Courtesy of Danielle Langloism, Wikipedia CCLFeeding Goats: Pasture
Sixty meat goats in Maryland are helping researchers determine what plants nourish goats best on a pasture-only diet. The goats live in five paddocks over 10 aces at the Western Maryland Research & Education Center in Keedysville, Md.
One paddock contains forage turnips and pearl millet, while another contains perennial forage chicory. Two more paddocks contain orchard grass and fescue, while a fifth paddock seeded with sericea lespedeza experienced a complete crop failure this past spring, said researcher Jeff Semler.
Where Semler’s team saw failure, the goats saw a smorgasbord of mares tail, lambs quarter and foxtail, and in the chicory paddock, thistles were the first plants consumed.
The goats ate all the thistles, leaving none for Semler’s team to test, but an analysis of the other so-called weeds showed they were of higher quality than most of the hay fed to the project’s test bucks during the winter, with the chicory testing even higher in quality than alfalfa hay.
The forage tests evolved from the Maryland team’s larger project on buck performance and parasite data.
