Goat Math: Why do I have too many goats?
Maybe you are new to goats and haven’t heard of goat math. Or you come from dogs, chickens, cats, horses or any other sort of animal which has its own form of X math. I think there might even be car math for gear heads. All these maths are the way you justify something to yourself, your spouse or others to keep, buy, etc more of something. This is not to be confused with the goat grazing problem which is a real mathematical problem.
Examples of goat math
It is your first kidding season and you keep all the doe kids, even though you said you wouldn’t. I personally did this.
You keep a buck from your first kidding season, but you really don’t have the eye to evaluate your goats yet and your mentor recommended you wait.
There is a deal on a really fancy goat and you bought it even though you told yourself no more goat purchases this year.
There is a buy one get a wether free deal so you decide to get the wether as a buck buddy.
You don’t want to have a buck on your property so you get set-up to do artificial inseminate but spend more money on semen than you will ever be able to inseminate your goats with.
You have just moved to property and got all the critters. Goats, chickens, ducks, cows, pigs, you name it. I am personally guilty of this.
Is goat math bad?
Goat math isn’t necessarily bad, we just all have the maximum number of goats we can comfortably have. There are many limiting factors and they all impact people differently. Maybe the price of alfalfa is your limit. Or how many feet you can comfortably trim in a month. Or how many does you can kid in a year. Whatever the factor is we all have limits.
What happens to everyone but the very most disciplined goat breeder is they get to a point where they have too many goats and need to reduce numbers. Perhaps the income you thought the goats would produce did not materialize and they are too expensive. Or your family is not as into the goats as you are, so you are doing all the care yourself. Or you just have too many animals to care for maybe it isn’t just goats you got into a bunch of different types of livestock all at once.
What happens then is you have to make difficult decisions that might not have been as hard before. For example selling does from my first couple kidding seasons would be much easier than trying to sell 5 year old does that are dry right now. I wouldn’t have more does than I could possibly freshen and be in the situation where I have three year old first fresheners.
There are other factors
Timing is also everything. In 2020 and 2021 goats were HOT, they were really really HOT. Due to COVID people were moving out of the cities and there was a lot more interest in homesteading. They bought goats, they bred goats, they sold goats. There were generally too many goats! Then reality of dairy animals hit home. You really have to enjoy them, dairy animals are the biggest commitment of all the farm animals. Milking is no joke. Even goats as pets can be a lot of work. I ran into someone recently who bought from me about six months ago and they said “they are doing great, we really enjoy them now that we can contain them.”
This has happened across dogs and cats in addition to livestock. People went back to their pre-COVID lives and their COVID hobbies don’t fit them anymore. This means the goat market is very difficult right now.
What I wish I did instead
Patience is really key to breeding livestock, goats are no different. Competing is one of the things I see makes it really hard for people. Everyone who is showing their goats wants to win, but it takes time to get to that level. Genetics is a big part of it, but so is your management style as well.
Have goals
The key thing is to have goals. When I started out I wanted goats for milk. This shifted to really enjoying showing. Wanting goats just for milk and showing can be very different things. I bought good genetics, but through goat math I certainly kept too many goats. Being more clear on those goals can help you decide who comes and goes.
Have a plan to market and sell your goats
Some people are okay with taking their goats to auction. They are livestock and that is an individual decision. I prefer to know where my goats are going. I don’t mind if they go for meat, I just went to know they are going to be very well cared for up into that moment.
If you are going to individually you need to have a plan. In my case my website was often really out of date. So to sell a single goat it felt like a lot of extra work, because I had to get things updated. Key is keeping up with things.
Make sure it stays fun
Finally you spend a lot of time with your goats, make sure it doesn’t become so overwhelming you aren’t enjoying it anymore. I started the year with over 70 goats and made a real effort to get my numbers down to something more manageable. For me that is about 40 goats. To keep some kids from the 2024 kidding season though I’m going to have to make a few more decisions.
Keeping goat math under control allows me to do silly things like dress goats up in costumes
Happy goating
I can’t make the right decisions for you, but having a clear idea of what you want will make your goat experience much better. We all experience goat math at some point, just don’t let it rule you.