Couple to give away their $350,000 Alabama goat cheese farm

Daily Mail ^ | April 30, 2015 | Lydia Warren

[bramps]

56 goats. I hear they're getting many muslim entries.

[BwanaNdege]

20 acres is not enough land to graze and grow food stores for ten dairy goats.

Have you seen Kudzu in the South?

[blackdog]

4 large square bales per acre, assuming ten in grazing and ten in stored forage, that means 40 bales of alfalfa, or about 40,000 pounds of dairy hay. Each goat will eat ten pounds of hay per day. So if one has 50 goats, that comes to 200 days of stored feeds for production and 160 days on pasture. 200 X 10 = 2,000 pounds of dairy hay per goat. 2,000 pounds X 50 goats = 100,000 pounds of high quality dairy hay.

Ok. 20 dairy goats. That's also assuming high quality dairy hay is fed and pastures are on a daily rotation divided into at least seven sections for intensive grazing and rotation. Come August and September, pastures must be left to regrow to about six inches before the frost hits. Otherwise pasture quality goes out the crapper the next year.

[blackdog]

Goats prefer to graze on brush over conventional pasture. The best thing goats are for is to fence them into an overgrown neglected woodland and let them eat everything below five feet tall. They will chew Kudzu infested land until there isn’t a stem left.

[kara37]

I wouldn’t deal with anyone who sells a good dog instead of taking them along. Think about that Twilight Zone episode....lol
****************************************

It’s a trained guardian dog. It’s there to protect the goats.
It is a must for any goat farmer to have guardians, because goats are prey. They use dogs, donkeys, or lamas.

Plus, the dog would be miserable without it’s herd.

[Rodamala]

bmfl

[Rocky]

Did I get your goat?

[blackdog]

High quality dairy milk cannot come from Kudzu, Quack Grass, Ivy, saplings, etc.... The flavor goes too "off". Dairy goats and sheep need high quality, high protein hay @ 14% protein or higher. That means alfalfa. Alfalfa = milk.

I had over 200 ewes and ran short of stored forage in April. It cost me $7,000 to purchase enough hay to make it thru those last two months. I should have kept herd size at 100 head. 80 acres was not enough for 200 sheep. Sheep and goats are about the same in nutritional needs if milking. My sheep went thru one large round bale per day. Each bale was between 800 and 1,000 pounds.

That being said, pound for pound, goats produce a lot of milk over dairy cows. Our dairy goats we raised for our own household milk produced two gallons per day per goat in peak production. Sheep produce about a gallon, but it's much higher in solids and fat than goats and cows.

[jocon307]

You know, it is a good idea, it’s like entering a lottery.

[piasa]

There’s in-town competition... Belle Chevre Creamery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_Chevre

[ExCTCitizen]

Goat Cheese is good... I would need to get info on cheese making, but I could use it to promote traditional values... like traditional marriage.

[piasa]

bump

[Rio]

Ready to move to
Alabama?

[Balding_Eagle]

I tend to think you’re right.

[Salamander]

Those dogs are raised from puppyhood *with* the goats.

The goats are his pack, not the people.

He would undoubtedly be more stressed to be parted from his goats than his humans.

[Salamander]

He’s all fur and badassery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyrenees

[tiki]

You can buy feed.

[Salamander]

“High quality dairy hay” would actually be not good for goats.
They can get sick from more than a tiny bit of alfalfa.
It’s too rich.
The poorer the hay, the better.
I buy “crap hay” from the local hardware store and apparently, it’s from somebody who mows their wild pasture every so often.
Full of weeds and scrub.
The goats love it.
*Once*, I had to get them “real hay” and they refused to eat it.
Goats like weedy junk nothing else wants to eat.

The saying is “A goat eating grass is a starving goat.”

[editor-surveyor]

When I was about 8 our neighbors had a great pyrenee.

We used to rid him like a horse.

[Salamander]

Hmmmm.