The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Goats => Topic started by: Bright Raven on December 30, 2011, 08:07:06 pm
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I am now more or less self sufficient in veg, eggs, fruit and meat. The main reason I go to the shops is for butter, milk and cheese. Should I try my hand with goats? If I spend about £15 a week on dairy for the family. Would the cost of two goats be more or less. Then of course there are the additional products I might need for cheese and butter making. It is a bit of a major step forward while I am still working full time so would possibly need to cut my hours and live more from the land to cope with milking and food processing. Good idea or bad idea what do you what do you think? I already have sheep but would need to build a goat hut and make the fencing higher.
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I'll let the goaty people tell you about goats and costs, but I wanted to share my feelings about having one's own milk, butter and cheese. (In my case, from the Jersey house cow.)
Cows' milk from the shop is not very expensive at all, so I'm sure my Jersey milk costs far more to produce. But it's proper milk, it tastes wholesome, naturally sweet, healthy. No need for a 'daily Actimel' for me, I have my own locally produced probiotics! (We drink it untreated - I filter it to hold the bits of straw and so on back, is all.) I've been drinking Hillie's milk for 13 months* now and I can't remember having a significant cold, or any other illness, in that time. Previously I'd have had one or two colds / throats / coughs every year, so it could be coincidental - but I don't think so.
I never thought I would, but not only do I make all my own butter, I even cook with butter I've made myself as I like it better and think it so much more wholesome than shop-bought stuff.
I use milk and milk products I never thought about before, because I have it and it's so gorgeous. I use buttermilk for cooking ( :yum:) and make a buttermilk cheese ( :yum: :love:), BH gets homemade cheesecakes (and is missing them now I am taking less milk - and he can't readapt to the shop-bought alternatives!) I use ripened / soured cream whenever I want (sourcreamed leeks is a favourite veg dish in our house) and make yoghurts and milk puddings, etc. I haven't cracked hard cheese yet, but we were self-sufficient in salad (Feta-style) cheese, cream cheese, curd cheese (for cheesecake mainly) and cottage cheese when I had the quantities to make them. I need to get more consistent with my Camembert-style, but I will get there.
Because she's a Jersey, she's also raised her own calf and three others, and fed all the pet lambs and the hound pup. Her own calf was a Jersey heifer (BH said "two's plenty", so she's called Plenty), she'll be bulled in a few months. Hillie has another Jersey calf on board; I asked BH what we'd do if it was another heifer (given the "two's plenty" comment) and he talked about buying really good calves at the mart to set on... Clearly he thinks she's making a contribution to the farm, as well as our larder.
Sorry to go on (and on and on ::)) but as you can see, I absolutely love having my own milk. And my little Jersey cow is a total treasure :love: :cow:
In terms of other equipment and so on for using the milk, I have bought :
- food grade plastic bucket for milking into - less than a tenner
- sievey thing I use with muslin for a filter - about £6
- muslin at £2.40 a square metre from the crafts' shop for filtering, cheesewrapping, etc
- skimmer for slicing cheese curd - less than a fiver
- scotch hands for beating my butter (which is churned in jamjars - free) - less than a tenner 2nd hand off u-no-where
- cheese moulds for shaping my cheeses; these do cost a bit more but you don't need a huge number of them
- cheese matting - cheaper by the roll but I managed for quite a while with two at a pound apiece
- thermometers for liquid and for room temperature - I spent more but you can get them for about £5 apiece
- umbrella food covers (to keep the cheese flies off), a few quid each, two of
Pans, bowls, a walking stick to make a hanger for draining cheese curd, a mineral lick bucket upturned for a milking stool, many things were to hand. Yoghurt cultures well in a food flask under a fleece hat next to a radiator in our house; if you have an Aga it's even easier!
I have bought other stuff but none of it is essential. I have used naturally occuring cultures for my cheeses; I'd have had to spend the odd quid if I didn't have them to hand. I didn't get on with dried yoghurt cultures, I think the odd pot of Yeo Valley is ok expenditure!
