I thought I’d preface this piece with some background, how I got started with goats, leading into figuring out how to keep them healthy and productive on a forage based system, to the inextricable interconnectedness between the health of our livestock and the land they live on, and feed from; how minerals, supplements and soil are interrelated and for really healthy livestock that work with the land there is no one size fits all mineral supplement: it all depends on the soil.
I’ve been keeping goats for well over a decade now. But the first few years of that was on a very small, backyard scale, starting with my pet buck, Bongo, a kid I picked up at the market (back then you could still pick up goats, puppies and ponies at the Friday farmer's market), and a couple of hardy little backyard milkers somebody gave us that pretty much took care of themselves while I was focused on other things. I was studying at the time to be a holistic nutritionist, raising a child, working two part time jobs, training ponies, moving house a couple of times, and getting married. The goats were in the background not taking up a whole lot of my time. We kept a few chickens for eggs and meat, grew some veg, made sauerkraut, raised a couple of wild boar in the back garden as one does, and the goats were backyard pets that had multiplied and become part of the thing I did to feed my family in those early days at homesteading, then came with us to start our first proper, rented farm where we expanded our poultry enterprise and got into sheep. The goats took themselves out to pasture, kidded themselves, got a handful of goat mix when they came in to be milked, and I thought I had it all sussed out because I had a background in horses and vague memories of my Nan’s old milking herd whose milk I was raised on as a small child. I didn’t know how much I didn’t know.
I guess we were lucky through those early years, and it gave me a basic foundation in handling and working with goats, but it wasn’t until our current Queen and matriarch, Fawn the Goat, came along, that I realised how much I still had to learn. We’d had a year or so without any goats since moving from our rented farm to our first little homestead of our own, and things were different now. We had our own land, and I had quit my full time gardening job to work from home and run the farm. I wanted to really put my focus now into the land and raising good, healthy animals and food. I spent months getting ready to have goats again, researching breeds, needs and care, waiting for the right goat. I decided on Anglo Nubian for the quality of milk, the meat carcass (we rear our buck kids for the freezer and Anglo Nubian are a dual purpose breed that beefs up better than a bony dairy goat), and (as I was learning to tan our sheepskins by then and wanted to make use of that resource from our goats as well) beautiful coloured coats. Turned out Anglo Nubians were not so readily available down around here, so I settled on a beautiful half bred Anglo Nubian cross Saanen, a first freshener who came from a mixed hill farm in the Kerry mountains (reared in hardy, outdoor conditions, a big plus for my intended system) with a pair of Anglo Nubian kids in utero. (As it happens, while we’ve had quite a few other goats and breeds through over the years we’ve had Fawnie and her offspring, I’ve completely fallen for the Anglo Nubian-Saanen mix: the best of both breeds for production and quality of milk, temperament and beautiful looks with the hybrid vigour that suits my system).
Fawn the Goat was a whole new kettle of fish from the self-sufficient little backyard goats we had before. She was a lean, queen, milk machine with an anxiety complex and she demanded that I up my game. I had to figure out how to keep her fed for (over-)production and keep some condition on her when she would fuss and pick and refuse all my offerings. How to settle her nerves and pick up her appetite. How to put a gleam back in her coat when she looked tired and poor. And how to keep her twin doelings, my perfect, ready made, little foundation herd, growing out well and strong through it all without sucking the life out of her. As I figured out, it mostly all came down to mineral balance.
Where I live there is a gaping lack of knowledge or resources for goat keepers. Honestly, goats often have it pretty rough. For many centuries goats were an integral part of Irish life and culture until, becoming known through Famine times as “the poor man’s cow” they fell out of fashion as Ireland picked herself up from British rule, with feral herds relegated to pest status and largely wiped out over the last half century or so (Old Irish goats became almost extinct). Irish goats, well adapted to sparse, hardy conditions, were easy keeping little house goats like my first little backyard milkers that would keep a family in milk and kid meat without needing for much more than a patch of grass out back and a handful of grain to keep them tame. It’s only in recent decades that “improved" dairy and meat genetics imported from the UK and Europe over the last century have trickled way down here to the far south-west. General levels of backyard goat keep and knowledge hasn’t yet caught up to the kind of care these improved, imported breeds need. There wasn’t anyone who could come and look at my goat and tell me what she needed or help me figure it out. And when I was starting out I couldn’t find anybody this side of the Irish Sea making compound feeds or minerals specifically for goats, for our conditions. The smallholders goat mix, the only goat feed I could get from our local pet shop (the farm stores didn’t carry goat feeds) that I had been feeding my little backyard goats previously wasn’t cutting it for high production milk machine, Scrawny Fawnie. Besides, by then I had come to question the ingredients and didn’t want to feed US soy and other questionably sourced ingredients to my carefully reared on home soil food. At that time my horses had already been 100% pasture fed for years, but I was feeding my sheep an organic compound feed and also starting to see their condition lacking, questioning the quality and suitability of that too, and veering toward going fully pasture/forage fed all round. But I didn’t have the knowledge to get there. It’s not as simple as cutting out grains, putting an animal on pasture and leaving them to it. It meant immersing myself in an ongoing study of not only my goats, but the land, its soils and nutrient cycles, the plants that grow on it, and the bought in forages, the foods my goats eat.
