Choosing a Goat Mineral

Episode 139
For the Love of Goats

Does attempting to select the right minerals for your herd make your head spin? Do you know which three minerals are the primary keys to your herd’s health? How about the proper levels that should be included in a good mineral? Is there an easy way to know that the mineral you selected is appropriate and worth your money? 

In this episode, I cover the nutrients that goats are most likely to become deficient in and what you should look for when shopping for a great loose mineral. I also touch on mineral antagonists and how balance really is key in your nutritional program. Stop throwing your money away buying minerals that are mostly salt. Learn the whats, whys, and hows for choosing a good mineral.  

Episodes mentioned:

• Copper Oxide as a Dewormer
• Copper Deficiency and Toxicity in Goats
• Copper Deficiency Case Study
• Avoiding Copper Toxicity in Goats
• Zinc Deficiency in Goats
• Selenium Deficiency and Toxicity in Goats

Transcript – Choosing a Goat Mineral

Introduction 0:02
For the love of goats. We are talking about everything goat. Whether you’re a goat owner, a breeder, or just a fan of these wonderful creatures, we’ve got you covered. And now, here’s Deborah Niemann.

00:18
Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s episode. Today I am going solo, because I’m going to talk about one of the most common things that we get questions around, and that is choosing a good mineral. Now we actually don’t get a whole lot of emails from people asking us, what’s a good mineral, or how do I choose a good mineral? What we get instead are emails from people who have problems with their goats that sound like an obvious mineral deficiency, and they say, oh no, it can’t be that they get a mineral–a mineral.

I am so sad to say that they are not created equal. Unfortunately, there are a lot of minerals out there that are a complete waste of money. They are incredibly overpriced salt. There are minerals that are like 90-95% salt, and that’s not what your goats need. Your goats need–the big things that they need from their minerals are going to be primarily copper, selenium and zinc, because those are the three things that goats are most likely to become deficient in. And if it’s a doe that’s pregnant or in milk, she also needs a good amount of calcium.

So one of the things–we have a goat mineral comparison chart that we share with people, and we update this every six months. One of our team members, Aimey, goes to the websites for these six minerals on the chart, and she checks to see if they have changed at all. And once in a while, somebody emails us to tell us that one has changed, and we look into it. But usually we do catch all the changes, because we are checking about every six months.

Now, at the bottom of this chart this time, Aimey added links to where she got the information. So if you want to check yourself to see if it’s changed, then you can. This is dated August of 2024. She’ll check again six months from then. Usually there’s not a change, but about every year and a half, one or two of the company’s changes, and there were some changes this time. So if you got the last one from us–I believe it was green–this one we made purple so that they jump out of you as being different. The purple one has the most up to date. And also, if you look at the bottom of the chart, it says updated as of August the 22nd.

Now, this podcast will totally be valuable to you to listen to. So don’t say, oh, never mind. I’m going to go to go to the website, but if you do go to the website, you can get a copy of this chart and print it out and take it with you to the feed store to compare it to what you have available there if you don’t have one of the specific minerals that I recommend on the list.

Deborah 02:57
This is our goat mineral comparison chart, and you can see that the Sweetlix Meat Maker and the Purina Goat Minerals both have check marks above them. Now the reason that I specify the Sweetlix Meat Maker and not the Magnum Milk is because the Sweetlix Meat Maker has twice as much calcium. The calcium to phosphorus ratio in Sweetlix Meat Maker, and most minerals, is 2:1. That’s really what we want. We want around, you know, 16-18% calcium for does that are pregnant and/or milking.

If you’ve got wethers, they don’t need this. So, weirdly enough, you know, if you’ve got wethers, you could, you could use Magnum Milk, and they would be fine with that, because they don’t need a lot of calcium. Pregnant does and does in milk do need a lot of calcium. So that’s why I specifically recommend the Meat Maker–why it has a green check mark above it. So you can see that some of these–just talking about the calcium here–you can see some of these others, I do not recommend.