So, in my experience, you do not need to spend much at all to be milking, making butter, cheese, etc. (But don't forget, Jersey cream seperates itself; I think it's a different job with goats' milk.)
Hope that helps. Sally xx
*13 months because she took a while to get back in calf, I'm reducing her output now and will dry her off completely soon.
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I dont think you will ever beat supermarket prices against being self sufficient. The idea is quality. We are now equalling the super market bill we would have paid with the feed merchants bill and that is half paid by selling produce of one description or another. We are like you self sufficient in most things. I do have goats which provide milk and some cheese, we are expanding to produce all our cheese, butter and soap but were already set up when we bought the place luckily. We make our own hay which is a big help, if I had to buy hay it would be too expensive and hay is unreliable up here anyway. You dont need fancy gear straight away either , you can make do and mend for cheese and buy second hand/ recycle rather than fall for catalogue speel. I honestly dont think you will be able to cut hours on goats produce till you get producing to sell as much as you are losing. Depending on what you produce in the way of bedding/ hay etc can make actual upkeep very cheap, they can be wormed and treated along with your sheep so no extras there. Good luck, goats are daily productive so you do see the benefits rather than sheep that are annually productive.
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id make sure u like goats milk first!
we used to milk our gg but i just dont like goats milk in any form whether its handmilked or shop bought. i wish i did tho.
we got 2 heifers instead, as our family (mostly my son :o :D) drinks stacks of milk. i cant wait to milk them next summer (if everything goes to plan-touch wood)
im very jealous u are so sufficient, i really should try harder with the veggie patch! ;) ;) :wave:
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What make sheep do you have?
I would start by milking them or a couple of them if they had enough milk spare.
Sheep's milk yogurt is divine :yum:
I've milked shetlands and produced a fair bit, and balwens though not so milky.
It might be worth a try?
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Naturally enough I say go for goats. They aren't that expensive to feed. I reckon it costs about £13 a week to feed my three but they are yarded so have root veg and extra hay. If I was milking all three (difficult as one is a boy) I would get more than enough milk to make cheese, yoghurt, butter as well as milk. Probably two would be enough as there'sonly two of us. I did have a go at hard cheese but it wasn't a success because I didn't have anywhere cool to leave it while it was maturing. Soft cheesemaking is a doddle as it yoghurt.
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Just thought I better say hello We don't have many animals but I love them all! 17 various chickens including my beloved Pekins and blue Orpingtons, Sydney my Indian runner and his 4 I.R friends, 3 turkeys, 8 cats,3 of them are Norwegian forest cats 4 dogs, 2 Labradors, a naughty Whippet and a Lurcher, and 2 Dutch rabbits.
My sister thinks I ought to get an Alpaca, so she has a supply of wool for her knitting. I think she can buy it and clean it out!
You missed your sheep out! What do you have? Because as Colliewoman says, that could be something to consider?
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When my children were small and I seemed to have a lot more time!! I kept goats and Friesland milking sheep. The sheep milked only from April, when they lambed until about the end of October. The goats, of course, milked throughout the year.
The goats had on average one and a half kids apiece (most of which went for meat) and the sheep, on average three lambs apiece (ram lambs were very sought after for crossing with other breeds to get a good, milky, multiple lambing ewe and a good sized carcass) Our best year was fifteen lambs from four ewes!!!! two sets of triplets, quads and quins and the ewes had enough milk for all :trophy:
The ewe milk made the best yoghurt and cream cheese.
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Tim Tyne has a section in his sheep book about milking sheep. You may want to investigate that further.
Goats' milk (and anything made with it, including fudge) is one of the few thinks that makes me heave, so they were never an option for us.
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Just thought I better say hello We don't have many animals but I love them all! 17 various chickens including my beloved Pekins and blue Orpingtons, Sydney my Indian runner and his 4 I.R friends, 3 turkeys, 8 cats,3 of them are Norwegian forest cats 4 dogs, 2 Labradors, a naughty Whippet and a Lurcher, and 2 Dutch rabbits.
