raising goats for meat.

not to long ago i cleared a spot out back to run a few goats. right now i have a boer billy, a band nubian(i entend to eat him) and a nubian/boer cross bred nanny. she was bred to a registered boer billy and is now knocked up. i gave a $100 for her. she has been bred a few times and normally drops triplets.

i was going to turn a beef out back there, but got to thinking about it. i am geared up for processing deer. goats are about the same size as a deer. i don't have to buy anything special for processing the goats.

right now i have a small building made for them that i busted up two bails of straw in. i built them a feed troff. the area they are in is covered in thorn bushes and saw briers. they have attacked the thorns and saw briers. i put a round bail of hay back there for them, a mineral block, and i give them a mixture of 19% protien sweet feed,cracked corn and alphala pellets twice a day. i used the water gate to dam up the stream. it used to be bout two inches deep, but now i have it backed up to around just over a foot. the stream starts in the field beside me from 4 fresh water springs.

i figure by putting the kids in the deep freeze when they hit 75-100 pounds will help offset the feed bill here at home.

anybody else raising goats for meat?

 

Mr... Uh What was your name again?

Anyway, Good post. Could you elaborate in greater detail how much feed and other items that you must purchase for your Goats per yr.

I am very curious about how self suffcient they could be in a true survival situation where there were no feed stores etc. Thanks.

 

My folks raised Boer goats and sold them to a local butcher for meat by the truck load. We never ever ate a single one. Before you decide to get too deep into meat goats - taste one. If you like it - go for it. If it tasets nasty to you, you might want to raise an annual steer for the freezer like we did.

 

You can buy Goat Meat at a Mexican food store, I dont know what they do to it but it is quite good.

How many geats would it take to feed a family of 4?

 

i've ate goat many times myself. i love it. last year we turned one into suasage. it was the best we had here. i never told the old lady any other way. just like cooking deer. if i never tell her she never knows. we have ate goat as burger,stakes and roast. it's no different than anything else when done right. i cook deer here almost weekly becuase i kill 3 a year and nobody knows the difference from beef. it is all in how you process it. if you hall it around in the bed of your truck for a week and show it off, it's ganna taste like **** period. i take mine that day and process it. i put the meat in a cooler full of ice and let it sit over night so the blood seeps out then cut the steaks,grind the burger and set the hams aside for roastes along with the neck roast. i vacuum seal it up and put it in the freezer. at times i have even had a hard time figuring out what we are eating, is it goat,beef or deer?

processing it makes every difference in the world. lets be totally honest. a deer is nothing more than a gloried goat.

 

Good butchering practice will HELP any meat to taste better, but there is a huge difference between the flavor of different species, and based on what the animal eats and how it was hunted as well as what happens once teh animal is down. There are a lot of factors. Mule deer fed on wheat are a whole lot tastier than whitetail fed on acorns. A hog will never taste like beef. Mutton will never taste like moose, etc.

 

Goats are browse eaters. Their dietary habits are more like deer than anything. They will denude underbrush in days. Having a good rotating pasture area, that is well drained, and plenty of good fencing (goats can CLIMB, let me tell you).
From a good source about raising meat goats, a Texas Goat ranch, Onion Creek Ranch, has vast quantities of information about keeping goats. They even offer classes, if you are so inclined.

 

Back in the mid 90's my sister-in-law bought herself an Alpines goat to be a house pet... needless to say that plan didn't work out as envisioned... so she gave it to me...

Now months and months pass and one day out of the blue she asks
"So how's that goat?" "Oh yeah, he was Delicious!!!"

Been twenty years now and she's still mad at me...what can I say, it was Delicious!!!"

 

So, in my estimation, as a source of meat, milk, and hides, goats rank in the top 5 for SHTF livestock. Some are self explanatory.

1: Rabbits - quiet, low space requirements, manure that can go directly on your garden without composting, hides that can be tanned, and more meat produced per ounce of feed than any other animal. Californian's have the best meat to bone ratio for rabbits of their size. Average weight of a rabbit when I process it is 5 pounds. That is 2.5 or more pounds of meat. Process at 8-12 weeks.
2: Muscovy Ducks - Ultra quiet, massive amounts of meat (50% more than mallard derivatives) , fat (up to 40% less than Mallard derivatives, more like veal in texture), feathers, and the ducks (females) can lay up to 90 eggs per laying season. Allow 1/3 (30 or so) to hatch out, you increase your output very rapidly, even with predation and "natural" deaths. Cull the excess drakes for meat and feathers at 75-85 days of age.
3: Goats: Low maintenance, browse feeders (anywhere deer thrive, goats will thrive), multiple offspring, milk, meat, manure, and hides. Also require far less water than cattle.
4: Pigs
5: Horses

 

If you're like me, the idea of cabrito al horno (baked kid, the Mexican favorite), died when I went out into the pasture with a .22 and a knife. Damn floppy-eared things came up, nibbled my shoelaces and looked up at me with big brown eyes.

I went to the store and bought hamburger fixin's for supper.

 

Dang, I must be heartless. My rabbits come right up and put their heads under my hand as I reach in the cage, 10 seconds later crack, broken neck. Yummy, cooperative supper.

 

Funny how quickly folks get over being squimish when their hungry....

I'd still rather eat the plate then the susi on it but goat and rabbit... now thats emm emm good chow

 

My 11y/o daughter helps bottle raise our goats runs with them plays with them but when it's time for them to become dinner shes ready to butcher them. She started butchering animals when she was 6y/o

BWM

 

When my children were yrs 7-10yrs of age, I took them hunting for rabbits. They weren't squeamish about watching them being skinned and field dressed. I treated it as a training lesson, and a lesson in mammal biology. One of the rabits was a pregnant doe, with well advanced foetuses. The boys were fascinated with the doe and her unborn babies, but not squeamish about it. I feel confident that if they needed to, they could make a meal of any wild game they are able to take down.

