies; they're not making milk. Does that are pregnant need their hay needs to be at least 50% Alfalfa by the third month of pregnancy. If it's 100%, even better. So it, you know, so 50 to 100% Alfalfa at the end of pregnancy. And then the bucks just need a nice grass hay.
For a very beginner who doesn't even know where to start learning this information, is there one test, one person to talk to, one way that they can get off in the right direction, learning more about what they specifically need where they are, maker, and you give them the appropriate forage that they need for their gender and life stage? Only milkers really need a 16% protein Dairy goat or goat feed. Don't ever give goats something like just cracked corn or something like that; that's like giving candy to a child. It, it is. I'm, come on, think corn oil, corn syrup, cornstarch; it's a lot of fat and sugar. Like if you want to fatten your goats up to slaughter them, go for it, but that's not usually the goal. You know, most people like are hoping that their goats are going to live a long, healthy life, that they're going to be productive, in which case you need to feed them appropriately. If you're feeding your goats correctly, they will look good; they will have the right amount of weight on them; they won't be too heavy; they won't be too thin. That is, unless, of course, you're dealing with a different problem, which brings us to the second reason why a lot of people wind up losing their goats.
33% of the homesteads that we talked to while researching for this video told us that they had lost at least one goat to parasites. We have gone through this; it's a really, really difficult problem to face, and that's why I wanted to get Deborah's advice on how we could stay on top of the parasites, because they are a real serious problem for goats. Intestinal parasites are a problem that you need to deal with. You know, you've got to figure out how to get control of the parasites, and and it's not a vet told me this over 15 years ago; she said, you will never get control of worms with drugs. It is all about the management. You know, you need to either be rotating pastures or have your goats on a dry lot, because grass is a really vital part of the parasite life cycle. Those worms, um, you know, the goats poop out the eggs, the eggs hatch on the pasture, and then there's larva. So I personally like to move my goats off a piece of pasture when the grass is less than six inches. We have, we have plenty of grass, and I just don't want to risk it.
You started talking about how management is such a big key. What's a good starting place for management with uh, preventing this problem of parasites? You know, in nature, animals do not live in a tiny little pen and feel like, oh, it's a big pen; no, it's not. In nature, they range over thousands of acres. The other thing too about goats that we always have to keep in mind is that goats are genetically, they are browsers; they are not grazers. There's a really old saying that goats should never eat below their knees, and there's even a really old saying about sheep that says you should never let the church bell ring twice on the same pasture. Like they were talking about rotational grazing a long time ago, but this just all got lost, you know, when when we all moved to the city, then, you know, after World War II, agriculture became so industrialized, and they got the idea that like there was, you know, like with humans, there's a pill for every ill. You know, they thought they could fix every agricultural problem with a drug or a chemical or something, and the reality is, when it comes to parasites, there is no drug or chemical or herb or anything that your goats need to be consuming on a regular basis; they just need to be not consuming worm larvae. So you don't even have to move them every day, you know, like, you know, if you move them like every five or six days, that is awesome, but even if you, you know, can move them every two weeks, that's good, because like assuming they're not too overloaded in that space, they've only those those worms have only been infective larva for like the last week to nine days. So it's just really important that you know the goats are not eating from their toilet. And some people get offended when I say that, but I'm like, you know, nobody listened to me until I said that, but that's the truth; like they're eating from their toilet; like you just, that does not sound healthy, right? No, no, it doesn't.
But unfortunately, sometimes it can be pretty hard to prevent that. We all have full-time jobs and responsibilities, and for a lot of people, rotational grazing is just too much of a time commitment for something that is mostly a hobby. So there is a solution: dry lots, and Deborah talked about them. Deborah, you did mention earlier, you said either management or a dry lot. How is a dry lot, if that's your path that you choose to go, how's a dry lot an effective tool against parasites? Because they're not consuming the infective larvae, um, they from a pasture, they get the infective larva from short grass. What does that entail? Is that, you know, on concrete, cleaning it every day, no grass on the edges, gravel, like what if you were to design, if someone wants to go the dry lot, I mean, some of us we don't have the option with the amount of space we have. What do you make sure of? What's what do people look out for? So yeah, you could do concrete. The other thing is, I know a vet who raises uh, kikos, and she did the most cool, awesome dry lot I've ever seen. She has, she put down road felt, and then on top of that, she put down gravel. We did the same thing when uh, we moved to this Homestead in Pennsylvania; we upgraded because it was our barns at the bottom of a hill; all the rain comes down, hits it, and it was just Mud City. So we put in a couple livestock heavy traction mats, the geotextile fabric, gravel. The only thing I would suggest if I were to redo it, because we have more than goats, but even with goats, because you know, not maybe your goats don't waste any hay, but ours have a bad habit, gravel is really hard to clean the hay that we found. So if I were to redo it, I would do a top layer of sand, because that would just make it easy to clean. So now we, we can do a lot to manage for worms; we can make sure we have rotational grazing, and we can make sure, and of course, we could, you know, if people want to learn more about these specific topics, you, um, you have so many different episodes of your podcast and your books, so people can learn more specifically about each individual thing, but we want to cover everything today.
