Meat Goat Blog

How Often to Worm Goats?

How often should I worm my goats? The smart alec reply is "as often as they're wormy." But that can be difficult to determine. Worming goats is a tricky business - worm too often and you allow the parasites to become immune to the wormer. Don't worm often enough and you lose goats. There are a few ways of testing whether your goats are wormy - ranging from Famacha eye scores and body condition scores to fecal egg counts. But the frequency of worming can vary drastically depending on your environment.

In dry or cold climates like Arizona or Montana, parasites will likely have a much harder time surviving than in more humid climates like Florida. Here in Oklahoma, our weather can be quite varied - but it usually leans slightly to the heavy side of the parasite range.

But the biggest factor affecting how often you worm is the parasite resistance of your herd. When we started off, we wormed about 4 times a year (and lost a lot of goats anyway). Thanks to a lot of hard culling, now we only have to worm one (or in wet years two) times a year. It takes a lot of effort to produce a herd that can hold its own against the parasites - but the reduced management time more than compensates for it.

The best way we've found for determining the parasite resistance of your herd without breaking the bank on vet bills is to keep some records of the Famacha eye scores. This also lets you know which does have the heaviest parasite loads. Using this information, you will be able to identify the goats that need to be sold and the ones that should be bred.

Using a Cleanup Buck - Quick Tips

If you haven't already, you might want to think about running a cleanup buck after your initial breeding this year. By running a second buck 30 days after the first one, you can ensure that anything that can be bred will be bred - while still being able to tell which kids come from which buck.

What to Avoid in a New Goat Herd

This is a follow up to a post I wrote a couple weeks ago on what to look for in a new goat herd. A lot of people are buying goats for fall breeding right now - and, if you have never been in the goat business before, all the conflicting information can get confusing. So here are the top five things to avoid when shopping for a new goat herd.

1. Ranchers that worm all their goats on monthly intervals – This will allow the internal parasites to become resistant to the wormer. Goats should not need to be wormed more than 3-4 times a year – we prefer even less.
2. Goats that are breed solely for their color – If color is the primary breeding criteria, they may be missing other more important traits like mothering or parasite resistance.
3. Goats that rely on pedigrees over ability – Not all goats with pedigrees are bad; but, if the only thing they have going for them is a piece of paper that says their great great grand sire was a particular breed, it may be time to look elsewhere.
4. Goats that need help kidding – Goats should be able to have kids on their own. If they can’t, you’re asking for a lot of trouble and heart ache.
5. Bottle kids – If a kid’s mother didn’t have the instinct to raise her babies, the kids probably won’t either. I can tell you from past personal experience, bottle feeding kids is a full time job.

What to Look for in a New Goat Herd

Breeding Season is rolling around again soon. That means a lot of people will be doing some last minute goat shopping to get in on next year’s kidding. So here are the top three things to look for in your new herd.

1. Goats need to be parasite resistant – without it, you will watch a lot of wormy goats drop dead for no apparent reason.
2. Mothers need to have good maternal instincts for raising and protecting their kids. Breeding does need to birth and raise kids every year – and they should usually be twins or more.
3. Goats should be living in a similar environment to the one you will put them in. If they were raised to lounge around a barn and you throw them into the pasture to fend for themselves, you will be doing a lot of “natural culling” – at your expense. "Breeding up" doesn't work.

Teach Goats about Feed - Quick Tips

Considering how hard we avoid pampering with our goats, it feels odd to say: teach your goats to eat feed. Most of the year, goats should not need to be fed in order to thrive - but, unless you have a herding dog, feed is almost essential to round up the goats from the pasture when you want to work them (or get them back after they find a hole in the fence).

Goat Parasites

Despite all the emphasis this blog places on parasite resistance, I realized that, until today, we still didn't have a category for goat parasites. So, here's some good news! If you feel like you need to brush up on your understanding of parasites, check out the category on the left marked "Goat Parasites" or click here!

Worming Regularly: A Bad Practice

As responsible livestock managers, we all know that the more time you spend taking care of your animals the better off they will be. But be careful translating logic like this into your worming practices – you might regret taking such good care of you herd!

Like people getting a booster on their flu shot, parasites can become immune to wormers – the more you  worm, the more immune they get. Now you’re probably thinking: “How can they become immune if the wormer is killing them?” Well, it comes down to a numbers game.

