So, you want to raise goats?

By Henrylito D. Tacio
IN introducing his book, Goat Husbandry, author David MacKenzie wrote: “When man began his farming operations in the dawn of history, the goat was the kingpin of the personal life, making possible the conquest of desert and mountain and the occupation of the fertile land that lay beyond. The first of Man’s domestic animals to colonize the wilderness, the goat is the last to abandon the deserts that man leaves behind him.”
MacKenzie further wrote: “For ever the friend of the pioneer and the last survivor, the goat was never well loved by arable farmers on fertile land. When agriculture produces crops that man, cow and sheep can consume with more profit, the goat retreats to the mountain tops and the wilderness, rejected and despised – hated too, as the emblem of anarchy.”
Goats are considered the first hoofed animals ever tamed. In the Biblical town of Jericho, people kept tame goats as long as 6,000 or 7,000 years before Christ. The ancient Greeks and Romans paid great attention to the rearing of goats. Anyone at all familiar with classical authors will remember how frequently these animals are mentioned, especially in pastoral poems.
In the Philippines, more and more people are now raising goats – in their farms, in their backyards, and even in their ranches! “We have been raising goats since the early 1970s and we have observed that the demand for the animal has been growing,” says Roy C. Alimoane, the current director of the Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center (MBRLC) Foundation, Inc. MBRLC is a non-government organization based in the southern part of the Philippines.
Rowe C. Celeste, MBRLC livestock specialist and goat supervisor, agrees. “We cannot cope with the demand of our clients,” he says. “We have people coming all the way from Cebu and other neighboring provinces just to buy breeding stock from us.”
Just like cows, goat is valued mainly for its meat and milk. “As a milk producer, the goat is inevitably more efficient where the available fodder is of such low quality that a cow can barely live,” wrote MacKenzie in his book.
“Indeed, I find among the writers, that the milk of the goat is next in estimation to a woman; for it helpeth the stomach, removeth oppilations and stoppings of the liver and looseth the belly,” wrote William Harrison echoing the opinion of 2,000 years of medical writing. Hippocrates commended the virtues of goat’s milk and, according to Homer, some of the gods and goddesses themselves were reared on it.
There is probably no other animal – except dog – that has a greater variety of range than the goat. “It is met with in most parts of the world, and appears as much at home in the cold regions of Norway and Sweden as in the hot countries of Asia and Africa,” notes H.S. Holmes Pegler in The Book of the Goat.
If you cannot secure purebred stock, you can start with the best female goats available in your area. Mate them with purebred or upgraded stock. Then, select only their offspring and discard the undesirable ones (you can either sell them or butcher them for meat). Continue this procedure each year, and you will have desirable goat stocks.
The Laguna-based Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCARRD) states that to start a profitable goat raising business, one has to have the following production inputs: (for backyard operation) investment – goat house, breeding stocks; operating expenses – veterinary medicines, vaccines, concentrates, additional feed supplements (for commercial or large-scale operation) fixed investment – land, goat house, fences, pasture area, water pump, feeding trough, spade, wheelbarrow and ropes; stocks – breeding does and breeding bucks; operating expenses – veterinary medicines, drugs, vaccines, feed supplements and goat rations, labor, repair and maintenance of goat house, fences, equipment and pasture.
To raise goat for commercial milk production, pure or upgraded goats of the Anglo Nubian or Saanen breed is recommended as breeder buck. Goat of this breed could produce 0.7 – two liters daily in 215 – 250 days of milking.
The PCARRD study shows that goat raising is highly profitable. With minimal capital investment of P67,250 for 25-doe level; P174,500 for 50-doe level; or P349,000 for 100-doe level, positive net income and return on investment (ROI) are realized, even as early as the first year. The ROI for five years is P67 percent from a 25-doe level operation under semi-confinement scheme and 60 percent from 50-and 100-doe level operations under pure confinement system. Payback period is two years.