This article is all about the best goat feed for your goats and essentials every owner should know about their herd’s diet.
Good goat feed can make a world of difference in your goats. You are what you eat, right? It’s important to supply your goats with the best goat feed you can. But what is the best goat feed? We could cover the lists and lists of feeds and supplements and there are SO many of them out there. Those lists do have a place, BUT… I feel like if you know the background of how goats and their digestion work you can make informed decisions about how best to feed your goats with what you have available to you. The first part of this post covers that background foundational stuff, the second part is more of my advice and things I’ve learned from feeding my goats.
Grasses and Browses
When considering the best goat feed we are going to start with what the natural “out in the wild” feeds are. There are two kinds of feed we are going to discuss that ruminants eat: grasses and browses.
Grasses (monocotyledons is the technical term, or just monocots) tend to show parallel venation (vein pattern) in their leaves as well as fibrous, adventitious roots.
Browses are made up of herbaceous and woody dicots such as forbs and shrubs. Forbs are non woody broad leaf plants that aren’t grasses. Most weeds and wildflowers fall into the forbs category. Dicots (as opposed to mono-cot) are named this because plants of this category have sprouts with two baby leaves. They typically have a reticulated venation and a main tap root with lateral branches.
Grasses usually have thicker cell walls that consist mainly of cellulose which is slow to digest. They also have a high silica concentration that leads to increased tooth wear and reduces the ability of herbivores to digest it.
Where as browses sport a thinner cell wall and cell contents that are quicker to digest such as sugars, proteins and lipids. However browses usually contain more indigestible fibers within their cell walls. That being said the browses have more phenolics. Phenolics are chemical compounds found in plants. Tannins (which are found in some browses) are a phenolic compound that decreases the ability of animals to digest protein. Whereas alkaloids, another phenolic, are a toxin. This is important to keep in mind when considering the best goat feed.
Grazer and Browsers
Different herbivores have different preferences and eating patterns. Cows are grazers, they eat grass. Goats are browsers, they eat browse. This is not a hard and fast line, goats will eat grass and cows will eat browse, but in general, cows are grazers and goats are browsers.
Browsers prefer to eat at eye level or higher, while grazers eat at ground level. Grazers are usually less selective and have fatter mouths than browsers. Browsers can have skinner muzzles and “deep” mouths that are built perfectly for stripping leaves off of branches. Browsers are usually selective eaters.
Grazers have been observed to have smaller salivary glands and smaller liver and differently proportioned guts to browsers. It is even thought that browsers have something in their saliva that helps reduce the effect of tannins in their food, making the proteins more readily digested.
The Anatomy of Goat’s Digestion
Goats, like other ruminants, have four stomachs. These “stomachs” are the rumen, the reticulum, the omasum and the abomasum. The rumen acts as a fermentation vat for the tough cellulose and fibers that ruminants eat. The rumen is lined with these fingerlike things that increase the surface area of the rumen and allow for better absorption of nutrients. The microbial activity of the rumen turns starch and fiber into volatile fatty acids which can make up as much as 80 percent of the goats energy needs.
The reticulum is only separated from the rumen by an overflow connection. Know as the hardware stomach, this is where all foreign material like a nail, goes that a goat swallows. It has a similar microbial makeup to the rumen.
The omasum consists of many layers and folds of tissue, kind of like the pages of a book, that grinds and squeezes the feed.
The abomasum adds key enzymes and components to the digestive system which help break down proteins.
Goats will regurgitate small clumps of food after they have eaten and rechew them (chewing their cud). This helps the particle size get smaller and more readily digested by enzymes as well as assisting in the passing of the material out of the rumen.
When a goat is born the abomasum is the largest of the stomachs and the other three are much much smaller. Initially a kid digests food like a monogastric animal, but as the kid starts nibbling on forage it develops the other three stomachs to their full capacity.
How Should THis Change How I feed My Goats?
So what does this all mean? I don’t know what is and isn’t available for feed in your area so I can’t tell you specific plants to feed and not feed your goats, but here are some ideas for implementing how goats eat naturally.
- Add more weedy and woody browse plants to your goats diet. Toss those garden weeds to the goats!
- Mix it up, make sure your goat’s feed has a variety of plants in it.
- Make your goat’s hay feeder so that they are eating at eye level.
- Add a brushy patch to your goat’s normal pasture diet. (I’ve thought it would be a good idea to let my goats run through our raspberry patch. One it will feed the goats and two, it will maybe make for less pruning for me.)
Goats can and will thrive off of more grass based diets so don’t think that you can’t have ANY grass. Maybe just lean more towards a more diverse and varied diet and try to include shrubs and forbs. Any other ideas for how to implement this?
On the Ground Advice
There are other things that are just good to know when it comes to the best feed for goats, next we’ll cover just some where-the-rubber-hits-the-road advice for feeding goats.
Because goats are more selective eaters they will pick through their food. This can lead to a lot of waste, which can be minimized with a good hay feeder. (Check out our post on the best homemade hay feeders for goats.)
Alfalfa is good, but can be too rich for goats, especially bucks or non lactating goats. Also don’t give bucks a lot of grain, too much grain can cause kidney stones and other problems that can kill your bucks.
A note on supplements. There are supplements up the wazoo that you can give your goats. That isn’t my cup of tea, I find it more complex than it needs to be and I prefer to give my goats a high quality, diverse diet and avoid supplementing. That being said I will give my goats a salt/mineral block or supplement from Redmond, and I will give my does barely on the milk stand to up their protein intake for milk production. If you find that you are having a problem and are looking for a great guide to supplements for goats, here is one from GoatFarmers.
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