I see people now coming into goats and making all the same mistakes I did, coming over to goats from sheep or cattle not knowing the different requirements of goats, or even how a healthy goat should look. Goats with dull, carpet coats, hair loss, fish tails, glaring signs of mineral imbalance that seem to go unnoticed. They’re getting their compound feeds, maybe a mineral mix, maybe they’re producing, rearing their kids, but they look tired and rough. It’s normal for nannies to lose weight when they’re milking or rearing kids, but goats’ coats should be soft and shiny (even long, rough coated goats should still be soft to touch and have a soft sheen). Their tails should be full, their eyes bright and clear, their beards luxurious. Kids should be fat to feel, bright eyed and gleaming, not pot-bellied and dull.
Mineral imbalances will show as dull or faded coats, skin issues, weepy eyes, hair loss, low fertility, low immunity, susceptibility to parasites and infections, weak hooves, weak kids, poor growth, etc.. Testing can be helpful, but it is an adjunct, not a substitute for learning the art of observation, spending the time to know our goats, developing an eye for condition. Knowing the mineral profiles of our soils and forages, how minerals interact, and the specific signs to look for imbalances in our goats and we can figure it out. We have low cobalt and a lot of iron in our soils, iron inhibits zinc and copper uptake, so I have to supplement a lot of cobalt, zinc and copper to my herd to keep their hooves hard, their immune systems strong and their coats shiny, their appetites up and their nerves settled. We had no end of skin and hoof problems until I figured that out and started targeting those specific minerals instead of feeding a general multi mineral. That was more apparent in our sheep than our goats, which I put down to the goats eating a lot more older, deeper rooted, woody forage—the forage goats are designed to eat with a higher and broader mineral profile compared to the grasses the sheep eat. Goats have higher mineral requirements than cattle or sheep; they are made to consume higher mineral content forages. Hazel concentrates copper, willow for zinc and cobalt. Hazel and willow happen to grow like weeds here, digging deep into our heavy clay subsoil to bring those minerals up. Simply feeding a “balanced” all round goat mineral won’t supply the right balance of the minerals my herd, soil and herbage specifically lacks. It’ll do them for while, until those imbalances start to show, as I found out with my sheep and my goats. A “balanced” mineral is only balanced if it’s balanced against their feed, their forage, the soils their forages grow in, and any pre-existing imbalance. A “balanced” supplement assumes you’re starting with balanced base levels; to correct an imbalance, you need to target it.
Ideally, we can give our goats free choice to an array of all the possible single minerals they might need and trust their innate wisdom to choose and self dose. But that isn’t always possible. I have good results with drenches and boluses for sheep (in higher doses), and besides specifically supplying the minerals I know my herd (and soils) are lacking, my goats always have access to a chunk of pink Himalayan salt and seaweed added to their alfalfa feed. I’ve figured out what works for my land and system, and my goats are gleaming on their diet of rough hill forage, hay and alfalfa with targeted minerals, no need for a multi mineral or compound feed. They get fresh carrots (pro-vitamin A) and sunflower seeds (vitamin E and selenium) through the winter or long periods of being housed through bad weather, when they’re breeding or pregnant, and fresh green forage is lacking. It’s always better to feed whole foods for nutrients in bioavailable form with the synergistic cofactors that we can barely begin to understand and cannot isolate or replicate. We give them hazel leaves and willow bark, we give them the weeds that root deep into our soils. Diversity. A diet of grass and hay doesn’t cut it for goats. We let them browse on the land for as much of the year as possible, choosing their own forages, choosing what they need, and fulfilling their role in the nutrient cycle.
We need to know our soils, and also our forages: what’s in the soil might not necessarily be getting into the plants the animals eat. That comes down to soil biology, the life in the soil, the plants, bugs, and fungi, and how they interact, and that is a study of its own. We’re on limestone, but all that calcium is locked up in the rock because the soil biology isn’t here to access it. So I feed high calcium forage feeds (alfalfa, seaweed) while working on our soils to improve the availability of the minerals that lie beneath. The health of our livestock goes hand in hand with the health of the land, the soil, the plants they eat. In the same way that rumen/gut microbiota responds and adapts to feedstuffs, the soil microbiota responds and adapts to the livestock. We’ve seen our lifeless and poor, fungal dominated soils shift to a more active, bacterial state, accessing more nutrients, shifting the balance of herbage to more nutritious, productive species, simply by the action of our livestock and their manure without any other inputs. I cannot separate the health of my livestock from the health of the land. I can prop up nutritional inadequacies, make up the deficits that the land can’t provide for a while, but ultimately, as they integrate, adapt and become a whole, functional system, the land and livestock are one and the same. I can feed the soil to enrich the forage my goats feed on, and I can feed my goats to enrich their manure to feed the soil. I can feed seeds to my goats to sprout in their manure and probiotics to break it down and feed the life in the soil that will draw up nutrients into the plants that the goats will eat and so and so it goes. One and the same. And so my mineral supplementation for really healthy goats that work with the land they live on, is constantly rebalancing, adjusting for season, stage of growth of plants and animals, availability of nutrients in my soils and forages, making up the deficits specific to my land, herbage, and herd, and adapting as it changes.
I’ll write one or two more in this series on raising goats a bit later in the season when we’ve got a few kids born, on raising kids and milk sharing. You can find all the goat posts tagged under Raising Goats on my homepage.
Some reading: