@Pasha838 More power to you. I never had goat so oposite of you ? Pig, cow and chicken or turkey was our food..
in this random rambling thread we post random pictures
- Thread starter backdoorchicken
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Pasha, do you have much of a problem with predators after your goats? Coyotes, wolves.I looked on the Internet - such cows are either very rare here, or they are not at all.
In principle, the place where I live is not at all mountains, these hills cannot be called steep, but there is no full-fledged flat pasture nearby.
Why is the soil uncomfortable here - there are many shallow holes in it, not deep at all, but sometimes a people can accidentally twist a leg. On the other hand, I have never had a cow, it is quite possible that she walks on four legs more accurate than I on two ))
While I'm definitely not ready to buy a cow, in the near future I want to limit myself to buying 2-3 sheep and, possibly, 1-2 piglets.
Now I have a herd of goats, their number ranges from 20 to 30, although once upon a time I wanted to keep only 2-3 goats. I eat part of the livestock, especially when I have too many male goats.
Very pedigree animals are too expensive to me, if i will talk about cows, then in the distant future I may buy a Holstein cow common here, different variations of which (not very purebred) often hang in advertisements for sale.
My farm is developing relatively slowly, so I won't buy a cow soon. Before even buying goats, I spent five years building a barn, fences, and running water and electricity there. And only then I bought goats.
I think I will prepare for buying a cow even longer. The winter is relatively cold here, so the barns are built quite strong and capital, in addition, space is needed to store a large amount of hay in winter, because spring does not come very early, the grass begins to grow normally only in May.
In other matters, I think sooner or later I will still have a cow, because my great-grandmother, even when she was very old, still coped with servicing the cow, milked and fed her without any particular difficulties. And I'm not old yet. As a last resort, I will live with goats, goats are also good animals.
Anyway, I have already found a place where to build a barn for a cow, but there first I have to demolish an empty bad barn, where once in the summer the workers who worked for me and my neighbors spent the night. Many years have passed since then, the barn has almost collapsed, I am gradually dismantling it, but more often I am doing completely different things.
If I build a shed for a cow, I will make it a permanent structure, like the existing shed for goats, i.e. build it from bricks or blocks, with insulation and an attic for storing hay. This is a rather slow business, but I think I can manage it in 10 or 15 years. I can certainly hire workers, but it's expensive. I'd rather do it myself slowly ))
Now I have 39 geese, but they are more like pets than food, I only cut very old, lame and close to natural death birds for meat, the rest live with me for years, producing manure for fertilizing greenhouses (in winter in cold weather they walk me not on the street but in greenhouses). I keep the ducks in about the same way, they also have a small insulated house attached to the greenhouse. I feed them with cheap grain, buy it in bulk, plus I do not use herbicides and my garden is often overgrown with weeds, and then I pull these weeds into a wheelbarrow and take them to feed the geese and these ducks. And for the winter I either mow or buy hay, laying it on the floor to make it warmer.
I keep chickens only Leghorns, mainly for eggs, but sometimes when the chickens get old, they have too many roosters among the young chickens and I slaughter dozens of these roosters in order to cook soup out of them later. For this, I have built a primitive slaughterhouse, which is a cheap wooden shed, with a massive yellow table inside, and wooden stumps. I also work with goat carcasses there. I never slaughter near a barn or a chicken coop, I always take it there.
I keep goats of a very cheap, common Russian breed here (they are called "Russian goats", their main difference is that female goats also have a beard). An adult goat gives milk from a liter to five, but most often they give 2-3 liters of milk. The kids give birth from one to three. All these goats have horns, and are good at using them, they have a crown blow with a swing in the stomach, so in adult goats I take some caution. In other matters, they are quite obedient and not aggressive, except for the cases when I approach the goat to milk it, and the goat male is very jealous.
Goat meat is considered second-class meat here, that is, worse than beef or pork, but I'm used to eating it and I like it. As I understand it, the key is to keep the goat free so that it can walk and not be locked up in the barn for days on end, as well as perform slaughter correctly, and, as I understand it, the carcass should never be hung by its hind legs, otherwise the contents of the bladder can somehow get into the meat and it will stink disgustingly. It will smell so bad that you will have to throw it in the trash.
And so - an adult goat male about 1.5-3 years of age gives several large good pieces in the neck and spine (bone with meat), and i can also take meat from the hams for minced meat, there will be about 10 kg of good minced meat. Bones after freezing can be given to a large dog, they love to chew on them.
But the ribs from these goats, unlike the ribs of a ram, are somehow tasteless, there is a lot of white fat and the meat is rough, I did not like it at all. They are only good for cheap bad soup.
Well, there it is also customary for us to have a heart, a liver and boil our tongue, although the tongue there is small compared to beef.
I usually make pate from the liver, when the liver is fried, the onions are fried, the carrots are fried, and then all this is mixed with butter and passed through a meat grinder.
Initially, I did not plan to slaughter goats for meat at all, but when there were about 30 of them, I realized that I would have to eat someone. By the way, keeping them is not difficult at all, the main problem is only that from time to time i will have to buy a goat somewhere else in order to avoid inbreeding. But this is a cheap breed, a young goat that has already started eating grass costs from 800 to 2500 rubles here, i.e. from 11 to 35 dollars. Translated into local prices, it's like going to McDonald's (in Rusia) once and eating ice cream and a couple of cola sandwiches there. For comparison, a purebred goose here costs from 2000 rubles, i.e. a young goat costs half the price of a goose.
There are, of course, expensive breeds of goats, but I did not buy them, I am quite satisfied with these, especially since they are ideal for local conditions.
In the future, I want to have 1-2 piglets too, but I haven't had time to do so yet.
Of the predators, there are only foxes here. Once in the forest I found wild boar manure, but I did not meet the boar itself (and, to be honest, I didn't really want to, haha). I keep a large dog from foxes, which are usually used in Central Asia to guard the herd from wolves. But there are no wolves specifically here. At one time, back in communist times, wolves were declared pests and were purposefully chased after them. It ended with the fact that in this area the wolf can only be found in the zoo.
Once in China, something was similar with sparrows, when they were also declared pests, as a result, a lot of sparrows were exterminated, and then the insects began to eat the fields and China bought wild sparrows in the Soviet Union to settle them back.
Foxes are too small to attack a herd of goats, only stray dogs are dangerous, but they live in cities near garbage dumps, and in the village and in the forest, or not, or very few of them, you can meet one for a whole season, and they are very shy. more often run away from the goat. rather than pursuing her.
Although there were reports of stray dogs attacking a goat in other areas, there was only one goat, not a herd. They most likely will not risk attacking the herd.
In addition, I never let goats walk on their own, I always walk with them, picking mushrooms or nuts.
If there was a serious problem with wolves then I would probably have to keep a whole pack of large herding dogs.
Another man on a Russian-language forum told how he had goats with a satellite sensor (I don't know what it is, some kind of tracking sensor with a monitor), he looked at the monitor and saw how the herd ran quickly in different directions. He went to see what was happening there, and it turned out that the goats had met a moose, angered him and it tried to catch up with them, and they scattered in different directions. The story ended in nothing, the elk got tired of running after them and went back to the forest.
Pretty kitty !
Thank you for sharing! I enjoy hearing another country's way.
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