Like the Redmond Goat Mineral here has only 4% calcium, which is really nothing. I mean, that’s not helpful to a goat in milk or whatever. But, and here’s the problem, because it’s, it’s 76% salt, so this is one of those. But that makes sense. I mean, Redmond is a salt company, and so most of their products are just very high in salt. You notice most of these others are between 15% and 27% salt. They’re not as much so they’re going to have higher amounts of actual, true, legitimate minerals in them.

Deborah 04:49
Now, the important things that you really want to look at are copper, because copper can be a problem. Copper deficiency can be a problem in some goats. Usually it’s not bad. So if you’re feeding the Purina, usually you don’t have any problems with copper deficiency unless you’ve got sulfur and/or iron in your well water, because those are copper antagonists, and so you might still need additional copper in addition to this.

So, somebody once was like, really was complaining that Sweetlix didn’t have more copper in it because she had to give copper oxide wire particles as a supplement in addition to that. And the reality is that they can’t put enough copper in there for everybody because there is no perfect copper level. This is basically what goats would need is somewhere between the 1700 and 2500 ppm is what they would be fine with, assuming that there are no copper antagonists in the environment. Now a lot of people don’t have copper antagonists, so this is all they need. They will do fine. If you have some, you might want to go with the Purina rather than the Sweetlix, because it is higher in copper. It’s 2500 and the Sweetlix is around 1800.

Deborah 05:56
However, we have always stuck with Sweetlix because we like to give our goats copper oxide for barber pole worm. We’ve got, we have episodes in here on using copper oxide for worms, so I’m not going to get into that now, but that’s why we have not switched to Purina, because
our goats are doing great with the Sweetlix, and I like to be able to give them copper as my first, you know, the first thing I try, if they’ve got worms, and if I was giving them the Purina, I would be nervous doing that, because that’s getting into a lot of copper now, so I would be worried about copper toxicity.

But you can see these other ones have way less. Like the Manna Pro has only 1350 ppm copper. Redmond has 1000, and New Country and DuMOR, it’s not even listed, which is frustrating, because copper is one of the most important things for goats, and I’ve got whole episodes on copper that you can listen to to get more information on that.

Deborah 06:57
The next thing I want to talk about is selenium. Both Sweetlix and Purina have 50 ppm selenium, and that’s really what I look for for pretty much anybody in the United States, unless you are in the Dakotas or the neighboring states close to the Dakotas. So if you’re in western Montana, then, then you’re just like the rest of us. But if you’re in, you know, eastern Montana, right next to the Dakotas, then you’re probably going to have a lot of selenium in your soil too. So you don’t need to have the high level of selenium that’s in Sweetlix and Purina. Your goats would be able to get away with the Manna Pro. And that would be–that would work.

Or zinc, that’s the other thing that goats have a problem with in terms of deficiency. And the thing that gets confusing here for people is that when you look at some of the labels, like Sweetlix has 1.2% zinc, whereas Purina has 4000 ppm. Manna Pro has 5500 ppm. And you’re like, well, which one is more? Because one is percentage, one is ppm. One percentage equals 10,000 ppm. So the reason that they use ppm is because it’s less than 1%, and so rather than having, you know, 0.4% they have 4000 ppm.

So the 1.2% that you have in Sweetlix is the equivalent of 12,000 ppm. So if you want to compare them, you know, apples to apples, then the zinc and Sweetlix is 12,000 ppm. The Purina is 4000 ppm. So you can see that the Sweetlix has three times as much. This is another reason that I like to use Sweetlix, because I like to use the copper oxide for barber pole worms. And your zinc to copper ratio should be around 4:1, and the Pur–and Sweetlix has the highest zinc to copper ratio of any, plus it has plenty of copper and plenty of zinc.

So it’s really unlikely for you to have a zinc deficiency problem if you’re using Sweetlix, because it has so much zinc in it. And this is why, like, it is a horrible idea for, for everybody, like, people are really jumping on this Zinpro wagon now, like, I’m giving my goats Zinpro! Your goats probably don’t need Zinpro, okay. Your goats only need Zinpro if they’ve got a zinc deficiency, and it’s not that common, especially if you’ve got a good mineral.