My sister thinks I ought to get an Alpaca, so she has a supply of wool for her knitting. I think she can buy it and clean it out!
You missed your sheep out! What do you have? Because as Colliewoman says, that could be something to consider?
Wrong Raven! I was wondering why someone had thanked me for some bacon the other day ;D ;D
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Wrong Raven
Oops, sorry - need that little 'dizzy' smiley here :D
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You're not the only one having a blond moment on here! xx :-*
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When we first bought our goats a couple of years back I did a costing based on the fact we are a family of 7. Now I can't stomach goats milk..at all!! so 6 people are drinking it and using it in mashed potato and other cooking. We worked out that we were saving over £40 a month in buying goats milk from the supermarket, feed costs (after the large outlay of making a shed and buying the bits you need to keep goats including very good fencing!) about £16 month then hay on top (currently £4.50 here for heston bale, they eat one of them every 3 days)
tried making cheese, no-one liked it (boo!) so this is how the soap business came about - the milk had to go somewhere ;)
try some goats milk produce like cheese and butter (delamere do a very extensive range) but I think quite often the shop bought stuff tastes very different to that made by someone in a similar situation to us keeping goats.
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... and buying the bits you need to keep goats including very good fencing!) about £16 month then hay on top (currently £4.50 here for heston bale, they eat one of them every 3 days)
Well that must be another regional term variation - up here a heston is 0.3T to 0.5T, a mini-heston is a big oblong bale, about 8 foot long, equivalent to 8 - 10 small 'square' bales, and a small 'square' bale is the only one you can pick up and throw about without a tractor to help. (And isn't square, but has the ratios 10:5:4)
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LOL I think so. I always call them 'little farmers bales' because that's what they look like to me but someone passing the other day mentioned they were hestons which I'd never even heard of!
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Naturally enough I say go for goats. They aren't that expensive to feed. I reckon it costs about £13 a week to feed my three but they are yarded so have root veg and extra hay. If I was milking all three (difficult as one is a boy) I would get more than enough milk to make cheese, yoghurt, butter as well as milk. Probably two would be enough as there'sonly two of us. I did have a go at hard cheese but it wasn't a success because I didn't have anywhere cool to leave it while it was maturing. Soft cheesemaking is a doddle as it yoghurt.
Oops make that £13 a month plus hay at £4 a bale using about bale and a half a week. Really shouldn't do calculations at gone 2 in the morning.
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LOL I think so. I always call them 'little farmers bales' because that's what they look like to me but someone passing the other day mentioned they were hestons which I'd never even heard of!
Apparently 'Hesston' is the make of the balers that made the bigger (8' long and bigger) bales, and the name just transferred to the bales. Now, clearly, people just use it to mean 'oblong' rather than 'round'.
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ahhhh that makes sense then.
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I think of them as "square bales" ... knowing full well they are oblong!! :D
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I have been mulling over a reply for most of the day...
If you have a full(?)time job and run a veg/fruit/eggs/meat producing smallholding already I would think you just haven't got enough hours in the day to a)look after goats (milking, feeding etc) twice a day, and b) make good use of the milk produced.
A good quality goat gives about 6 ltrs per day at peak lactation (2ltrs go to each kid for about 4 months), even in midwinter you will still get about 3ltrs of milk per goat. To get a good allyear round milk supply it would be advisable to have two females and kid them alternate years. That means you have a lot of milk for about 10 months, and then one of them is dry for the last two months of her pregnany. A good goat can milk for more than two years, but it could be more difficult to get them back into kid if they have been empty for a long time.
So even in midwinter you will have to get "rid" of about 5 ltrs of milk per day from two goats. Making one lot of hard cheese takes most of the day, and you have to be around to check on it, do the next stage etc - I have found it difficult to do other jobs in parallel, but maybe I am too much of a scatterbrain.... Soft cheeses are easier, can be done overnight, then dried during the day, also easy is yoghurt (quite runny, but very tasty). In order to make butter from goats milk you will need a cream separator, they are about 100pounds from the Ukraine. Washing up all the bits and bobs for it takes quite a while. If your milk is about, say 4.5% butter fat and butter is about 80% fat then you get about 55g of butter per litre of milk. You will need a disposal strategy for the remaining skimmed milk... pigs come to mind.
