Maintaining a Healthy Goat Herd

Maintaining a healthy goat herd is important for animal welfare, profitability, and—yes—even our sanity as livestock breeders. Preventative actions like proper nutrition, cleaning and sanitation, disease testing, and vaccinations are key to a healthy goat herd. A solid commitment to those preventative actions results in fewer individual disease and illness interventions that can be costly and time consuming.

While all the tasks can be daunting, finding routines to incorporate in daily and weekly chores, as well as breaking out less routine tasks (like vaccinations) by season and stage of life makes the mission much easier.

Nutrition for a Healthy Goat Herd

Maintaining a healthy goat herd starts with proper nutrition. Ensuring you’re feeding a complete ration with sufficient macro-nutrients, micro-nutrients, and fibrous roughages will set any herd up for success. Most goat feeds on the market, paired with hay, will be all that goat herds need. However, it’s important to keep a close eye on your herd and adjust nutrition as needed.

For example, if your herd seems to be packing on the fat, you may need to back them off of grain to ensure they remain at a healthy weight. On the other end of the spectrum, a herd that’s only on pasture may begin to thin out if there’s not enough nutrients in the forage, and you may need to provide a protein supplement to those animals. Equally important is adjusting feed intake with temperature, like we covered in one of our previous blogs.

To maintain weight in optimal temperatures, goats must consume 2-3% of their body weight on a dry matter basis with 7-8% protein daily. To achieve weight gains, total dry matter consumption must surpass the 2-3% range.

Cleaning & Sanitation

One of the best ways to keep a healthy goat herd is keeping facilities and equipment as clean and tidy as possible. Yeah, we know—it’s easier said than done, but it is the first line of defense against negative health impacts.

Sanitizing water tanks, bottles, milking equipment, and even individual pens (before each kidding season) helps keep harmful bacteria and viruses at bay. We keep bleach, iodine, and TekTrol on-hand for our go-to disinfectants. Bleach is an effective, cheap broad-spectrum disinfectant for surfaces; however, its efficacy is rapidly reduced with organic matter. Therefore, we turn to TekTrol when disinfecting barns or pens when the presence of organic matter is more likely. Iodine is our preferred solution for any disinfectant needs on the animals themselves, such as teats or wounds. You can find more in-depth information on disinfectant efficacy with the University of Iowa’s handy chart of disinfectant characteristics.

Keeping farm facilities clean goes far beyond just sanitizing, though. Sweeping, tidying, and closing barns will help keep out rodents that carry diseases that can negatively impact livestock. Replacing bedding often and ensuring feeders and waters are clean of fecal matter is also vital. These steps will limit a herd’s exposure to fecal matter from other animals that can carry harmful bacteria, including the mycobacterium that causes Johne’s disease. Replacing bedding also helps keep a dry environment, which keeps respiratory illnesses to a minimum.

So how often should we do all of this?

Action	Item	How Often?
Sanitize	Bottles/milking equipment	Every use
Drench guns	Every use
Water tanks/buckets	2-4 weeks
Individual indoor pens	1-2 times/year
Teats	Every milking
Clean/Tidy-up	Indoor bedding areas	Once/1-2 weeks
Feed sheds	Once/week
Outdoor pens	Once/year

Vaccinations for a Healthy Goat Herd

Vaccinations are vital to a healthy goat herd. We get it, though—it can be difficult to keep track of who needs what between the different life stages within our herds. We’ve found the easiest way to stay on track with vaccines and whole-herd interventions is to break it down by life stage and knock out other welfare management tasks at the same time.

For example, when we are completing our pre-breeding vaccinations, we’ll also trim hooves and evaluate the animals for any injuries or conditions that may need interventions (e.g., loose stool, respiratory issues, etc.).

Life Stage	Timing	Vaccines/Dis. Control	Dosage	Use
Brood Does	4-8 weeks before breeding	Chlamydia Abortus Bacterin	2 mL/doe, subcutaneous	Chlamydia (late-term abortions)
Clostridial 8-way	2.5 mL/doe, subcutaneous	Eight clostridial bacterial diseases
Doramectin (Dectomax)	1 mL/100 lbs, subcutaneous	Internal parasites
Pregnant Does	2-4 weeks before kidding	Clostridium perfringens types C & D – Tetanus Toxoid (CD/T)	2 mL/doe, subcutaneous	Enterotoxemia and Tetanus
Pour-on external insecticide (permethrin)	1.5 mL/50 lbs, topical	Lice, mosquitoes, flies, and ticks
Kids	30 days old	Clostridium perfringens C & D Antitoxin	5 mL/kid	Enterotoxemia
45 days old	Clostridium perfringens C & D Antitoxin	5 mL/kid	Enterotoxemia
Bucks	4-8 weeks before breeding	Clostridial 8-way	2.5 mL/buck, subcutaneous	Eight clostridial bacterial diseases
Doramectin (Dectomax)	1 mL/100 lbs, subcutaneous	Internal parasites
Pour-on external insecticide (permethrin)	1.5 mL/50 lbs, topical	Lice, mosquitoes, flies, and ticks

Diseases Testing

Another important line of defense for livestock producers is disease testing. Disease testing helps us make culling decisions and ensure we’re keeping our herd free of diseases—specifically Johne’s diseases—that do not have interventions. Once a year, we complete whole-herd blood testing for Johne’s disease and Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis (CAE). At the same time, we’ll often complete pregnancy testing on brood does. Additional testing can be completed, like for Caseous lymphadenitis (CL).

Producers and breeders will need to decide what diseases they want to test for based on their own herds’ needs. We encourage everyone to talk with their veterinarian(s) to plan for disease testing for their specific needs.

*The content within this blog is not meant to be a replacement for advice from professionals like veterinarians and feed specialists. Every livestock producer must evaluate their specific needs to maintain a healthy herd. The content here within are procedures that have worked for our specific needs but may not work for your specific needs.