Kinds of Goats for Dairy Farming

By Daniel Botkin
Daniel Botkin

Daniel Botkin is an avid organic gardener, micro-farmer and permaculture advocate who recognizes the timeliness of "backyard agriculture" and permaculture-style food gardens everywhere in our future food equation. Having left a 25 year career in schools, teaching and counseling, Daniel has for the last decade stewarded and farmed a "micro-intensive" five acre plot, Laughing Dog Farm, on a lovely and historic hilltop in Western Massachusetts. With the help of seasonal volunteers, Daniel and his family operate a small CSA and sell gourmet veggies, herbs and flowers at their local farmers market. Daniel also teaches classes and workshops on permaculture-style food farming, goats, hoop house design, winter gardening and much more.

www.laughingdogfarm.com

Nubians and Alpines are great dairy goats, and Boer goats are known for meat. Learn to what kinds of goats to raise from an organic farmer in this free dairy farming video.

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Video transcription

So once you've been smitten with the goat bug, you need to decide what kind, and how many. So there are numerous varieties of goats, and they come from different places, and they've been adapted for different purposes. We started out with the Nubians. And the Nubians are the ones with the big, floppy bunny rabbit ears. And they give the best milk. The highest quality, highest butterfat milk. So we started out with a Nubian who was with us until recently. In fact, our original goat mothered these, this one, and they're being bottle fed now. We bred the Nubian to the Boer, which is a big, robust meat goat. And then we added Alpine, and Saanen. Alpine and Saanen both being excellent dairy breeds. And what we've created here is a whole new breed, perhaps. Albosean, or Albopian, we'll have to find an appropriate name for it. As far as how many goats, that really depends on what your purposes are. If you're going to raise just a couple of pets, well you'll probably want to limit it to one or two dams, one or two does, and then each year, you'll get one or two kids from each one. Your housing capacity, your pasture, your food and just what kind of goals you have with your goat herd will determine from there how many to get. You absolutely need two goats though, they are social animals. And you probably wouldn't want to put one goat in a barnyard, she'd be lonely.