Purina Goat Chow really works well for the beginner. It is not a complete food. If you look at farms (goodard farms) and others who use Purina, they also use a complete mineral, and free choice alfalfa hay. When you look at most peoples goat menu's they may say they use this feed or that, when in reality it is nothing more than the base of the feed, they topdress with Black oil sunflower seeds to improve the fat, they add beet pulp for energy or more corn, or more oats, or more barley.
Your best bet is to always mirror your first goat diets after a real person who is feeding the kind of goats you want, and those goats look good and you admire them.
In my opinion Goat chow contains way to many roughage by products, the oils change with the season, and some they choose to use in winter are unpalatable to goats. Their grain mix contains way to much mollassas for high producing does, and although their mix contains calcium in the mineral form, it should also be in the alfalfa meal or pellet form.
If feeding high quality alfalfa hay or alfalfa pellets, you could feed the goats any grain, even plain clean oats, and have very good looking animals.
Always know what defficiencies you have in your area for minerals, feed a good loose mineral fresh all the time, then the best hay you can find. Supplement the hay with grain for reasons....kids growing, does are in the last 50 days of pregnancy and growing those very fast growing kids, making colostrum and milk, the doe is milking, a buck is being used heavily...other than that your goats will do fine on good hay. I use grass hay and alfalfa pellets nearly free choice, grain is fed to growing kids, to milkers on the milkstand, and to get weight back on really used bucks. I do start the milkers back on their grain the last 50 days of pregnancy, most where milked until 80 days pregnant, so the grain is given back very very slowly. You do not base the diet of your goat on grain, then give anyold hay.
Never make any changes suddenly, and why I don't like feeding a sacked grain like Purina, everytime they make this, at every mill, and no two mills are the same, they use different ingredients to come up with the miniums for protein and roughage. And of course if you are going to feed a sacked feed get a menued one, one that states, corn, oats, barley on the tag, this means everytime this sack is milled it contains the same ingredients, these feeds are much higher quality than roughage grain anything...and usually cost 3 or 4 dollars less per 50 than Purina!
The only checkerboard I would pay more for is their minerals, their goat minerals are nice, their 12 12 cattle minerals are excellent, and 50 pounds of them cost the same as 25 of their goat. Vicki
In my area the 12 12 loose cattle mineral and the goat mineral have little difference in them, other than the goat one contains molassas. You want the goat to go to the mineral for the salt, not the molassas. No other salt should be given to goats, other than what is in their loose mineral. For us any mineral that the girls readily eat and has 1000ppm of copper on the tag is fine. I like the consistancy of the Purina 12 12. If I could get the loose dairy cattle I would feed it but it is not a proch order here so you would have to buy alot.