I milk (at the moment) 3 goats (1 GG, and two BT) and have about 6.5ltrs of milk per day. We buzz the separator into action every three to four milkings, and I also make quite a bit of cheese (about one hardcheese from 4.5ltrs per week, also haloumi, garlic soft cheese, quark etc). I also feed a couple of weaners. I make butter and icecream from the cream (and being continental have cream in my decadent coffee...) - and yes we are self-sufficient in dairy. (except a wee pot of Yeo to kickstart the yoghurt every so often and some cheap cheddar to melt on maccaroneí cheese :o)
However I spend about 45 minutes in the goatshed in the morning, same again in the evening, mine also get a lunchtime snack. As I am at home during the day I can let them out (and quickly back again in the rain) when I am around. I also go and cut branches for them from about late May until the leaves are off, usually once a day. Due to hay shortage last summer ours had freshly scythed grass (my OH's first job every other evening when he came home from his office job/1.5 hours commute) from about May until October.
You will need a relief milker - or a milking machine. (My OH doesn't do hand-milking and neither are my wrists anymore, so we went and bought a milking machine - 1500 pounds, but IMO money well spent).
There are quite a few start-up costs - goathouse, fencing, feeding equipment, goats (it does pay to buy BGS registered goats, so you can make an educated guess at their milk production capabilities and sell quality offspring). A livestock trailer is not essential, but being able to borrow one is. Goats come into season quite visibly/audibly and will need to be mated within the next 36hours, so flexibility in just being able to drive them to the (previously planned and informed) billy is also necessary.
Ongoing costs are: feed (hay, dairy nuts etc), vets (not often but if yes than it gets quickly expensive), annual CAE tests, vaccination every six months, worming and (in my case) annual de-lousing. Hay is a worry most years, our bales this year are 4 pounds for the normal small ones, and my 7 goats go through a bale every two days. :o If they are not lactating they will be ok on mainly hay and only a handful of concentrates, if in milk you have to feed according to milk yield, in late pregnancy feeding up to make sure kid(s) is growing... so it pays to have them in milk as long as possible.
I am curently writing up all my costs and hope to be able to claclulate how much our milk is per litre - or maybe I don't want to do that... :-\
Quality wise it's a no-brainer, we do not pasteurise our milk, and the ice cream alone is worth it! But my vegetable garden has suffered quite alot in the last two years (I also have sheep, hens, a couple of weaners most years, meat poultry on one kind or another... and two children that need to be driven to/from school).
So, food for thought for 2012 - but I wouldn't do without my goats anymore (I have started to show and now pedigree breed....they are very addictive!)
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Wow! I am amazed and overwhelmed by the quality, depth and passion in the replies given. You are all inspiring me to go ahead with this project. BUT it is clear that I need to do a lot of groundwork and planning first. Most of my animals are fairly low maintenance (in a rolling maintenance sort of way) and as a teacher I do have good long holidays to work in. My hubby tinkers at home (in a building arks, digging, doing fencing, fetching and carrying and sawing up wood sort of way :trophy:) and does the smallholding jobs that do not involve poo :farmer:. He loves the animals so. I am sure he would take to goats very easily. At the moment we have 7 Suffolk sheep (one has just gone in the freezer :D) I have one Ram (Rodney the Suffolk) and I hope the four ewes will all lamb in February half term. I did give Rodney a calendar and some very clear instructions.
