EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT RAISING MEAT GOATS
BUT DIDN'T KNOW WHO TO ASK

I began raising goats in 1990.   Most of the people who contact me for help have  been raising goats two to five years.  They got into goats without being properly prepared,   killed   goats from lack of knowledge, lost  money, and got out . . . and a  new group of people followed them,  repeating the same mistakes.

Goats are a dry-climate species.   They can handle hot and cold but they don't do well in wet or windy & wet  climates.    Goats are not "little cows."   Cattle and sheep are grass eaters.  Goats are deer in how they live, eat, and reproduce.       Goats are foragers/browsers -- not grazers; they move over acreage and  eat "from the top down" to avoid stomach worms that suck blood that cause  anemia and death.   You can't deworm your way out of stomach worms ; frequent deworming   builds  worms that are resistant to all classes of dewormers.

Wet marshy climates equal  sick and  dead goats.   Many people are trying to raise goats in such areas, but they are struggling with worms, hoof rot, coccidiosis, and a host of other problems that they can never totally overcome and their goats will never perform well because these conditions are not good for goats.

If you are going to raise  goats for meat purposes and make money doing it,  you must have sufficient land  for goats from  which they can feed themselves most of the year, supplementing sacked feed  during periods of  harsh weather.   Harsh  weather is defined as   stressors  like  extreme cold and heat,  droughts, floods,  high winds especially when coupled with rain,  etc.    For example,  I don't know anyone who is able to avoid feeding sacked feed or protein tubs/blocks during winter.  In  many locations, you have to feed sacked feed year around.  Given their  fast metabolism, goats require  better quality of nutrition  than other species.  Try to save money on goats’ nutrition and you will have wormy, sick , then  dead goats.

Proper nutrition is  the most difficult thing to get right in any managed herd  -- no matter how minimal  that management might be.   Find a trained goat nutritionist from a major feed company and enlist his help.

You can't make any serious amount of money raising goats on less than 50 acres -- and even 50 acres won't allow much production.  Meat goats can't tolerate crowding and the stress it brings;  goats can't be feedlotted like cattle or sheep without losses.    ( I am not referencing   highly-domesticated and heavily-managed dairy goats; they are totally different animals in terms of management and nutrition.)

A-D-A-P-T-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y.  Hardly anyone considers adaptability when they  buy goats.    Goats need time to adapt to new environments.   All goats, regardless of sex or age,  need time to develop immunities to the bacteria, viruses, and other organisms that live on the land to which they have been brought (which are different from those to which they have been previously exposed)  before breeding them.

Never buy pregnant does.  Goats don't move well and  pregnant does can reabsorb embryos or abort fetuses. resulting in very unhappy buyers.  Does bred at their previous home will not be able to provide immunity  to the organisms  on your property  for  their newborn kids via their colostrum and milk when they kid at your location.  Kids are born without a functioning immune system and get all of their immunities through their dams'  colostrum and milk.

Never buy breeding stock at commercial auctions;  there are no surplus quality goats to be found this way.   At commercial auctions, you are buying other producers' problem goats that they have brought to auction in hopes of getting better than slaughter prices.

Contrary to popular belief, goats do not and actually cannot eat "anything and everything."    They need top-quality hay and plant materials ,  because they have a rapid rumen passage rate that requires   easily  digestible foodstuff  to  extract  maximum nutrition in  a short timeframe (11 to 14 hours).     It is   easy to feed incorrectly, mess up the rumen, and kill the goat.    Think feeding the RUMEN, not the goat.

"Number of goats per acre" is based on how well you can control the Haemonchus contortus (barberpole) wormload.      Availability of plant materials for the goats to eat does not determine  the stocking rate per acre, like it does with other species of ruminants.     This means starting very small, culling heavily in every generation those goats who display bad traits (susceptibility to worms, bad mothering abilities,  kids that are too large resulting in birthing problems,  poor feet and  mouth, etc.)  and  selecting those goats to keep that have good traits (ability to tolerate a  low-to-moderate worm load, good mothering traits, small-to-medium birthweight kids for easy birthing but  grow  well, good feet and mouth, etc.).   If the goats that need culling are your children's favorites, this is going to be difficult to do, but must be done because their weaknesses are threats to the overall health and safety of the  herd.

