Grazing Management in Indoor Dairy Goats

When feeding dairy goats pasture, the same pasture management principles of assessing feed quality and measuring quantity apply, as they would to any other pastoral based livestock farming. Beyond that, however, there are some key management practices that are important when stock are not themselves grazing on the land and a few peculiarities specific to goats to bear in mind.

Grazing Management Tips

Goats do not like to eat pasture that has had other animals grazing on it, or manure/effluent spread on it. They will even turn their nose up at silage that has been made from such pasture.

When pasture is harvested in order to feed to housed livestock, such as a Cut and Carry, or TMR system, there will always be sidlings and paddock edges that the machinery cannot get into. Because of this, most farms operating this way will have some sort of other stock (Usually a few beef cattle) to graze around the edges. Even though this seems to contradict the comment above, the dairy cattle will stick mainly to the edges as this is where the available feed for them is and because these areas are difficult for the harvesting machinery to get into, it does not matter that they will 'fowl' the pasture in these spots.

Whilst goats are known to not eat clover fresh from the paddock , they actually love to eat it as part of a cut and carry system (or in baled silage) and in this way it provides a good source of protein in their diet.

Quality harvesting machinery will reduce the likelihood of:

bruising the pasture through rough collection
contaminating the pasture with dust / dirt / mud
loosing pasture (Gallagher type harvesters are prone to having pasture blow away from the harvesting wagon particularly in high winds or when turning corners)

Check your mower height by measuring your post-cut residuals. Setting it too high will mean pasture is not effectively utilised and the regrowth will be of poorer quality as the base stems will have a higher lignin level which is more difficult for the goats to digest. The main concern with setting it too low is the potential for the feed to be contaminated with soil which can harbour bacteria but will also lead to feed refusal. .