Goats eating their bedding

[Squeaky McMurdo]

My goats have decided to eat their straw bedding. They were on shavings until Tuesday, so perhaps it's just the newness and they'll get bored of it, but will it hurt them?

[mygoat]

Won't hurt them a bit. They always are impressed with 'new'. 'new' must always be better. They'll get sick of it (or trample it and pee on it till it's inedible) and go back to hay.

[Doug Hodges]

The floor of my barn started out being the hay in the feeders. I didn't bother putting straw down. My stalls are about a foot deep with hay that evidentally wasn't tasty enough or inadvertently was dropped on the ground and the goats think its beneath them to stoop down to eat hay off the ground. I guess when spring hits, I will need to clean them out. But right now they have some very nice (expensive) bedding.

[Ford Zoo]

Mine do the same, which is upsetting because in the end straw ends up being more costly bought in a square than hay bought in a round. I try to trick them by kicking them out of the barn to eat hay and get full bellies while I bed them down. But they are always smarter than me and end up eating a lot of the straw anyway. So I spend the time to rake up their fallen hay and use it for bedding.

[KathleenElsie]

Straw is the more expensive. 8 straw V 5 hay

[Doug Hodges]

Not when feeding alfalfa and straw is 3 per bale here.

[Cygnet]

Our goats love wheat straw -- my suspicion is it's salty. (Many of the farmers growing winter wheat here use overhead sprinklers, and the aquifer is brackish.) Alfalfa is healthier, but my goats tend towards the "chunky" side anyway, so it probably won't hurt them either.

I was very tempted to use pine straw for bedding this year when the ponderosas started shedding their needles. Turns out the goats love pine straw so much I'd worry about them getting fat on it -- when we turn them out, it's the first thing they head for!

[mygoat]

Ew. If your straw is more than your hay, find a new straw guy... it's a byproduct and is just bedding. We pay 2-3 per straw bale... Just bought some 'backup' square bales of grass hay for 6.00 each. We normally get a huge round bale of the same grass for 60.00.

[where I want to]

To some extent it depends on the type of straw. Oat straw, esepcially if it has a lot of seed heads, seems to be more interesting. My goatsleft the rye and the rice straw alone.

[LomahAcres]

Whenever I toss in a new bale for bedding they pick through it for the grain heads. But after the first day, it's old news and back to alfalfa for them. I use wheat straw - it's just what we have around here for about $3 a bale.

[Ford Zoo]

With the weather this year, most everyone growing wheat simply chopped it. The only other alternative is canary grass or swamp grass selling for at least $4-5 a bale, usually only sold for ground cover and put up wet. That's still more than alfalfa, if we can find it. And way more than what I pay for rounds.

Interesting how prices compare around the country in any given year.