****The goal is to develop an entire herd   that tolerates a low-to-moderate  wormload and has other positive traits that result in low  maintenance costs yet high  productivity.****

Raising goats involves a great deal of common sense and  many  people don't have it concerning   livestock and agriculture in a time  where most folks are city dwellers.     I know this first hand;  from age 4 to 42, I lived in Houston, Texas,  where I never had a pet and as a adult worked in an office.     If you don't have  a gut instinct for what it takes to raise  goats, you may  struggle to be successful unless you commit yourself to learning "everything GOAT."

Pay attention to your animals.  Notice how they move,  eat,  rest,  get from location to location,  and watch what they eat and avoid eating.  Recognize how important the herd is to every goat in it.  A goat away from its herd is either sick or a doe getting ready to kid. Learn to think like a goat.

Don't  blindly do what your friends and neighbors are doing;  they are likely as confused or ill-informed as you may be  about raising goats. Ask questions when someone tells you something that they insist   is factual. They may be parroting what they've heard and spreading   bad information.  Listening to many voices will  confuse you.   Don't take advice from people raising show goats unless you plan to raise show goats,  because almost everything they do is  contrary to  what you need to be doing with  meat goats. Choose your mentors carefully. Try to find  a  qualified goat vet  or one who is willing to learn along with you; vets knowledgeable about goats are difficult to find.

Goats are high-mortality animals.   Any species that has early sexual maturity, short gestation, and multiple births is going to experience a high level of mortality or  it  is going to overwhelm the balance of Nature  and  over-consume its food supply.     If you work diligently, you are  going to have a 5% mortality rate when kidding.  If you do nothing, you will have anywhere from 10% to  100%  kid mortality rate.

There will be times when you need to put a goat down because you can't save it.   This is part of raising livestock.  " If you  can't do dead goats, you can't do live goats." I've learned from these animals that there are far worse things in  life than dying.   Goats aren't afraid of dying; this is part of life to them.   If a goat (or livestock guardian dog) knows its time to die has come,   it will quit eating and drinking and move far away from its herd  to hasten its death.   A weak or dying animal is a threat to the rest of the herd, and goats are very much herd animals.  They have few natural defenses from predators, so the herd means safety.

When raising goats, you must have needed supplies and medications on hand because you will have no time to get them in an emergency, which usually   occurs at night during bad weather over a long holiday weekend.     Goats are considered a minor livestock species  and almost everything  we use as medications and dewormers is  "off label," so  you have a vast amount of learning ahead of you if you are going to raise healthy animals.

The problem isn't the breed; the problem is management.  People tend to want to find a quick fix for their problems. Example:  "If Boers can't tolerate our worm loads, let's try Kikos because they come from  wet New Zealand  so they will do well in  our wet area."     Nonsense.    Goats must have time to adapt to their new environment and develop immunities to its  organisms.  Adaptability does not transfer from one location to another. Adaptability has to start all over at the new location.

Producers do not get a "leg up" by buying registered goats. Registration does not mean the goat is a quality animal.     Registration provides pedigree information only.  Genetics is a crap shoot.  The best buck and best doe can produce terrific offspring one year and total junk the next year because of many variables over which the producer has no control.    You have to learn how to select  quality breeding stock meat goats. Registration has nothing to do with the quality of  a goat. Registration is the livestock equivalent of Ancestry.com.

Market research is critical to your success.   With proper management, land, facilities, and nutrition, you can raise any breed of goat to healthy adulthood.     But  this doesn't mean that the breeds or cross-breeds that you've decided  to  raise will necessarily meet the needs of the market in your area.   Some producers  are raising animals to weights that are far in excess of liveweights that bring  maximum money per pound.    Historically, maximum money has  been made for goats in the 45 to 60 pound range liveweight.

BREEDS:  Let's objectively evaluate breeds of goats with an eye towards what people think of as MEAT breeds.    I've been raising  Myotonic goats since January 1990.   I am the only person that I know of in this country who has raised Myotonics and Boers side-by-side since Boers entered the USA around 1992.    I've owned several different breeds of dairy goats and I've  raised Pygmies and  spanish goats. Every breed has pluses and minuses, and I will address  both for each breed evaluated.

