Milk goats 101

“They’re like miniature cows,” offered Carol Chaffin Albrecht, local healthful-food activist and co-owner of Oroville’s Chaffin Family Orchards, speaking of goats. “They’re ruminants—which means they have four stomachs.”

Who knew?

Turns out, Chaffin Albrecht has a whole lot of information (borne of years of experience raising livestock) to offer anyone thinking about raising dairy goats, which, if you’ve paid any attention at all to the burgeoning movement encompassing self-sufficiency, back-to-the-land living and a desire to eat healthful, natural foods, seems to include a fair number of people.

The widely acknowledged health benefits of drinking fresh goat milk (not to mention eating goat cheese, or chèvre) are many, including that it contains “a more easily digestible fat and protein content than cow milk,” according to the American Dairy Goat Association, and “can successfully replace cow milk in diets of those allergic to cow milk.” Additionally, goat milk has been found to be effective in the treatment of ulcers. It is also widely reported to be the milk of choice for the majority of people in the world; only in the West is cow milk more widely consumed than goat milk.

As Chaffin Albrecht put it, “Fresh goat’s milk is a whole, nutritional food.”

So you’re thinking about raising a dairy goat: What are some of the key things you need to know?

First of all, you shouldn’t have just one. “One goat is cruel,” Chaffin Albrecht said. Goats, she said, are social animals that like to stay together in their “mother groups"—any combination of mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters and babies. “I have a flock of goats, and I won’t ever buy a single goat because they’ll be an outcast. You have to buy two.”

Second, you’ll ideally need about an acre of pasture—slightly less if you are going to supplement forage with feed, such as high-quality hay. But, stressed Chaffin Albrecht, “dry-lotting"—the common practice of maintaining a goat in a small corral in which it is fed hay but not allowed to forage—is inadvisable. “I can’t recommend it ethically,” she said. “That’s where all the modern diseases come from.”

Chaffin Albrecht recommends rotational grazing between demarcated areas of pasture: “It’s important to move your goats every two weeks or less—you’re going to outrun your parasites [such as roundworms] that way. If a doe poops on one pasture area, if you leave her there three weeks, she will become re-infected.” Plus, to make sure the goats do not run out of forage, “you need some pasture that is just native grass that is green in the winter, plus some irrigated pasture for the summer.”

Also, she noted, goats “have been created to make use of forage that we as people cannot digest or utilize,” such as grass, brush and woody plants. Eating the bark from woody plants—which contains the plant’s minerals—allows goats to consume more minerals than a species such as the cow that just eats grass. The downside of this, though, Chaffin Albrecht advised, is that “you can’t pasture them without protecting your woody plants if you want them [the plants] to live.” Three wooden pallets arranged around a tree, for instance, “will protect them at goat level.”

Goats also need more shelter than cows, as they are less tolerant of cold weather.

Depending on the breed, a dairy goat (as opposed to a meat goat, which is bred specifically to have more fat and muscle, and less milk than a dairy goat) will produce from one quart to two gallons of milk per day (as compared to a cow, which produces from about three to five gallons a day).

Which brings us to milking. A dairy goat must be bred annually in order to produce milk.

Enter the notoriously stinky billy goat.

“The bucks stink—they stink really bad,” Chaffin Albrecht offered. “If you keep bucks on your property, they’ll make the milk stink,” and negatively affect the taste of the milk as well. “You want to have the bucks away from the does, or É have your doe bred” by a buck that is hired specifically for that purpose but does not stay on the property.

Also, Chaffin Albrecht strongly advises not taking the baby goats away from the mother until they are ready to be weaned just to get more milk.

“The modern way of milking goats is to rip the babies off as soon as they are born,” she lamented, referring to goat milk that comes from mainstream, large-scale goat dairies. “When you buy [goat] milk at the grocery store, that’s how it’s done.”

Rather, Chaffin Albrecht recommends that “a more natural way is leaving the babies with the mother and ‘stealing’ some milk on the side while she is still nursing them, or temporarily penning the babies to get some milk [regularly].” Chaffin Albrecht also recommends rotating two does for milking purposes, with each being bred yearly, six months apart. Thus, a doe is providing milk for human consumption for only half the year. This rest period, and extra feed during lactation, helps to keep the female goat from becoming too physically taxed.

There really is quite a bit to learn when it comes to raising dairy goats.

“I would advise that they spend a day or two at a goat farm helping out, in order to learn about raising goats,” said Chaffin Albrecht of anyone wishing to raise dairy goats. That’s what Chaffin Albrecht—who has many years experience with goats—and her 9-year-old son Josh did recently, when Josh purchased his new little flock of Nigerian Dwarf Goats with money he had saved.

“That’s the only way you’re going to learn,” she said. “You may end up mucking stalls for two days, but you’ll come away with a wealth of knowledge. “I do that with any new breed.”