Goat meat production

Traditional farmer mentions raising meat goats .
In the Lancaster farming newspaper this week is an interesting artical.
Penn State extension is offering a home study course on meat goat production.

The course starts Feb 6 and will cover profit enhancing production principles for raising meat
goats.

Lessons are available through conventional mail delivery,or through e email and the internet.The
course is comprised of 6 weekly lessons.

Lesson topics will include production basics,nutrition,health,reproduction,marketing,and financial
issues.Each lesson has information about the topic and a worksheet for producers to complete and
mail or e mail back to Penn State extension for comments.Producers can always submit questions
they would like answered.
The artical goes on to say that the course is a great way for producers to learn new information
without having to rearrange their schedule to accommodate a meeting.Producers,or potential
producers can study the lessons at their leisure in their own home.

They list the cost as 50 for each lesson for email internet,,and 85 for us postal delivery.
Deadline for registration is Jan 28

In the last 5 years roughly, goats are everywhere. Boers seem to be predominant. Don't know if they are meat goats or not. Before I could afford cows on this farm I raised a few Newbians. Didn't take long to realize that even though I enjoyed barbecued goat, the "kids" didn't produce enough to justify the cost of keeping mama and papa around.

Boers are a good goat for areas without much rain as they get foot and worm problems real quick in wet,humid areas.I raise Kikos they were developed in an area of New Zealand with
a lot of rain.The last goats I sold were kids that weighed between 50 and 80 lbs bought between $2.70 and $3.00 a pound.Goats and cattle work real good in the same field together.

How do you market them? I have a few hair sheep, and I take them to the sale barn. Sometimes the price is pretty good, other times I almost give them away. I hear of people doing well selling them off the farm, but that seems like a lot of trouble.

I ate goat meat once. Tasted like bad venison.

In my area we have a butcher that processes goat and sheep for the arabs. He has a "holy" man come and bless the animal or what ever they do anyway he pays around $3 a pound. I have about 30 goats but make more money selling them as pets and then selling hay to the owners.

I sell mine at the Winchester VA livestock they have buyers from the NE US there.Most of the time I sell in December as that is usually when the prices are up the best.Prices are definitely seasonal.

I have tasted Venison that tasted like bad Venison doesn't mean all venison is bad,some people can screw up anything.

Might add sheep market is a whole different thing from goats.The get grouped together for some reason have very little in common.

I serviced the elevator in the Falls Church Va. Halal butcher shop. Halal is the inspection and blessing of the live animal dispatched by a Holy man. They must have killed at least 25 goats a day. I don't know much about nnalert culture, but it was a busy butcher shop with three or four guys behind the counter. They were nice to me,seemed easy to do business with. I never raised a goat but it seems interesting.

My wife has those filthy darn things. They have cost me thousands of dollars over the 20+ years the filthy dam things have been here. Example-- spent thousands of dollars to landscape the house, came home the next weekend and the filth had gotten out and destroyed everything. I have planted 25 grape vines, this filth has destroyed all of them. Planted 150 northern pecan trees, again this filth got out and destroyed all of them. She is now down to 6 of them and there will be no more here. It is next to impossible to make any money with them, she tried every way, that includes me buying all the hay and feed for them. Biggest waste of money she has ever done,

Your escaping problem sure isn't one we have seen at our place. We've had boer goats for about 10 years and the only time they've ever gotten out of the pen is one time when our kids (the human kind, not the goat kind) forgot to close the gate after doing chores. I found several of them munching on some weeds right outside the open gate, shoo'ed them back in, and that was that. I've never seen them trying to go over the 4-foot panel fence and with plenty of space and stuff to eat inside the pen they never seem to be looking for ways to get out.

There's an old saying that if you can build a fence good enough to hold water, it MIGHT hold goats. There's some truth to that. But it really depends on the goats and the fence. Panels are something different entirely, most people can't (or don't) fence in much acreage with panels.
Before I got back into cattle I considered goats. If you can find the buyers and market yourself, there's more demand in this country than there is supply. But most of it's close to bigger cities. I'm well away from any city and I decided I couldn't afford the fence for them.

A little humor on your comment: "The get grouped together for some reason have very little in common." As the story goes, goats are used at sheep farms to load them into the shipping trucks. Goat is trained: Starts toward the trailer and the sheep follow (that's what sheep do, right?). Walk up the ramp into the truck continuing down the side adjacent to the ramp. Continue around the front and back down the far side with the sheep merrily following behind. Goat then continues across the back of the trailer and continues looping till there is no longer a line. He/she then merrily diverts to the ramp and the farmer/shipper closes the gate behind. All kinds of sheep out there!

(quoted from post at 11:22:43 12/03/18) I ate goat meat once. Tasted like bad venison.

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Well, just as there is bad venison (usually the result of poor handling/cooking) there is bad goat. Good goat tastes about like good venison IMO. Bad goat tastes like crap, just like bad venison.

(quoted from post at 01:00:18 12/04/18) Your escaping problem sure isn't one we have seen at our place. We've had boer goats for about 10 years and the only time they've ever gotten out of the pen is one time when our kids (the human kind, not the goat kind) forgot to close the gate after doing chores. I found several of them munching on some weeds right outside the open gate, shoo'ed them back in, and that was that. I've never seen them trying to go over the 4-foot panel fence and with plenty of space and stuff to eat inside the pen they never seem to be looking for ways to get out.

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I think meat goats have a different personality than dairy goats. Dairy goats can be tough to fence. You have to build a good fence and probably add electric to it too. Most people won't do that and blame the animal. Human nature.

We never had much problem with dairy goats getting out. Holstein steers are much worse than any goat I've ever had.