You have to run your farm like a business to make a profit. Yes I love my goats, but the pet notions have to go. With frozen milk sales on the farm at 5 to 13$ a gallon, cheese at over 1$ per ounce, colostrum at 50 cents per ounce, and most good milkstand trained family milkers selling in the 300$ range, yes you can make a nice tidy income off your stock. Mine certainly pay there way in just milksales, my cheese, soap, colostrum, lotion and kid sales are complete profit. To put it into terms for my 4H kids, most good milkers cost your right at 200$ to 300$ a year to keep, that means a sale of one good kid a year or 2 lesser prices animals just to make her pay her way, then anything else you do with the doe is profit.
Texas has a nice little loop hole in the law for animal consumption. Go to realmilk.com and find out about this, putting your name on the list will immediatly have customers calling and emailing you, there is such a demand for milk we are seeing our very first real cooperative efforts in getting milk customers to other farms, not just our own, because none of us have enough milk to sell. Even milking 10 does, I never have my freezer full.
We sell 1/2 gallon of milk strained raw, into 1 gallon Glad (works the best) ziplocks, freeze them flat, 2 sell here for 5$. I write on the white strip "For Animal Consumption only". What your customer chooses to do with the milk after the sale is only up to them. With customers coming from realmilk.com they understand the laws, this makes for informed customers.
It is work, I milk from March to December, only taking off these months when the girls are heavy bred. I also of course show, which gives me top dollar for my kid sales, and I likely have better prices on my buck kids going for breedings. But don't loose the quick sales of soaking wet kids..........I sell for 50$ which includes paperwork, all my first fresheners buck kids, they have to be picked up at birth. They get a colostrum bottle and then go onto whatever kind of milk the folks will be using, most cases it's grocery store milk, which we find works much better than milk replacers. This gets all bucks off my place, except for what I am using myself, in less than 7 days after birth, a huge labor saver for me.
There is no profitable way to raise dairy bucks for meat...milk, hay, feed prices all outweigh the profit you will make selling the does milk. If you aren't selling your doe kids for over 100$ each, than it is not profitable to raise them, you can purchase replacements that are grown and ready to breed for less....now having said that with the disease prevention/and since it's my show stocks kids who likely also will show, I do not purchase replacements but raise them.
If you don't get the bucks gone quickly they drink a 10$ bottle of colostrum and 75$ worth of saleable milk in 12 weeks, this does not count anything else, worming, cocci prevention meds, hay, grain, cleaning pens, shavings. I don't let them nurse because they drink considerably more milk this way.
With milk sales, do you really want a group of boys you will only get meat sales (1$ a pound) drinking your profit?
You have to have goals for your farm, if a doe or buck does not take you a step further towards your goal than it doesn't need to be there. Most folks don't make money on their goats because of sentimentality.
My goal is a nice show herd, that milkes for 10 months consistantly so I have milk sales. Easy does to deal with, that are large and dairy. I get rid of does who will not follow the milking routine, who are mean to other goats, who have kidding problems, who have bad feet that make hoof trimming a nitemare chore, I only keep purebreds and only breed purebreds because there is more money in their offspring. I raise nubians, if I was independantly wealthy and didn't have to make a profit off my gals, I would raise and show LaManchas again. A doe must earn her keep, either through show wins, which means sales of kids for the most money, and/or a nice long level lactation. It's a bonus when they can do both. Vicki
I had to promise my DH that next spring would be different, they will ALL be sold..
