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EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT RAISING MEAT GOATS (PART TWO)

Producers do not get a "leg up" by buying registered goats. Registration does not mean the goat is a quality animal.     Registration provides pedigree information only.  Genetics is a crap shoot.  The best buck and best doe can produce terrific offspring one year and total junk the next year because of many variables over which the producer has no control.    You have to learn how to select  quality breeding stock meat goats. Registration has nothing to do with the quality of  a goat. Registration is the livestock equivalent of Ancestry.com.

Market research is critical to your success.   With proper management, land, facilities, and nutrition, you can raise any breed of goat to healthy adulthood.     But  this doesn't mean that the breeds or cross-breeds that you've decided  to  raise will necessarily meet the needs of the market in your area.   Some producers  are raising animals to weights that are far in excess of liveweights that bring  maximum money per pound.    Historically, maximum money has  been made for goats in the 45 to 60 pound range liveweight.

BREEDS:  Let's objectively evaluate breeds of goats with an eye towards what people think of as MEAT breeds.    I've been raising  Myotonic goats since January 1990.   I am the only person that I know of in this country who has raised Myotonics and Boers side-by-side since Boers entered the USA around 1992.    I've owned several different breeds of dairy goats and I've  raised Pygmies and  spanish goats. Every breed has pluses and minuses, and I will address  both for each breed evaluated.

Thee are three TYPES  of goats:  meat, milk, and fiber (hair)  goats. The phenotype (body conformation) of a   MEAT  goat is short legged, deep, and wide bodied, with udders that are tight against the body and produce milk on demand.     This body type means more meat and less waste (bone, fat, internal organs- for which you do not get paid, by the way) at slaughter and less likelihood of damage to does' udders when foraging/browsing over land covered  with briars and bushes.     Dairy goats are long legged and long bodied  so that the does can carry big udders which can be  damaged by bushes and briars when foraging/browsing.    Dairy goats are like the typical West Texas whitetail deer in that they have very little meat on them.  They aren't  *meat*  goats;   they are the opposite of meat -- they are *dairy* because they serve a different purpose.

Boers came into the USA around  1992  from New Zealand.   In the late 1980's, when apartheid still existed in South Africa and most of the world embargoed trade with  that country because of  its  racial practices,   embryos out of show-goat culls were smuggled out of South Africa into New Zealand and implanted into surrogate dams ("recipient" does) whose offspring were sold to US goat producers at hefty prices.  People who paid lots of money for these goats  heavily managed them to protect the value of their investments.    An unfortunate  side effect of this close management has been pampered goats that became feed bucket dependent and who were never required to adapt to their new environment.     Very little culling for bad traits or selecting for good traits was done to a breed which was developed over 100 years ago by putting British Nubian dairy bucks on the feral does of South Africa.   Boers that producers had problems with were sent to auctions to become other producers' problems.

Boers have gotten a bad rap as a goat that cannot adapt to living conditions  in the USA,  but this  isn't attributable  to a breed deficiency.  Boers   weren't  given an opportunity to adapt to new locations,  most of which were far wetter than the seven-inch annual rainfall areas in South Africa  from which they originally came. Fullblood Boers have largely been used as show goats in America. Serious meat  producers have been moving away from fullblood Boers for years.

Savanna goats are white-colored  Boers.   Kalahari red Boers are red-colored Boers.   These are not different breeds from Boer.  People are identifying them and registering them as something other than Boers, but they are simply specially colored Boer goats.

Kikos were developed in New Zealand beginning around   1978 in an effort to raise a bigger brush  goat.  New Zealand was (and perhaps  still is) an island without predators and feral goats were overrunning the island.      Toggenburg, Saanen, and Anglo-Nubian bucks (dairy breeds) were bred to several hundred of the feral does and the outcome over about seven generations was named "Kiko." Like the  spanish goat, Kiko has  little meat on it and has retained the phenotypical long legs of dairy goats that reflect the dairy bucks used to create the breed.

With the  exception of a few heritage spanish breeds that were long isolated, fullblood  spanish goats don't  exist as a breed anymore,  having long ago been crossed with dairy goats and then with Boers to increase their size.    I have personally seen  many  (but not all) so-called pure spanish herds, and  if you know what you are looking at, you can see dairy-goat colorations and markings on what people today call pure spanish goats.   Spanish goats' attraction to many producers has been their hardiness and not their size or amount of meat.   This hardiness exists because the goats have long ago adapted to their original west Texas environment.  Adaptation does not transfer with them to new locations but instead must take place over months and years at their new homes.

