Goat Feed besides Purina Goat Chow

[Hollywood Goats]

I feed mine stock and stable sweet feed, and plenty of hay! they love it and it is for goats, cows, sheep, and horses, the chickens like to pick at it too! it costs $6.95 for 50 lbs at my feed store.

 

[()relics]

Yeah I am going to stay out of this one...Just Because...I do use DE to dust my chickens and as a free choice mineral supplement but have no proof of any sort of results...I will go with the "can't hurt" line of reasoning here...I don't like using bagged minerals formulated for anything but goats....I feed pelleted feed nearly all year,medicated with decox or rumensin, to 1 group of animals or another...I don't like Purina products or generically packaged sweet feed....Enough said

Don't listen to TSC employees*.. About 99.98% of the time, they have no idea what they're talking about.......



* If you happen to be in Indiana at a TSC and the lady's name is Kim...Kim Roll...a la Rollfarms...it's prolly best to listen.

I must say you sidestepped a real firestorm there....

 

[cmjust0]

Yeah I am going to stay out of this one...Just Because...I do use DE to dust my chickens and as a free choice mineral supplement but have no proof of any sort of results...I will go with the "can't hurt" line of reasoning here...

DE as a dustbath for chickens...perfect usage! I would never, ever tell someone not to do that because it's pretty much what DE is proven to be good for.

As for the "can't hurt" component...the price tag of "food grade" DE hurts my eyeballs just to look at! I don't even pay that much for a bag of really good mineral and I know it does some good!

Other than that, though...yeah, I don't figure it hurts anything.

Don't listen to TSC employees*.. About 99.98% of the time, they have no idea what they're talking about.......

* If you happen to be in Indiana at a TSC and the lady's name is Kim...Kim Roll...a la Rollfarms...it's prolly best to listen.

I must say you sidestepped a real firestorm there....

I know, right?

 

[cmjust0]

I feed mine stock and stable sweet feed, and plenty of hay! they love it and it is for goats, cows, sheep, and horses, the chickens like to pick at it too! it costs $6.95 for 50 lbs at my feed store.

If it's for goats and sheep, it's inadequate for goats...probably inadequate for cattle and horses, too.

Copper is the issue.. I'd always heard and noted for myself that "all-stock" types of feeds contained *no* copper so as to make them acceptable for sheep, so my advice was look at the tag and note the lack of copper and understand that goats absolutely require copper..

However.. :/

I've recently been informed (and have verified) that some "all-stock" type feeds actually do contain copper...but in amounts of 10ppm or less. I'm not sure if that's a recent development on the part of manufacturers of "all-stock" feeds to befuddle the oft-given advice that "all-stock," sheep feed, and sheep & goat feed isn't appropriate for goats or what, but...well, there's copper in some of them now.

However, 10ppm is still WOEFULLY INADEQUATE for goats. You should be looking more in the >25ppm (up to 50ppm, IMO) range.

So...having said that...my new advice is as follows: If it won't KILL a sheep, it's no good for goats.



...but seriously. If it won't kill a sheep, it's no good for goats. I mean that.. My advice would be to get your goats on goat feed ASAP.

 

[Hollywood Goats]

I know that it does not have sufficient minerals, that is why I give them minerals in addition, I am sorry that I forgot to mention that.

 

[Hykue]

Thank you for all the feed information. I think I might have a hard time finding the most appropriate feed here - the salt block that I checked in passing the other day was for "sheep and goats" and DID contain copper. I was mightily confused. I'll get it all figured out eventually, hopefully before I even get my new goats home.

On the DE thing, I read about how great it was in the garden, and I had a cutworm problem, and some places claimed that it was good for "soft-bodied" insects (like cutworms). So I put it out around all my little plants in the corral (yes, I planted a garden in the corral. The previous owners took the gate, and I didn't have any large livestock anyway . . . it's fantastically rich soil). It didn't seem to work, so the next night when I went on cutworm-stomping duty, I brought out a tuna can with DE in the bottom. I found a cutworm, I plunked it in the tuna can, I went inside and played video games. I was going to stop when the cutworm died. I played until very very late that night. That cutworm must have traveled a mile around that tuna can, through DE the whole way, and it showed absolutely no sign of any ill effects. It was in it for hours and hours.

Since then, I have heard mostly claims that it's good for hard-bodied insects, and I haven't tried the experiment with any beetles, so I can't speak to that. I also don't know how similar cutworms are to internal parasites . . . cutworms are actually insect larvae and most internal parasites are true worms. But if it's supposed to have a physical effect, I imagine it would be similar for those two kinds of critter. I will have to give some to my chickies to dust bath in when they get a little bigger, because I have about 24 pounds of it left. Can't hurt . . . Incidentally, the chickens have a solution for my cutworm problem . . . it sounds like this "aaaaaaaw" (you know, the open mouth sound).

(Edited because I was so sleepy that I said parasitic worms were insects - and I'm a biologist! How embarrassing - I must be very tired.)