Our ever evolving Goat management plan.

A few years back the cattle market wasn't doing very well, and our banker asked us, “Have you ever thought about adding some goats for diversity?”  My response immediately was “Eww, no I do not want any grass maggots.”  Let me introduce you to our trainwreck, we had a 120-head of heavy-bred Boer, Boer cross does sitting in the driveway about a week later. 

A few days go by and with some 5-gallon bucket sitting in the middle of these grass maggots, I fell in love.  They had the cutest personalities, a lot like dogs.  We cruise along for a few weeks, it's all fun, games, and animal crackers.  Now a little back story, I grew up on a farm, with wheat, cotton, cattle, and raising show pigs, so I'm not really a novice with livestock but I am definitely about to find out I know absolutely nothing about a goat.  

Commence kidding.  I am so excited sitting at the edge of the field with binoculars, I am about to witness the first goat birth at Pruitt Farms.  Momma has one, then two babies then get up and walk off and go back to foraging with the herd.   WHAT THE HELL?  The next month is a blur, I have kids in the dryer, I have kids in tubs in my kitchen, heck I have kids in my bathtub.  It's like an introduction to motherhood on steroids with all the bottle babies needing around-the-clock care.  So once things settle down, and our dead pit became unreasonably overused, we sat down and needed to regroup what we were doing, and what we were going to do.  My husband immediately said get the trailer, and let's haul them to the sale barn I am done.  I was already attached and all in, so we compromised and kept the goats. 

Sitting down we decided we needed to come up with a good game plan because obviously, we weren’t going to be able to manage goats like we manage cattle.   We also found out in the last blur of a month, that goats need shelter.  Which we had no shelter of any type for them to access.  We then found out that if you throw a bucket of water at a fence and any water goes through it, it's not going to hold a goat.  We had been using a 4-wire hot wire around a quarter of wheat which worked great until the wheat ran out in early summer.  Then we spent our days chasing them up and down the highway.  So a few months in we build a large loafing shed and put up goat wire around the 160 acres these goats now call their humble abode.  

The next kid crop wasn't much better.  We got taken to the school of hard knocks once again by these precious 4 legged critters.  Mineral! Mineral is as important as the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat.  Without it, we struggled with insane worm loads, floppy kid syndrome, and a whole list of other problems.   

So we stock up on minerals and head on down the road for a few months.  In the meantime, we stumbled across a Fullblood Savanna Buck.  

Introduction to goat paradise.   We get them lined out, we are no longer mineral deficient we are no longer chasing up and down the road, we are no longer losing kids and dams to not having adequate shelter, and now the white babies start bouncing around like a busted bag of popcorn.  

As you can see by this short story of our ever-evolving goat operation, we did not have a good plan of management when we jumped in, but we feel as if we have it lined out pretty well for the resources we have at hand. 

We are a managed forage-fed operation.  In our pictures what you see is our herd maintaining their body condition foraging the pasture we provide for them.  Over the years our numbers have jumped around from having anywhere from 120-600 head of Savanna, Spanish, and Savanna Cross herds.  We would feed the profit out of them with grain if we had to buy grain for all of them.   We invest in putting a healthy well-balanced crop in for them when mother nature corporates.  We supplement with hay when we are drought-stricken, or need to supplement in any way.  We also invest in a good goat-formulated mineral.   We have learned what fences will hold goats, and what type of shelter they need.  I'm not by any means saying our management has perfected itself, as I would readily assume that it will continue to evolve as time goes by.

 As fate would have it, or the economy I should say, the goats have actually become a profitable endeavor.  The demand for goat chevon, and quality seed stock is nothing we could have ever imagined.  Goat numbers are down in the United States currently, with an ever-increasing demand.  In 2019, we started purchasing fullblood does to start raising our own replacement bucks for the commercial herds.  Then in another 5-gallon bucket and animal cracker party, I caught the Savanna bug full on.   In 2020, we sold down our herd, to where everything retained was a minimum of 50% Savanna, and bought out a parental DNA verified and Pedigree International registered herd,  Iron Star Ranch, a conservatory of rare Amoreart genetics. The ISR herd has been deemed by some breeders as “The best-kept secret of the industry.”  Which has turned into one of the best decisions we have made in our program.