Thee are three TYPES  of goats:  meat, milk, and fiber (hair)  goats. The phenotype (body conformation) of a   MEAT  goat is short legged, deep, and wide bodied, with udders that are tight against the body and produce milk on demand.     This body type means more meat and less waste (bone, fat, internal organs- for which you do not get paid, by the way) at slaughter and less likelihood of damage to does' udders when foraging/browsing over land covered  with briars and bushes.     Dairy goats are long legged and long bodied  so that the does can carry big udders which can be  damaged by bushes and briars when foraging/browsing.    Dairy goats are like the typical West Texas whitetail deer in that they have very little meat on them.  They aren't  *meat*  goats;   they are the opposite of meat -- they are *dairy* because they serve a different purpose.

Boers came into the USA around  1992  from New Zealand.   In the late 1980's, when apartheid still existed in South Africa and most of the world embargoed trade with  that country because of  its  racial practices,   embryos out of show-goat culls were smuggled out of South Africa into New Zealand and implanted into surrogate dams ("recipient" does) whose offspring were sold to US goat producers at hefty prices.  People who paid lots of money for these goats  heavily managed them to protect the value of their investments.    An unfortunate  side effect of this close management has been pampered goats that became feed bucket dependent and who were never required to adapt to their new environment.     Very little culling for bad traits or selecting for good traits was done to a breed which was developed over 100 years ago by putting British Nubian dairy bucks on the feral does of South Africa.   Boers that producers had problems with were sent to auctions to become other producers' problems.

Boers have gotten a bad rap as a goat that cannot adapt to living conditions  in the USA,  but this  isn't attributable  to a breed deficiency.  Boers   weren't  given an opportunity to adapt to new locations,  most of which were far wetter than the seven-inch annual rainfall areas in South Africa  from which they originally came. Fullblood Boers have largely been used as show goats in America. Serious meat  producers have been moving away from fullblood Boers for years.

Savanna goats are white-colored  Boers.   Kalahari red Boers are red-colored Boers.   These are not different breeds from Boer.  People are identifying them and registering them as something other than Boers, but they are simply specially colored Boer goats.

Kikos were developed in New Zealand beginning around   1978 in an effort to raise a bigger brush  goat.  New Zealand was (and perhaps  still is) an island without predators and feral goats were overrunning the island.      Toggenburg, Saanen, and Anglo-Nubian bucks (dairy breeds) were bred to several hundred of the feral does and the outcome over about seven generations was named "Kiko." Like the  spanish goat, Kiko has  little meat on it and has retained the phenotypical long legs of dairy goats that reflect the dairy bucks used to create the breed.

With the  exception of a few heritage spanish breeds that were long isolated, fullblood  spanish goats don't  exist as a breed anymore,  having long ago been crossed with dairy goats and then with Boers to increase their size.    I have personally seen  many  (but not all) so-called pure spanish herds, and  if you know what you are looking at, you can see dairy-goat colorations and markings on what people today call pure spanish goats.   Spanish goats' attraction to many producers has been their hardiness and not their size or amount of meat.   This hardiness exists because the goats have long ago adapted to their original west Texas environment.  Adaptation does not transfer with them to new locations but instead must take place over months and years at their new homes.

There are three true meat breeds in this country:  Pygmies, TexMasters™, and Myotonics. Pygmies are  pet goats and have been used  mostly as show goats, but they are  a decent small meat goat.     TexMasters(™ are a breed that I began developing in 1995, breeding my Tennessee Meat Goat™ bucks (larger and more heavily muscled fullblood Myotonics developed at  Onion Creek Ranch in Texas)  to  Boer does and then changing  the breeding protocol over the ensuing years to remove significant  Boer influence  because I quickly learned that it didn't take much "Boer"  to take the meat off the offspring.  I developed  TexMaster™ as a commercial meat breed.

