question on balancing the hay I'm feeding

[Jcran]

I've been feeding straight alfalfa hay for the past three months. However, I've got a LOT of really nice timothy out in the hay barn that we were feeding the horses. Now that I'm down from 4 horses to 2, I'd like to feed more of the timothy to the goats. We have dry yearlings, and preggo boer and dairy does due starting at the end of February. My thought was to offer free-choice timothy and then to top-dress with alfalfa. We have 4 does in each pen...4 dairy does in my daughter's 4-H pen, and 4 boers in the other. I plan to give 1 flake alfalfa top-dressed for each pen of 4 morning, and 1 flake for each pen at night. This would theoretically provide 1/2 flake a day for each doe with all the timothy she wanted throughout the day. The does have been getting two flakes a.m. and p.m. in each pen of 4, working out to a flake per doe per day. They were cleaning this amount of alfalfa up with little waste. We've also got two dry yearling dairy does in a small pen by themselves. They get straight alfalfa; can I switch that out too? The other dry boers are off property currently. The boer buck is already getting straight timothy and looks good. I am thinking the alfalfa top-dress will give enough calcium

[copperpennykids]

I would keep my pregnant goats on the straight alfalfa. This is not the time to reduce the calcium feed available.

The dry yearlings would be the ones to get the timothy hay - with the mix being 50/50.

Personally I would have the dry yearling Boers together with the dry yearling dairy does, if you needed to keep things simplified.

BTW: We keep our Boers on straight alfalfa for at least 8 weeks after the kids are born. Then they would get a mix as they start to wean their kids. Ours are such heavy milkers that they generally need the better feed for about another 4 weeks to get back into shape once the kids are weaned, so they get the alfalfa longer. Then they get switched to the "dry" pen, where they receive grass hay or grass/alfalfa hay only.

Our dairy goats get straight alfalfa year-round (they are either in milk or they are 2 months out from kidding- so they are working hard). If your dairy does dry up before they are 3 months bred, it wouldn't hurt to feed them a 50/50 mix of alfalfa/grass. But you really want them to get that alfalfa the last 2 months of pregnancy.

We do give a few flakes of grass hay to all of the goats, as a treat - something a little different to nibble on. But alfalfa is our mainstay feed.

P.S. Our goats don't care much for timothy hay, so you may end up with a lot of waste. YMMV on that one!

[julieq]

Agree with Camile here. Our ND does are either in milk or late into pregnancy so we never change the feed regime. The few times we've had an alfalfa/grass mix they weren't happy with it, which worried us. So we feed alfalfa exclusively (which is fortunately cheap here) and then the left over stems are thrown to the horses.