Goats

Saanen crosses, Boer goats and dwarf goats:

the three are kept for quite different reasons. The white Saanen and its crosses with the brown Toggenburg carry the country’s small dairies, bred for volume of milk and a calm temper on the milking stand. The Boer, white-bodied with a red-brown head, is a meat goat, raised much as the hair sheep on the next farm are. Dwarf goats are kept mostly as pets and garden company; they eat less and need less room, but give only a little milk. A buck of any breed smells strongly in the breeding season and has to be penned away from milking does, or the milk picks up the taint.

Cabrerizas, slatted floors and the forage chopper:

with most herds kept confined or semi-confined, the house matters more than the pasture. A good cabreriza stands off the ground on a slatted floor, so droppings fall through and hooves stay dry; lameness is one of the commonest problems keepers here report, and a damp floor makes it worse. The gaps should clear droppings without being wide enough to trap a kid’s leg. Allow about a square metre and a half per adult under the roof, with separate pens for kids and for pregnant, milking and dry does. Because the feed is carried to the goats, the other big purchase is a chopper for king grass and other cut forage, and a raised trough or a rack with a feed barrier, since goats will not eat what they have trampled. For the exercise yard, woven mesh holds goats that walk straight through barbed wire built for cows.

Milking stands, machines and kid buckets:

a small herd is often milked by hand on a raised stand with a headlock and a feed tray, which lifts the udder to working height and keeps the doe still while she eats. A portable machine starts to make sense as the herd grows. Goat units use two-teat clusters with liners sized for goats, so a second-hand cow machine is only a bargain if goat clusters come with it. In a dairy herd the kids are reared on milk from buckets or bottles with teats until weaning at around three months, and that gear changes hands as soon as a batch is weaned.

The udder, the feet and the slats underneath:

with a doe, look at the udder first. The two halves should be even, soft after milking and free of hard lumps, with teats that hang down rather than splay out; strip a little milk from each. Lift a foot or two, because curled, overgrown hooves mean the trimming has been skipped. Ask whether she has horns or was disbudded as a kid: horned goats catch their heads in mesh fences and headlock feeders and are rougher on the rest of the herd. Ask for the breeding dates and whatever health records the herd keeps. On a used wooden cabreriza, check the slats from below, where urine soaks in and rot starts; on a chopper, look at the blades and make sure the motor holds its speed under a full load of grass.

Passing on a doe or a pair of kids:

describe the life she is used to, because that decides how she settles: confined on slats or out on pasture, hand-milked or on a machine, fed cut grass and concentrate or left to browse. Give breed or cross, age, the date she last kidded, whether she is in milk and roughly how many litres a day, and whether she is in kid. Photograph the udder from behind and from the side, and the feet. Someone driving over from Puriscal will want to know whether she has ever been tethered, since a goat raised in a pen does not know how to look after herself on a rope. And goats are herd animals: one taken away alone will call for days, so a doe that leaves with her daughter or a companion settles into a new cabreriza far faster.