So far it had not occured to me to try and milk my girls, I am sure that Dai - who is a five year old welsh x who is astute and sagacious won't let me anywhere near her. She is a brilliant mum and very protective. I have never tried to milk them but I will this year. So step I will be to find my old crash helmet and have a go. Even if I could make a little soft sheep's cheese I would be happy, perhaps Milly and Fluff will be compliant for me - they will be first time mums. Step 2 needs to be to find a supplier of goats milk in Shropshire and have a go at making some goat butter and cheese to see if we like it and if I can make it. I am lactose intolerant and have been a bit reluctant to try super store goat milk. It would be daft to go ahead if it re-awakens my IBS. I have only used soya milk on my cereal and in my tea for over ten years now. No problems with cheese and butter (including farm store goats cheese and butter which has been really yummy :love:)
Perhaps this year I should experiment with some cheese making with goat milk sourced locally to see if I can learn some skills ahead of taking on the goats. 6 liters at peak lactation is a lot of milk! You must be very well organised and canny to cope with it all I love the idea of making soaps - the less I buy from Tesco the happier I am. Giving milk back to the pigs is a winner. Pigs are fantastic converters :pig: brilliant I love pigs, but the feed bills have been a bit scary over the last year, we will have to grow more of our own pig food next year, milk would be a great supplement.
My small farmers bails are at £3 this year from a local old boy who cuts very good quality hay and I store them in the trailer as there is no where else for them to go. My seven sheep are getting through one every three days. The feeding costs look similar to my sheep so at least I can calculate for that. As for finding a compliant billy when the girls are in heat...... my goodness I had no idea! 36 hours to get organised is not long at all, I know a lady in North Shropshire (Sandcroft Goatherd) who could advise me and help me to find stock and a billy as required. I went to visit her two years ago and was really impressed with her set up. I did however come away feeling that goats are the animals with Emotional Behavioral Issues in the farmyard. I loved her Anglo Nubian's they were real beauties and they looked very naughty.
Oooh you have all really spured me on to find out more. I will have a look on the processing forum to check out butter and cheese making. Thanks everyone :yum:
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Anglo Nubians are brilliant goats and yes they are naughty. I used to handmilk 16 of them when a friend was on hol.
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A friend has AN's - they really keep her on her toes!! I think my saanenX has a bit of AN in her because she is full of mischief ;) The Togg's I have are very well behaved in contrast!
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I'll admit I could be a bit biased but you can't beat Sanaans for placid, affectionate animals. Togs come a close second. Having had some experience of Alpines I would steer well clear. Houdini has nothing on them and they are very boisterous. Curry is half BA and boy don't I know it. As you are in Shropshire, you are welcome to come and meet my girls some time.
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Thanks, that would be perfect, I would love to visit with hubby and Freddie (age 6) sometime in the new year. It is always a good idea to work out what you are getting in to before you strike out into a new venture. :thumbsup:
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I'm going to go all romantic-ish now ;D I can say hand on heart there is nothing like spending a winters morning sitting on the milking stool with your head resting on the flank of a Saanen while you milk away. My old Lurcher girl used to come with me when I milked Betty and she would stand ready for when I fired the milk out for her to catch ;D ;D It's enough to make you forget about all the mud ::)
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If the smell of warm goat is that good perhaps there is a marketing opportunity for a new perfume? Eau du Caprica for romantics or Goatcci for the fashion conscious.
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If the smell of warm goat is that good perhaps there is a marketing opportunity for a new perfume? Eau du Caprica for romantics or Goatcci for the fashion conscious.
Ahh, there's a scent about a Jersey in milk, nothing else is exactly like it. It sends relaxation all down my spine.
I just noticed that this is my 2000th post. Nice one.
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the smell of a jersey in milk gives me the boak hate the smell of milk that is why i don't touch the god awful stuff stinking rotten putrid stuff
happy 2000 posting you must be on more than me :wave: :farmer:
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Thanks, that would be perfect, I would love to visit with hubby and Freddie (age 6) sometime in the new year. It is always a good idea to work out what you are getting in to before you strike out into a new venture. :thumbsup:
Just PM me when you are ready. I only work a few hours a week ATM and that's as a home tutor so am around a lot and I'm on here at least once a day to pick up messages.