Now, you look at the New Country and the DuMOR, they don’t list zinc at all in their guaranteed analysis. And so you know, if you’re feeding one of those, then your goats might need zinc. But instead of, you know, doing individual minerals, it’s just so much easier if you buy a mineral that actually has what they need in it. So, like I said, I like the Sweetlix because of the high level of zinc. And even back when we had goats, because we bought a very expensive water treatment system to try and get the sulfur out of our well water, and we’re talking like a couple $1,000 for this water treatment system.

It’s huge, massive. It’s like five feet tall. It uses chlorine. It’s basically like we have our own water treatment plant to try and get the sulfur out of our water. But back before we got that, the water had a humongous amount of sulfur in it, and we were actually having to give our goats copper oxide four times a year, and even doing that every three months, we never had a problem with zinc deficiency in any of our does.

The only time we had a problem with zinc deficiency was when we could not buy grass hay for our bucks one winter, and so the bucks were on alfalfa hay from, like the beginning of November until and then, like by the middle of January, my bucks all had symptoms of zinc deficiency. And again, we have a whole episode on zinc deficiency. So you can learn more about that.

Deborah 11:03
The other thing I want to mention is that in Goats 365, we have a nutrition course that gets more, gets deeply into each of these, each of the minerals that your goats might be deficient in, to give you even more information about this. So, basically, I wanted to do this episode because I get so many people asking, you know–so many people don’t realize that they’re using a mineral that’s not good, and they don’t know how to figure out if it’s good or not.

So to summarize, the things that you really want to see is, you want to see around 16-18% calcium with half as much phosphorus. You want to see salt. I really like salt that’s like 15-20%. Purina is 27.5% but their copper level is also higher, so the goats might not consume that much because of the high level of salt. The other thing is, we want to see copper that is between 1700 and 2500. I do not recommend any minerals that hit 3000 because there’s actually a published case study where several goats in a herd wound up with copper toxicity way back when a lot of people were using cattle minerals, because there were no good goat minerals that had copper in them, back when they still sold the sheep and goat minerals.

And some people realized, like, oh, my goats need copper, unlike sheep, but there weren’t any good ones. So they bought a cattle mineral that had 3000 ppm copper in it, and some of their goats wound up with copper toxicity. So I don’t like to get that high with the copper. And then the Selenium, you want around 50-60 ppm selenium, and the zinc, for zinc, there’s a couple things, pretty much the higher the better.

Like, I’ve never seen anything more than 1.2% and my goats have done fantastic on that for like the 15 years I’ve been using Sweetlix. Even though we are supplementing, we were supplementing with copper a lot of the time, because zinc and copper are antagonistic towards each other, so that means that they have to stay in balance. That’s why it’s important to know that there’s that 4:1 ratio, and it can go a little one way or the other.

But this is why, like, you don’t want to give them Zinpro if they don’t need it, because they can wind up copper deficient. And, in addition to the possibility of copper toxicity, your goats could also wind up zinc deficient if they get too much copper. And I have, I’ve seen that happen. So you don’t want to supplement with something, unless you know that there is, like, a legitimate reason to, not just because somebody on Facebook said, Oh, my, I give my goats Zinpro every day, and they’re doing great, because you have no idea why.

Like, well, why are your goats zinc deficient? Maybe they’re not giving any kind of a mineral. Maybe they’re giving–maybe they just got a salt block out there, and that’s, this is the only zinc they’re getting is a Zinpro. So you really cannot copy somebody else’s nutritional plan without sitting down and, you know, lining it up, like, you know, okay, what are you doing for the mineral–what do you, you know, what kind of water do you have? What’s in your soil? Because all of these things make a difference. So I hope that this has been helpful to you. And if you’ve got any questions, please feel free to ask in the comment section below the show notes.

Deborah 14:33
And that’s it for today’s show. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to hit the “subscribe” button so that you don’t miss any episodes. To see show notes, you can always visit ForTheLoveOfGoats.com and you can follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/LoveGoatsPodcast. See you again next time. Bye for now!