Here's How We Wean, Fatten, and Butcher Goats on Rimfire Ranch

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Partly as a result of this experiment and partly because of the money I was spending at the time on feed and fertilizer in general, I began to understand food chains and pyramids of life for the first time. The bottom line of the whole experience can be

summed up in one sentence: You can feed plants for a small fraction of what it costs you to feed animals.

I've become a disciple of the Hohenheim System (developed in Germany in 1916) of pasture management. It provides dairy cattle with all the nutrients they need for good health and optimum milk production (while the animals eat only pasture and no supplemental grain at all), and I think it works just as well for goats.

The keys to the Hohenheim System are [1] heavy applications of nitrogen-which can be provided at almost no cost by growing thick stands of legumes right in among a pasture's grasses -and [2] moderate grazing, which leaves the pasture at least four to five inches tall all summer.

This, of course, is a far more conservative approach to grass farming than the methods employed by many of the "anything for a fast buck" agribiz operations that now dominate this nation's agriculture.

Back in the Ozarks where we used to live, for example, a great many of the beef cattle operations have degenerated into technologically advanced versions of essentially primitive slash-andburn farming techniques. A big operator will spray 160 acres of woods with herbicides to kill the trees, bulldoze them into windrows and burn them, spread chemical fertilizer over the barren land that's left, plant grass, and graze the hell out of it. There are big, quick profits to be made this way, but the forest is fast disappearing and I'm not at all sure that the "new" pastures created in this manner are going to be worth a whole lot in a few years.

I much prefer the Hohenheim management principles I've learned: Add lime to your pasture if it needs it and then seed in sweet clover and other legumes. Spread on manure and whatever additional "organic" fertilizers you have on hand to feed the grasses and legumes, and then use chemical plant foods sparingly and only to fill in the gaps that a lack of natural fertilizers keep you from filling "organically". And don't overgraze. The result will be a pasture that not only contains more plants per square yard ... but healthier plants which contain more nutrients.

THE KILL. . .AND HANGING THE CARCASS

We slaughtered our buck when he was nine months,old. A messy experience with another goat a few weeks earlier had taught me that trying to knock an animal unconscious with a sledge isn't as easy as the TV westerns would have you believe. This time I neatly felled the buck with a single 20-gauge shotgun slug to the head from a distance of 10 feet. He lost consciousness instantly.

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