Keeping Goats on Your Farm (And Out of Trouble)

Image Gallery Laura Childs’ “The Joy of Keeping Farm Animals” is a practical, thorough guide for anyone interested in having a backyard barnyard. COVER: SKYHORSE PUBLISHING

The following is an excerpt from The Joy of Keeing Farm Animals by Laura Childs (Skyhorse Publishing, 2010). In accessible prose accompanied by charming photographs, Childs discusses the basics of raising chickens, goats, sheep, turkeys, pigs and cows, offering valuable insights into the very nature of each animal. This excerpt is from Chapter 2, “Goats.”

Whenever you need to set up an area for goats — inside or out — it is beneficial to remember the adage of a goat, “like a 3-year-old in a goat suit.”

If a barrier can be jumped over, an electrical wire reached, glass windows pushed upon, grain accessed or nails stepped on, it will be. Any object within reach will be challenged, broken, eaten, chewed, ripped, pushed or punctured by a goat. If you wouldn’t leave your 3-year-old nephew alone for 20 minutes in the shelter or hope to hold him with the fence you just built, it probably isn’t adequate for a goat either.

Goats won’t take up much room on your farm. Their housing requirements are nearly as casual as those required for chickens. In fact, a large shed will do just fine for a few goats. With just a little ingenuity and room in your budget, you can have the ideal setup for keeping goats.

There are two primary methods for housing and containing goats. The first is to pasture them and provide a poor-weather and bedding shelter. The other method, “loafing and confinement,” is to keep goats in a shed or small barn with a fenced yard for exercise.

The loafing-and-confinement system of raising goats is used mainly for dairy and fiber goats or by farmers who don’t have ample pasture. Sufficient room is provided inside and out but keeps high-energy activity to a minimum. Less energy expended allows for productive use of feed.

An average goat only requires 20 square feet indoors, plus 200 square feet outdoors. Meat goats require more: 30 square feet inside, 300 outside. Miniatures require a third less than the others.

The Goat Barn

An existing shed conversion may be perfect for housing goats and could save you building a new structure. Knowing the number of goats you will house at the height of the season (your does plus offspring that you keep for five to six months) will determine whether an existing building is adequate. A communal stall takes 35 to 50 percent of your floor space and leaves adequate room for a milking station, feed storage and one or more smaller stalls. The small stall will be used for isolation of a sick goat, quarantining a new goat, kidding or weaning.

Design your floor layout to accommodate the feeding and watering of goats without entering their communal stall. The easiest way to do so is to build a half wall between their space and yours. Your side contains the manger, water bucket and soda/salt feeder. Their side contains slatted or keyholed head access to all three.