In order for a wormer to be considered effective, it must reduce the fecal egg count of the treated animal by 90% - anything less means you’re building immunity. In almost any set of worms, there will be a few that are not affected by the wormer – it doesn’t matter how much you pump through, those worms are gonna stay alive. Wormer is designed to get rid of the other 90%. But if you kill all the worms that are not immune to the wormer (thereby eliminating the "refugia") then, as the parasite population rebuilds, it will be built only on the genetics of the parasites that survived because they were immune.

This is where things get tricky. In order to prevent the worm population from becoming immune to the wormer, you must allow the worms that can be killed to mate with the ones that cannot be killed. By doing this, you allow the genetics from the immune worms to be “corrupted” by the non-immune parasites. But if you worm the entire herd every month, the worm population will very quickly dwindle down until the only worms that are left cannot be affected by wormer – they’re immune.

So don’t worm unless you have to – and even then, remember that 80% of your worms come from 20% of your herd. If you worm the bottom 20%, it will do almost as much to cut back on the parasites as worming every animal on the place – but you’re less likely to build immunity.

Avoiding Snakes with Goats - Quick Tips

If you're like me and think the less snakes you meet the better, then you should consider goats! When goats run across snakes they will sometimes stomp them to death; but more importantly, since goats clear the brush that snakes like to hide in, it becomes more unlikely that there will even be any snakes to meet in the first place!

If I had to Start Over in the Goat Business

This time of year we get to talk to a lot of really nice people who are getting started in the goat business for the first time. Most of the time they have a lot of really good questions, but there are some things that you could only know to ask by experience. That's why we always try to give them a few pointers to help them avoid the mistakes we made when we were first starting. So that got me to thinking, what would I tell myself if I had to start over in the goat business?

(The paragraphs below are supplemented by blue words that are linked to previous blog posts that could be useful. If you're interested in the topic, click on these links to read other blogs on the subject.)

For starters, I would tell myself to do a lot more research and talk to a lot more people about what they thought would and wouldn't work. For example, when we first started, we had the great idea of using the plastic orange construction site fencing as a sort of mobile-goat-pen. What a disaster! Let me tell you, it didn't seem like nearly as great of an idea when we were chasing goats around on the blacktop trying to get them back to our property. If only we'd talked to someone who had been in the goat business for a couple years! They could have quickly told us what a goat pen ought to look like (and that ours didn't fit the bill)!

I would also tell myself to be much more selective about where I purchased my goats. Our first goat herd came from a herd dispersal. With goats like these, there was a reason this guy was getting out of the goat business! These were definitely not the goats to start the high quality, low maintenance goat herd that we had envisioned. As it turned out, many of these does were not capable of giving birth or even just staying alive without drastic human assistance. If I could tell myself to do anything different when I started in the goat business, I would have started with goats from someone who was breeding for the same thing we wanted!

If I were just starting in the goat business again, I would tell myself to go to more goat seminars! A couple years after we bought our goats, we started going to seminars. Oh how much easier life would have been if we had just learned a little more about simple things like internal parasites and goat minerals before we'd bought our goats!

If I could give myself advice for starting in the goat business, I would tell myself to keep some good records. Even if I was pretty sure that "the brown baby with the white spots belongs to one of those white does that hangs out by the water trough a lot", I might not be able to put all of those pieces together after a a couple weeks have gone by! A few ear tags go a long way for being able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your livestock later on.

Also, using the criteria of "well that goat looks pretty healthy to me" would not be my recommended way of deciding whether or not a goat needs to be taken to the sale barn. If I could give myself some advice for starting in the goat business, I would tell myself not to be afraid to cull the goats that need to be culled (by taking them to the sale).

So those are the trade secrets! If you are starting in the goat business for the first time (or you're just stubborn old-hand like me) these tips will make your life a little bit easier. If I had to start over in the goat business, this is definitely the information I would want to know!

Keeping Goat Kids Healthy - Quick Tips

Your goat kids are finally here; they look great, but they may be in danger. Coccidia is a parasite that is probably in their systems already - preparing to strike. We suggest feeding minerals that contain Rumensin for a couple of months before weaning to prevent the little ones in your herd from getting infected!