Incidentally, On a visit to a remote sheep property with my boys many years ago, I left them to camp overnight under the supervision of my then 14yo son with the property owner's two children out at a water tank several kilometers from the homestead (they also had a 1 ton flat bed utility and a vhf radio if they needed to make contact). I left my eldest son with a .22 wmr bolt action rifle and a couple of boxes of ammo for rabbiting with.

When the property owner and I returned the following day, they had a respectable pile of 15-25 feral goats that had come down to the tank water....for their last time. My sheep grazing mate was pleased because the goats were competing with the sheep for feed and water.

It was an experience that my boys have never forgotten, and they speak of it with some pride, that they could be trusted to be given the opportunity of testing their self reliance. Having a couple of feral pigs truffle snouting close to the camp added to the sense of adventure...fortunately the pigs wandered off...I'm not sure that a .22wmr would have had enough grunt to see off the grunters in the dark.

Nowadays, such a thing would be unthinkable, and my children would have risked being taken from me...for negligent parenting on my part. : O

 

It's sad but most children are raised to be totally worthless IMHO. Incapable of any that doesn't involve a cell phone. We home school our daughter and survival skills are part of her education, so are cooking from scratch, trapping animals, and other outdated things of that sort.

I've kill hogs with a 22lr but it has to go between the eyes.

It is a sad state when such child raising practices could get you in jail and your children taken from you.

BWM

 

I dont mind killing miost things, and Im a firm believer in there must be a reason to kill something, food or something getting under the house etc. It is hard for me to kill one , its of theose "white" rabbits, wild rabbit no problem or a old dog whos suffering, its hard to let go of a friend. I often throw fish back if they are full of eggs.

 

Two things to remember when raising goats.

1) There is no such thing as an escape proof fence with goats. Your current ones may not care to escape, but sooner or later you will have a Houdini. She will proceed to teach her evil ways to all the others. Six stripped peach trees and forty-two caprine hoof print shaped dents on the hood of your roommate's new Mustang later, you will curse yourself for only using 9 strands of hot wire hooked directly to a 220.

2) Mature bucks are foul disgusting perverts who will astonish your visitors with their flexibility which allows them to do a reacharound maneuver with their mouth that leaves them wanting a cigarette afterwards, and inspires some male viewers to take up Yoga. They also smell like a week old corpse left on the rear dash of a '73 Rivera in the Texas sun, courtesy of the liberal amount of pee and um... well not pee... that they constantly spray on the backs of their front legs and on their noses. They'll also spray it on you if you're not watching. If he starts hunching his back, might wanna move.

I raised and showed Boers for almost 10 years, had commercial Spanish before that. Got into hair sheep and learned what low maintenance really was. Sold every goat and good riddance. Miss my sheep though. If I can ever find some land up here, I'll probably run a Dorper ram over some Dall ewes.

As far as eating, castrate or band the buck kids around a week or two. Goats mature super fast, and once they start spraying themselves, they're not fit to eat.Whenever someone tells me they had goat and it tasted nasty, I know they got an uncut male over 3 months old.

 

I've been raising Barbado sheep for 2 years now. In addition to being amazingly prolific and fertile (twins and triplets are my norm), they lack the addicting personalities of goats, so butcher time is easier. I have three boer goats and I'm buying more, but I don't see me being able to butcher them. They really become pets unlike sheep which are pretty dull. I use both to keep pastures clear of broadleaf weeds (the sheep do an amazing job of this), and the more woody shrubs (goats do good at this). This keeps my pastures good for the cattle and horses. I sell sheep from time to time, eat a few a year, but when I finally get overrun with goats, I'll have to sell them because I can't bring myself to whack one with a pipe.

Ditch Witch is right on castration of goats. With hair sheep, as long as you butcher them by 6 months, there is no noticable difference in taste. Goats however (I do occasionally eat other people's goats at BBQ's) get nasty at 3 months. Castration is a must. I don't think they ever lose the smell or taste if they are allowed to become sexually mature.

 

It's probably the reason why this old goat lives alone....was kept for stud purposes too long!

 

The hair , keep it off the meat, it will really mess up the taste.

Other than that processing one is similar to deer.

Goat fits in with a lot of Mediterranean recipes. Goat kabobs with a lemon maranade are pretty good with some cous cous and such. JMHO< YMMV

Also burying em in a pit and slow cook / bbq works well, sometimes with a chicken or two stuffed in the body cavity and cook slow buried in the pit for a good long time.

Also FWIW, goat leather is about the thinest scrawnist most easy to tear stuff I have ever figured out wasn't worth the time to mess with.

The belly hair is mohair and can be spun into a yarn and knitted into wonderful sweeters or woven into a wool like cloth, but no lanolin much like on it. I'm still experimenting on this and not sure where it is gonna go.

I like the idea of weaving cloth as a PAW career. People are gonna need n want cloth. Cotton is all over the south so ought to be able to turn that out, but for cold weather, I'm thinking having some sheep for wool would be pretty neat if It were manageable.

I have goats, and one thing I have noticed is that I often have to butcher or trade of several nannies before I find one that gives milk that I like the taste of. So if yours gives funny taste milk, it is not true for all of em. Even if on same forage.

I'm no goat pro, fortunately there is a lady down the road a piece who keeps em and offers me help keeping them in line. I used to trade her eggs for goat milk till she got me started with my own goats. I still trade her eggs and she helps with the goats so we both still win.