Pastures
We have 3 pastures, each with an electric wire on top to keep the big adults safely inside. A Sunpak Solar 12 fence charger provides an effective 79,000 volt top wire charge that instantly gets the goats, predators, or your attention. Our billy pasture and our large doe pasture is separated by a breeding/quarantine mini-pasture. Each pasture has its own barn/shelter for the goats to get out of inclement weather or sleep as desired. We do not lock them inside at night. The doe’s may kid in their pasture but are brought into a barn stall for ease of monitoring, bonding, and safety for 24-48 hours. If a newborn kid happens to suckle off another doe before they are bonded to mom, the real mom may reject them.
Shelters
Our main barn is shelter for the girls and kids. An attached enclosed lean-to with a secure gate protects our Bermuda hay, round and square, minerals, and grain. We can not emphasis enough to keep your grain storage securely goat-proofed. Goats can literally eat themselves into a deadly bloat situation from over consumption of grain. The barn is also equipped with solar panel lighting… comes in handy during the shorter winter days and kidding season. The Billy Bunk is on skids and we can move it around when needed. The mini-pasture has a small Quonset hut. Auto-fill water troughs, along with hay and mineral feeders, are in each pasture.
At this time, we do not have any predator issues and won’t consider a guardian dog unless we experience losses.
When the hot weather comes so do the pesty flies. Besides keeping the barn as poop and urine free as possible, we hang a few disposable fly traps
around that do a pretty good job at reducing the flies, literally traps 10s of thousands of them.
Scales
We have a VS-660 scale from A & A Scales. While you can get by starting out with a bathroom or pet scale, a good livestock scale makes life much easier. We weight kids within 24 hours of birth and at 30, 60, 90 days, and at 1year. We also spot check weight if we suspect parasites or illness as well as how recovery is doing. Most medication dosages vary by weight of the goat. DO NOT guess weight for dosages! A scale of some sort is a must have. We did purchased the double gated enclosure for the scale as well but DO NOT recommend it… there are sturdier and less expensive ways to enclose.
Heavy Equipment
We have a 40hp diesel Tym 4×4 front loader tractor as our main work horse. We have a bush hog, box blade, and a very important hay spear to move around big rolls which are much less expensive than bales. Our truck has a steak body and it serves as our hay transporter, goat hauler, and anything we need that is not on the farm hauler, lol.
To seed the pastures, we have a 1970 International Harvester grain drill pulled by our tractor. The pasture is seeded the beginning of May with a Summer mix of legumes and grasses. In the beginning of October we plant our a Winter mixture of legumes, grasses, including Alfalfa. We fertilize the pastures twice a year just prior to seeding and lime the pastures once a year in the Spring.
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