The breed most  under-rated and  misunderstood   is the Myotonic breed.  Myotonia is essential to the development of meat.  There are  three types of Myotonic goats: (1) the smaller sized Myotonic  that  pet and show breeders have crossed with Pygmies and Nigerian Dwarf goats or have been line bred within the smaller Myotonics to create special features attractive to pet buyers, such as long silky hair, blue eyes, and unique color combinations;  (2) small to medium-sized  goats that display myotonia but are not fullblood Myotonics.  Within  this category  are producers who  deny that Myotonics are  a breed and instead view it as a condition, so they call any goat that displays myotonia "Myotonic"; and (3)   the larger and more heavily muscled fullblood Myotonics developed at Onion Creek Ranch in Texas in the mid-1990's and trademarked as "Tennessee Meat Goats."

The pet category  has given  the Myotonic breed a bad  reputation  by coining   demeaning and misleading  names  (fainting, fall-down, scare, wooden-leg) that imply  that the breed is defective and more susceptible to predation than other breeds -- neither of which is true.  All breeds of goats are susceptible to predators; goats are sprinters, not long-distance runners. Livestock guardian dogs are essential in every goat-raising operation.  Myotonics do not "faint."  Fainting means losing consciousness.  Myotonics stiffen, and this stiffening creates muscling which translates into meat.

If you see a goat with MEAT on it, particularly in the rear end, that goat has  Myotonic in it.      I've seen Kikos and Boers purported to be fullblood Kiko and Boer and I  readily see   the Myotonic influence in those goats.     If you know breeds,  the Myotonic conformation  traits will jump out and scream "myotonic" to you.

The fullblood Myotonic goat has a 4 to 1 meat-to-bone ratio -- 25% greater than any other breed -- and Dr. Lou Nuti (now retired) of Prairie View A&M University north of Houston, Texas performed carcass evaluations  in 1999 and 2000 that  proved that any goat that is at least 50% Myotonic has a 6-10% greater  meat yield.    This increased meat yield and higher meat-to-bone ratio more than make  up for the slightly slower growth of  fullblood Myotonics.   Even the show-goat industry has recognized the value of breeding Myotonic into show wethers to give them that "hard topline"  sought by many show judges.  As far back as the  mid  1990's, Mike Kelly of Kelly show goats in Ranger, Texas was using Onion Creek Ranch genetics as his "secret ingredient"  to breed  winning show goats.

If you've are interested in raising meat goats, here are some resources to help you.   There is a lot of information on the Internet about meat goats,  but much of it is sadly  incorrect.   Chevontalk, my meat-goat  listserv  established in 1998,  is on www.groups.io.     MeatGoatMania, the online meat-goat magazine owned by  Suzanne Gasparotto of Onion Creek Ranch in Texas   and Pat Cotten of Bending Tree Ranch in Arkansas, is also on www.groups.io and is published   mid-month.     Both are free.   My website's Articles page on www.tennesseemeatgoats.com has dozens of my articles   available for  reading.   At  Onion Creek Ranch in Texas, every October since 2001, Pat Cotten and I host a four-day seminar called GoatCamp™ on how to raise goats.  I also offer a consultation/mentoring service for goat raisers.

If you want to be successful in raising and selling meat goats, heed the information in this article, choose your mentors carefully, and learn to THINK LIKE A GOAT.

Suzanne W. Gasparotto, Onion Creek Ranch,  Texas       060123

The author, Suzanne Gasparotto, hereby grants to local goat publications and club newsletters, permission to reprint articles published on the Onion Creek Ranch website under these conditions: THE ARTICLE MUST BE REPRODUCED IN ITS ENTIRETY AND THE AUTHOR'S NAME, ADDRESS, AND CONTACT INFORMATION MUST BE INCLUDED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE REPRINT. We would appreciate notification from any clubs or publications when the articles are used. (A copy of the newsletter or publication would also be a welcome addition to our growing library of goat related information!)

All information and photos copyright © Onion Creek Ranch and may not be used without express written permission of Onion Creek Ranch. TENNESSEE MEAT GOAT ™ and TEXMASTER™ are Trademarks of Onion Creek Ranch . All artwork and graphics © DTP, Ink and Onion Creek Ranch.