Ever So Goats
Registered and Commercial Boer goats with a few Alpines
Update!!
A lot of personal growth within our herd – 11/21/2022
I realized that I am not very good at selling goats, and I don’t care to get better at being a salesman. I do love the truth. I don’t know how much other people look at my website and I would rather use it to help myself keep track of things happening with my goats. That being said, I’m putting my impressions/opinions about my goats on here, good or bad. If you are curious about something, feel free to contact me about more information. I’ve kept a couple bucks and have had repeat buyers, but unless someone expresses interest in my bucks, I’m not keeping any for the “per chance” buyer.
What We Breed for in Our Herd
Our herd isn’t like every one else’s, for starters, we are in the middle of nowhere. We don’t show because the shows are too far away so we find value in other ways. We collect data on our goats to make the most productive goats we can.
We collect birthing weights, weaning weights, dam weights at kidding. We write down data about kidding ease, teat structure, and hoof trimming information. We use this information to make make management decisions. This year I figured out that I definitely want to kid in the colder months because the kids grow faster, granted we also had bigger birthing weights in the colder months than we did in the warmer months which contributed to better kidding ease in the warmer months.
Disease Testing is important to us as we like to have hardy animals that can last for many years. It costs money to replace a goat and if you can get at least 2 more years out of a goat because there isn’t CAE, CL, or Johne’s then it is definitely worth it for us. It’s also very traumatic to have your favorite goat pass away from a wasting disease, and I don’t want to do that again.
Lastly, we breed for what we like. There is hybrid vigor in crossbred goats that can’t be discounted, but you have to have your purebred breeders for outcrosses to know what traits are being bred onto the kids.
Our Herd, Past and Present
We started with a small herd of Alpines and slowly changed over to Boer goats. We raise Alpines as a source of milk for the house and the few bottle kids we have. The Boers goats make up most of our herd, we are registering some of our Boer goats but our biggest goal is to create a herd of good dams with very muscular sires to raise strong healthy kids. I help as much as I have energy and patience for (sometimes I need to take a nap, because collecting data is time consuming, but I will also quickly pull a kid so I can go inside and take that nap without worrying about the birthing process).
Why We Raise Goats
I, Jessica, grew up with goats and I enjoyed having them. When Nick and I got married in 2010 we started our own goat herd in 2011. We were raising only Alpines until we started our Boer herd in 2015, the same year we had our first son. The goats are a very mild animal and are safe for our two sons to be around and the boys enjoy the silly goats too! 2020 goat prices increased and Nick decided that maybe we should increase our herd size, so we are currently working on that as well.
Current Events
November 21, 2022 – I finished kidding out our last doe Monday with a kidding rate of 211%. We attempted to breed out of season and it worked relatively well. All my older girls got bred, but only one of my yearlings got bred (we semen tested the buck and he is good, so he might simply be a little stupid or it didn’t work on the younger girls). We had Appletini test positive Johne’s test this year and culled her (she only had wethers so we don’t have any of her kids in our herd).
I recently stopped being a Steering Committee member for the Dakota Goat Association, I want to focus more on my own herd and my family and I couldn’t do it all. I’m excited to focus more on my herd and trying to collect more data. We are still in our first year of participating in NSIP (which hasn’t been updated on their website). We are going to try it for 5 years and see if it is a useful tool for us.
July 2, 2021 – Our last group of bred does is finally kidding and so far all have had twins, 6 doelings and 2 bucklings. I have 3 more left to kid. We sent in fecal samples to test for Johne’s Disease on the bunch of goats we hope to breed at the end of July. We are trying to increase our herd numbers by keeping our own replacements so we have no “keeper” does for sale. I have retained the 2 best bucklings from the spring kidding and I might offer one of them for sale. Lucian at the right is one of my keeper bucks.
August 2020 I, Jessica, was having health problems and we found out that I had a tumor behind my liver, in a place that was hard to operate on. October 2020 I had surgery to remove the tumor and have been healing (I had a lifting restriction of only 15 pounds for 6 weeks). Our family has been fairly healthy since my surgery but I didn’t get a chance to take all the pictures I wanted to take or trim hooves as early as I would have liked. I’m happy to say that my home grown buck has excellent hooves that grow in my favorite way so that they are easy to trim.
Fall of 2019 we bought a beautiful Boer buck that died and during the autopsy he tested positive for Johne’s Disease. We tested the entire herd and about 60% tested positive. We made the hard decision to take kids off at birth to raise on pastuerized milk and cull anything that wasn’t bottle raised. The new babies are on new land that the old herd never was on. We have been told by a veterinarian from the University of Wisconsin to do a fecal test for Johne’s before each breeding season and cull what tests positive. I’m hoping all our hard work spring 2020 pays off. All of the Johne’s tests have come back negative for the kids in 2020 but we are not comfortable ensuring a Johne’s free herd until we have 2 consecutive years of negative tests. I’m waiting until January 1st, 2021 to register goats, that way they are registered before they kid. I keep records on my goats for how big the kids are at birth, how much they weigh at weaning, if the mother required kidding assistance, and general health data. I haven’t found another herd near me that does this and so I’m trying to keep my own stock as I have bred and culled based on data rather than show records.
Contact Us
30409 106th Street, Herreid, SD 57632
605-204-0489
eversogoats@hotmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/EverSoGoats