Here is how I did it. The girls all lived with the buck in the main woods pen. When they would udder up I would move them to another pasture where they kidded and stayed with their kids for 12 weeks, this is also the pen where they received grain and alfalfa pellets. Only heavy bred and nursing does and kids at my place recieved grain and alfalfa pellets. At 12 weeks the dams where put back into the woods with the boys, the bucks where sold, any doelings where sold that I was not keeping for replacments (and honestly if they where replacements I bottle rasied them with the dairy does, so the core of my boer herd was tame, but the kids stayed in this pen until they where large enough to be bred.
The more boer in your herd and the farther south you are the more year round, and 3 time kiddings in 2 years you will get, the more dairy the more north you move the harder this will be.
If you do not have pasture/woods/browse for them than obviously they will not be able to keep this up for very long before you see nutritional problems. I hayed heavily during winter, had fee choice loose minerals out and that's it. I had 25 adult does breeding and one buck (in fact for 2 years I borrowed a buck). If you do not have pasture than you will have to pellet feed year round, I am not sure how you would be able to even break even if this is the case.
My sales had little to do in the end with holiday sales. In our area, north of Houston you can sell meat goats everyday of the year for 1$ per pound. Hands down my 3/4 kids (Nubian X Boer) which means your 1/2 Nubian X 1/2 Boer does bred to a boer buck, gave me the heaviest kids at 12 weeks. More boer and they were slower growing, more dairy and you had taller kids that weighed less.
Moving the does heavy bred to a new pen also gives you a time to trim their feet and worm them, vaccinate or do anything else you want, then once again doing the same when they weaned their kids. This left only the buck to catch and treat twice a year.
Having a schedule and sticking to it worked really well for me, when all was said and done her first kid of the year was repay for feed and drugs, all other kids born in that year where cash crop.
Start with nice comercial stock, don't fall into the purebred/fullblood trap, buy clean CAE tested, CL vaccinated stock with no old sores, bad feet or scar tissue in the udder. Don't let the doe herd consist of both horned and unhorned animals. Trim the bucks feet before you buy him, the more Boer you go the worse their feet are, they can become very claw like as they get older, buy a buck who is manageable, and don't expect to put him by himself, they simply don't have the temperment for this. Everyone will tell you that goats are herd animals so never buy only one doe, but yet they pen their bucks alone!!!! Then complain they are mean.
Don't go worming monthly, or with things like Safeguard or herbal wormers, go to Cydectin immediatly, and worm the whole group as soon as you get them home. Cydectin is a cattle pouron that you use at 1cc per 25 pounds orally. You will use this for several years before you will move to anything else. Buy from one person if you can, goats do so much better stress wise if they move with goats they know, this way also you are not introducing new disease. Do not buy from the auction barns, go to a farm to purchase a group, better prices that way and less disease coming from the sick goats usually sold at auction or things they catch from the pens and soil at the auction barn.
See if you can't find someone local to your area who has goats who will mentor you. Join a local goat club, ADGA.org all us dairy goat gals have done boer, and we all have folks who belong to our clubs who have boer goats.
Don't purchase a bunch of overgrained fat juiggly does thinking they are big, big nice stock down not jiggle when they walk! All that fat at their point of elbow that you can grab handfuls of is unhealthy!
Sit down put pen to paper and figure out what you can afford...feeding, fencing and barn...then buy goats from somebody who is doing what you can afford to do. It makes little sense to try to start a commercial herd with someone who treats their goats as pets and pampers them and grains them to an early death. Keep the sentimental girls at home when you do go buy
Vicki
how often to breed does?
