Dear Editor:
I read your article on dairy goats, and would like to share some of our experience with dairy goats. The article paints a two gallon a day picture, but it does not tell the whole story, and anyone reading it, I feel, should know there are drawbacks. We had two goats for over a year and a half, and it was great, with five kids, and three of them under the age of four, we went through the full gallon a day that the two goats provided us. it was a good experience, and the milk was fantastic, I couldn’t believe it, I liked it more than cow milk even.
However, the two goats stripped every square inch of bark off all of our trees in the yard, as high as they could get. They are voracious eaters, and quite a few of our orchard trees had to be cut down, as they peeled them almost overnight it seemed. They destroyed trees and our one mulberry tree that we worked diligently to get growing. They also pushed with their horns on two of our windows to the point of breaking, and replacing the windows was not cheap. Also, we found out that the mountain laurel leaves are toxic to them, as our oldest daughter at the time was feeding them to the two goats we had. We eventually left them to the local 4H, and have since taken on chickens, to go along with our bee hives that we have had for over three years now. Also, they need milked at least once, preferably twice a day, and on the days where it was 10 degrees out, and a foot of snow, the wife seemed to think that it would be best if I were the one doing the milking.
Goats were good and bad, and I hope people can at least see that it’s not as simple as it appeared in the article I read. I would get goats again, and definitely in a SHTF scenario would get them, but for now, until the SHTF I would stay away from them. In total, the cost was no better than buying milk at the store, it came out about even. However, knowing the quality of the milk we were getting made it worth doing. – Paris