Raising goats for meat mean watching the scale almost as closely as you watch pasture: every pound counts toward your bottom line and also the time until marketing. Visual estimates are fine at first; most folks begin there, but if you weigh regularly, it’s easy to see which kids is gaining consistently and which aren’t.
Growth is set in motion in the first few weeks of life, and kids look to us to provide nearly everything they need to get started, including milk and necessary digestion that comes with it. A young kid’s digestive system are just starting to develop the bacteria needed to digest grain and grass; a small lack of milk intake or an exposure to parasites at an early age can cause up to several months of delays in growth. When a kid starts to sample solid feed, their rumen will mature rapidly and soon they’ll be gaining weight every day. It’s important to pay close attention to this time in a kid’s development. Those that nurse well and make easy transitions to high-quality pasture or creep feed will continue along, resulting in higher weaning weights and fewer health issue later.
Why You Should Weigh Your Goats
How fast do you want them growing? What type of breed determine the amount of growth momentum? Dairy breeds and fiber breeds generally takes more time to get up to weight. They require more total feed than meat types such as Savanna or Boer animals, which have been bred specifically for efficient feed conversion and rapid muscle development. Many commercial herds raise crossbred kids (Kiko or Boer crosses) because those crosses also gets the benefit of increased hardiness from one parent while retaining growth rate of the other. This saves you all the guesswork.
Check out the table above to see how various breed are performing by key checkpoints so you know who to hang onto in terms of bucks or what doe replacements to keep. Those genetic limits interacts with nutrition, health, and season. They need enough energy and protein to grow, but not so much that they becomes overweight, which will hurt their future reproductive ability.
The single biggest barrier to daily gain is still internal parasites in most areas, and a moderate worm load can quietly subtract several pounds over a few weeks before you notice the difference on the scale. Protect your investment in a good breeding program and good feed by rotating pasture, monitoring FAMACHA scores, and treating only when needed. These are all the factors that can be used as numbers when you has a weight to give you feedback at regular intervals.
Birth weight, 30-day weight, 60-day weight, and 90-day weight let you determine average daily gain without having to wait until sale day to know whether or not your program is succeeding. And you can catch a kid below its predicted growth rate sooner so you can adjust feed, treat for parasites, or separate it into a smaller group with less competitive animals on the same bunk.
Then there’s market timing. Do you have a buyer who seek heavier animals for direct sale or auction, or one who wants lighter kids at a specific time for ethnic or holiday trade? Adjusting your weaning date and nutrition to fit your intended range will avoid gambling on having the animals fall into best range at random.
But here’s what matters most about recording weight gains: It allows for decisions. Managing by evidence, rather than hoping to know, means that when you notice some kids is lagging and others keep up, you don’t manage blindly anymore; you’re managing on purpose. It is a repeatable system, one that gets better each kidding season.
You should of monitored weights more regulary to see how they are doing. It would of helped too. Actualy, it’s moddern farming. One shouldn’t rely on visual estimates alone as much than they used to. We need to recieve better data for the kids. Looking at different than expected growth is important. Every kid should follows a path. If you want to see success, you must be comfortabley with numbers.