On the drug side, there's of course the age-old battle of natural remedies versus, you know, big Pharma solutions. Uh, do you have any guidelines as far as the use of either of those, both of those, and then when working with drugs, how to find some solutions if we do need to go in that direction? So I did everything wrong, because I got started in 2002, so that was when everybody was doing everything wrong. It was like at the apex of of like the worst parasite situation uh, with goats. We were literally sitting there watching goats die. Like I know you have worms; like I, I learned to do my own fecals and everything; like I was asking her, looking at a slide that was just covered with worm eggs, and um, it was I didn't do McMasters; I just did regular fecal flotations, but I mean, it was just covered; like I could not have even begun to like manually count the number of eggs on there, and this this buck was dying; he couldn't even stand. I tried everything; like not just with him; like with him, I tried like I tried the herbal dewormers, you know, they're like, oh, if your code actually has a, you know, like you're supposed to give it to him every week, but your goat actually has worms, give them twice as much, and so I was giving him twice as much, like for several days and doing more fecals; it did not kill any of them. I mean, it didn't make a dent in in the number of of eggs that those worms were producing inside of him, and after a week of being unable to walk, he died, and and so I tried everything, you know, I tried I tried putting basic H in the water; I tried very expensive garlic tincture; I tried um, weren't I tried herbals from like three the three most popular online herbal goat places at the time; none of them worked. I tried um, apple cider vinegar; like if anybody told me this is supposed to kill worms, I tried it; I had nothing to lose, you know, and nothing made a difference, and you know, so I say basically Mother Nature called my herd, and I was left with ones that had really good parasite resistance, and you still have to do all the things right, you know, like I had I had one buck; the only time in his life he ever needed a dewormer was when somebody screwed up on the pasture rotation; they they put the bucks back on a pasture um sooner than they should have, and and he wound up needing, but that was the only time in his whole life. So don't think that like, oh yeah, you can just just let Mother Nature call your herd, and then they'll all be fine; no, you still have to do the pasture rotation.
Maybe managing for worms seems like a lot of work, but honestly, it's the better problem to have when compared with the other leading cause of death that we found in goat owners, and that was disease. 36% of the goat owners we spoke to talked about losing at least one goat in the herd to diseases, and you know, I always tell people like you really should hope it's worms, because it works; it's really easy. Okay, if it's not worms, then you're looking at something like Johne's or, you know, something much, much worse that may be incurable, maybe infected your whole herd, and will mean that your whole herd needs to be exterminated. There's a lot of stuff worse than worms.
We sadly have experienced this firsthand on our Homestead, not with our goats, but we did have a cow that was tested positive for Johne's. If you're new to our story, you'd have to go back a couple years in our catalog to find this. Our very first family milk cow, who was very much beloved by our family, tested positive for Johne's, and this is a very challenging disease to manage and work with. When we were faced with this diagnosis, we found a fantastic animal vet to work with, Cody Creelman. With him on our side, helping us make these decisions, we were able to manage this disease, and we have never had a reoccurrence on our Homestead, and let's hope that that is always going to be the case.
