The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Goats => Topic started by: macgro7 on March 17, 2020, 09:56:59 am
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I have a choice of pure (ungerigstered) golden Guernsey or Toggenburg cross (male is pure Toggenburg and females are mixture of Toggenburg, saanen, guernsey etc).
Notnsure what to choose ;D
We are only looking for enough milk for the family. So it doesn't have to be a "holstein"
Any advice???
Pros and cons of either?
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It really depends on what you are planning to do with them. An unregistered GG will never have offspring that is registrable in the pure GG section, even if you use fully registered GG males in the future. Cross -bred milkers can be very good, but unless they have been bred with milk production in mind rather than just using the nearest billy goat for mating, you have no way of knowing, so would not be able to buy with confidence.
If you just want to produce milk for the house and are not bothered about registration etc, GG kids will always be easier to sell than cross-bred ones, but I would keep to using pure GG boys to mate to.
And all goatkids are cute, but GG's are REALLY cute.... so there is my opinion.
PS.: I do breed GG's... hopelessly addicted.
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I know! I had Guernsey kids before for couple of years! But they were not pure...
The GG available are pure but dont know the owners personally (preloved).
The Toggs are from small dairy farm - 10 acres - goats milk is used mostly for producing ice cream. They do have some Guernsey females in their herd so so kids might look ginger (british) and not swiss.
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I bought two unregistered GG doeling crosses a few years ago, one had a lot of Saanen and the other had Tog, they both looked pure Golden. The Saanen GG has given loads of creamy milk even as a first freshner. The toggy GG barely gave any milk as a first freshner and I subsequently sold her on. So now I still have the saanen GG and her daughter (Eva) whose father was a pure GG, she (Eva) had two kids last year and I milked her as a first freshner, again lovely creamy milk enough to make cheese every few days.
My saanen GG was and still is very placid and stood beautifully on the stand as does her daughter. The toggy GG wasn't and it was a chore to milk her. Hope thats not too confusing :dunce:
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Are they kids or milking?
Different goats seem to have slightly different tasting milk, see if you can get a taste of their or the dams milk.
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Kids from milking mothers