There are three true meat breeds in this country:  Pygmies, TexMasters™, and Myotonics. Pygmies are  pet goats and have been used  mostly as show goats, but they are  a decent small meat goat.     TexMasters(™ are a breed that I began developing in 1995, breeding my Tennessee Meat Goat™ bucks (larger and more heavily muscled fullblood Myotonics developed at  Onion Creek Ranch in Texas)  to  Boer does and then changing  the breeding protocol over the ensuing years to remove significant  Boer influence  because I quickly learned that it didn't take much "Boer"  to take the meat off the offspring.  I developed  TexMaster™ as a commercial meat breed.

The breed most  under-rated and  misunderstood   is the Myotonic breed.  Myotonia is essential to the development of meat.  There are  three types of Myotonic goats: (1) the smaller sized Myotonic  that  pet and show breeders have crossed with Pygmies and Nigerian Dwarf goats or have been line bred within the smaller Myotonics to create special features attractive to pet buyers, such as long silky hair, blue eyes, and unique color combinations;  (2) small to medium-sized  goats that display myotonia but are not fullblood Myotonics.  Within  this category  are producers who  deny that Myotonics are  a breed and instead view it as a condition, so they call any goat that displays myotonia "Myotonic"; and (3)   the larger and more heavily muscled fullblood Myotonics developed at Onion Creek Ranch in Texas in the mid-1990's and trademarked as "Tennessee Meat Goats."

The pet category  has given  the Myotonic breed a bad  reputation  by coining   demeaning and misleading  names  (fainting, fall-down, scare, wooden-leg) that imply  that the breed is defective and more susceptible to predation than other breeds -- neither of which is true.  All breeds of goats are susceptible to predators; goats are sprinters, not long-distance runners. Livestock guardian dogs are essential in every goat-raising operation.  Myotonics do not "faint."  Fainting means losing consciousness.  Myotonics stiffen, and this stiffening creates muscling which translates into meat.

If you see a goat with MEAT on it, particularly in the rear end, that goat has  Myotonic in it.      I've seen Kikos and Boers purported to be fullblood Kiko and Boer and I  readily see   the Myotonic influence in those goats.     If you know breeds,  the Myotonic conformation  traits will jump out and scream "myotonic" to you.

The fullblood Myotonic goat has a 4 to 1 meat-to-bone ratio -- 25% greater than any other breed -- and Dr. Lou Nuti (now retired) of Prairie View A&M University north of Houston, Texas performed carcass evaluations  in 1999 and 2000 that  proved that any goat that is at least 50% Myotonic has a 6-10% greater  meat yield.    This increased meat yield and higher meat-to-bone ratio more than make  up for the slightly slower growth of  fullblood Myotonics.   Even the show-goat industry has recognized the value of breeding Myotonic into show wethers to give them that "hard topline"  sought by many show judges.  As far back as the  mid  1990's, Mike Kelly of Kelly show goats in Ranger, Texas was using Onion Creek Ranch genetics as his "secret ingredient"  to breed  winning show goats.

If you've are interested in raising meat goats, here are some resources to help you.   There is a lot of information on the Internet about meat goats,  but much of it is sadly  incorrect.   Chevontalk, my meat-goat  listserv  established in 1998,  is on www.groups.io.     MeatGoatMania, the online meat-goat magazine owned by  Suzanne Gasparotto of Onion Creek Ranch in Texas   and Pat Cotten of Bending Tree Ranch in Arkansas, is also on www.groups.io and is published   mid-month.     Both are free.   My website's Articles page on www.tennesseemeatgoats.com has dozens of my articles   available for  reading.   At  Onion Creek Ranch in Texas, every October since 2001, Pat Cotten and I host a four-day seminar called GoatCamp™ on how to raise goats.  I also offer a consultation/mentoring service for goat raisers.

If you want to be successful in raising and selling meat goats, heed the information in this article, choose your mentors carefully, and learn to THINK LIKE A GOAT.

Suzanne W. Gasparotto, Onion Creek Ranch,  Texas       060123