If you are faced with a disease problem, it is a more difficult problem to manage than worms. As Deborah said, it's generally a good idea at this point to get involved with a professional veterinarian, but that can be difficult to find when you're dealing with goats. Not all vets are created equal, and so Deborah had some fantastic advice on how to find a vet that would work very specifically well with goats and your herd, and what to do if you can't find one who actually has experience, how you can at least get a head start in treating your animals for the more difficult things that you will perhaps be faced with in time as a goat owner. It is definitely important to find a vet who knows goats. I just yesterday somebody messaged me about a two-day-old kid that has watery diarrhea, and the vet said, oh, it's coccidiosis; give it Corid. It's two days old; I'm sorry; that is impossible; like I use that word almost never, but like you just look at look at any of the vet textbooks; coccidiosis happens after three weeks of age. If a kid has watery diarrhea when it's two days old, you're looking at something like E. coli or, you know, some kind of a virus or something like that. That's why you have to have, because like to find out what's wrong with that kid, like she needs a fecal culture, not a flotation, because it's not parasites; a culture to see what kind of an infection is causing this watery diarrhea. You know, you can't just think, oh, I'm gonna join a Facebook group; they're going to be able to do it all. You know, I have a membership where we have meetings on Zoom three times a month, and and I tell people right up front like this is not a replacement for your vet. There are going to be times that you need to have their Diagnostics; you need to have prescription drugs; you need to have procedures that only a vet can do, you know, like a C-section; I mean, stuff happens where you're going to need a vet, so you really need to do your best to find one that actually has real goat experience. You know, if you're if you're interviewing potential, that's what would you ask them to know whether or not they're they have enough good experience? Yeah, exactly. If you ask them how many goats they see in a year or, you know, how many goat herds, you know, they see in their practice, something like that.
Just one other good question to cover for, especially for newbies, you already mentioned a lot of these, Deborah, but maybe we'll just give a couple bullet points for people to look for signs that there's something wrong with your goat. Uh, when you look at your goat, you come out in the morning, and you say, you know, you go to feed your goat; what's something you want to just be looking for to make sure that there's, you know, just the first warning signs? If they're not, somebody called me, called me screaming and paying in pain, and they're like, yeah, she never ate her food last night, and I was like, okay, last night you should have called the vet. Goats love their food, you know, like everybody else, so if they're not eating, that's a bad sign. And the thing is, they're prey animals, and so prey animals do not want to show any vulnerability, so they're usually pretty quiet until things are it things are really bad, and you know, to check your goats' eyelids; like that's one of the things that's really great about like not relying on fecals is um, every single day when I milk a goat, like I just run my hand on her spine, you know, so I know like I know how she feels, especially in Winter, because their coat can that yes, so can really hide a lot. Yeah, so it's really important that you pay attention, make sure everybody's eating every day, also that you put your hands on them as much as possible, you know, and with bucks, I know that's not fun, but like that's the last thing I do before I go inside, you know, like run my hand on the bucks uh, and you don't even have to do your bucks every day; you can do your bucks once a week. Yeah, so that you know that, and and then if they feel if they feel skinny, you know, to check the eyelids, and that's the thing; like that's it's so easy and it's quick and it doesn't cost anything, and it'll and you will know so much quicker.
How often uh, for like a famata test, how often do you suggest that someone check, you know, check the islands; obviously run your hands down them every day; do you do that too with the eyes? No, not with the eyes; not unless like if the if the body doesn't feel so great, then I'm like, oh, I wonder what your eyes look like. Um, but if you know you have a bad problem, like if you're just getting through a problem, it's recommended that you check their eyelids every week, and if you have a goat that's recovering from worms, just keep them in the barn. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes people make is if they have a goat that had white eyelids, they give them the dewormer, and they stick them right back out there on the pasture where they can consume more worm larvae. So when a goat has a really bad case of worms, they need to be kept in the barn so that they cannot consume more worm larvae until they've recovered from their current illness.
Dealing with parasites is one of the most confusing things about working with goats. In fact, in the extended version of this podcast, Deborah went on to explain why you should not rely on fecal egg counts to manage your goat herd. I probably haven't done a few years, wow, because what one of the things that I discovered was, for the last decade, we've owned so many goats, and I learned so much in this one hour long discussion with Debra. If you want to have access to the entire commercial-free, uncut version of this podcast, as well as all our other podcasts, click right here to become a Homesteady Pioneer. And if you own goats, you need to listen to Debra's podcast, for the love of goats. You can check out some of her episodes right here on YouTube; click the link that just popped up to head over to her Channel, and go to thriftyhomesteader.com and check out everything Deborah's up to.