When I got started with goats I barely knew the difference between hay and straw. Although I quickly learned that hay is food and straw is bedding, I just assumed that all hay was the same. That is definitely not the case. Alfalfa, clover, and peanut are legume hays, while timothy, oat, bermuda, and orchard are examples of grass hays. If you're sitting there thinking … [Read more...]
Kelp: Friend or Foe
Opinions on kelp for livestock vary about as much as they do on politics and religion. While one person says it's a savior, others say it's dangerous. The truth is somewhere in the middle. And as always, keep in mind that conditions vary from farm to farm, so what works great for one farm may not work as well on another farm. Before we dive into the nutritional analysis of … [Read more...]
Preventing the Top 5 Causes of Chicken Death
Did you know that the top five causes of mortality in chickens can be mostly prevented by management? That's good news for those of us with chickens. At the Livestock Conservancy conference in November, Julie Gauthier of Chickcharney Farm in North Carolina led a workshop about managing poultry health. She shared many helpful ideas for ensuring the long term health of your … [Read more...]
Collecting Rainwater on the Homestead
Although I didn't grow up on a farm, I remember visiting my grandparent's farm and my uncle's ranch as a child. I only have a few memories of what I saw there, but one regarded water. They had downspouts that flowed into water troughs. So, when we moved to our homestead in 2002, we immediately put water troughs under two of the downspouts on the barn. I had no idea at the … [Read more...]
Poisonous plants and livestock
A couple of weeks ago I visited a poisonous plant garden. No, it wasn't at Hogwarts. It was at the University of Illinois. Don't go looking for it. You won't find it. It is hidden away behind the school of veterinary medicine. Since the plants are poisonous, they don't want people taking self-guided tours and potentially poisoning themselves. Our tour was coordinated by The … [Read more...]
4 benefits of rotational grazing
When I was new to homesteading, I thought you just put up fences, stuck your animal in the pasture and left them there all year. However, there are a lot of reasons you should NOT do that! Rotational grazing or subdividing larger pastures into smaller paddocks and moving the livestock from one to another every week or two has lots of benefits. It's healthier for the … [Read more...]
Castration options for goat kids
It is a simple fact that you don’t need very many bucks for a dairy herd. Because a buck can sire dozens of kids, you should keep only the best for breeding. That means that a lot of bucklings will become pets, brush eaters, or meat. Unless they will be butchered in a few months, bucklings should be castrated because intact bucks get stinky and pee on themselves. They also tend … [Read more...]
Conducting a Newborn Check in Goat Kids
Why a Newborn Check? Shortly after each kid is born you should do an initial newborn check to make sure that each kid has all its pieces in the right places. In addition to checking for obvious things, such as an anus, you also want to know if a kid has any disqualifying defects so that you don’t offer it for sale or get your hopes up about its future in your herd. What to … [Read more...]
Dam raised vs. the bottle: Socialization
The decision to dam raise or to bottle raise kids needs to be made before the kids are born. There has been a bias towards bottle raising baby dairy animals for the past few decades as factory farms took over the dairy industry. When you have thousands of cows in a dairy, it is impossible to socialize them if they are dam raised. Dairies want as much milk as possible from the … [Read more...]
Infertility in bucks and does
As we head into breeding season, some people wonder about the prevalence of goat infertility ... Luckily, infertility in bucks is rare. An inability to get does pregnant is usually related to nutritional deficiencies, which is why a good mineral is essential for bucks. As a buck gets older, his sperm count may go down, meaning he can service fewer does in a day, which is … [Read more...]