This week, I’d like to take the chance to tell you about my goat.
I know what’s running through your mind. She has a goat?!?!! Why hasn’t she mentioned this before? Where does she keep it? What’s its name?
WHY HAVEN’T WE BEEN TOLD ABOUT THIS GOAT?
Well, it’s because it is not really in my life anymore. You can bet your buttons that if I had a goat in my backyard I would talk about it nonstop, to everyone. My goat lives somewhere across the world, with a family that I have never met.
I got her as a Christmas present two years ago. It was arguably the best present that I’ve ever received. Through the nonprofit organization “Heifer International”, my parents purchased a goat in my name that went to impoverished family that needed it.
Click the pictures to link to more info
Heifer International operates under that old adage “give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for life.” In its early years, the idea was that people could donate money to sponsor an animal for a family that needed it. The animal could provide milk, meat, wool, offspring, and power for tools like plows, depending on what type of animal it was. Heifer International would give the animal to a family and train them on how to take care of it and grow their business. Today, you can donate a cow, water buffalo, bees, a sheep, a goat, a llama, an alpaca, rabbits, chickens, geese, a pig, fish fingerlings, or ducks. The training and immediate resources this animal gives to the family can become a source of income and nutrition. The offspring and the training can also be passed on to community members to lift whole communities out of poverty.
Today, the repertoire of Heifer International has expanded. You can choose what initiative you want your money to go to, or decide to send a general donation that can be put where the nonprofit feels their recipients need it most. Some of their other projects include providing resources for sustainable farming, providing necessities like stoves, irrigation, and nutrition, and empowering women. Your donation can give building supplies for houses or trees for a farm.
Heifer International has also expanded the ways that people who want to get involved can help them fundraise. In addition to the traditional method of donating directly to fund an animal, you can facilitate one of the many programs they’ve designed. They have a reading and donation program for schools, and specially designed programs for congregations that have a faith-based component. Heifer International also has several ways to get involved in service projects, both in the U.S. and overseas.
I think that is so important for every person living on this big Earth to take responsibility for our co-inhabitants. I don’t
want to sound mushy or sentimental here, but there is a lot of bad in the world. Nearly one billion people live in extreme poverty. Heifer International has helped 25 million families lift themselves out of hunger and poverty by empowering them with animals, like goats, and more. And that is incredible.
If you’d like to donate to this awesome charity, click here. If you’d like to donate a goat, click here. And if you’d like to learn more, click here or listen to Alton Brown explain it:
Last week we discussed the goat digestive system, in all its ruminant glory. Now that we have that background knowledge of the way a goat eats, we can get into the fun topic of how humans have made use of the goat digestive tract.
Goats have narrow mouths and because of this can be selective in what they eat. They are classified as grazers picking out certain leaves, grasses and coarse plant material to eat, as opposed to browsers like cattle and sheep that have wider mouths and tend to shuffle their noses along the ground, eating grass without discretion.
Even though goats have the potential to be picky eaters, they’re not. While many goats have a favorite food, most plant materials look appealing to goats. On production farms, the feed that goats get centers around high energy cash crops: hay, alfalfa, soybeans, etc. But in some operations, goat owners have taken advantage of goats wide appetite to feed the goats in a way that benefits both landscape and goat.
I have seen one example of this when I worked at Piney Mt. Orchard, where farmer Megan Rulli’s goats were periodically moved to areas on the farm that had large amounts of brush material. She could have taken these problem plants with a tractor, but as a treat for the goats and a more time efficient solution she instead used a movable electric fence to temporarily relocate the goats. The result was a change in scenery and a tasty snack for the goats, and a large swath of usable land for Megan.
Source: reec.illinois.edu
Source: grassoutlet.com
Source: vetstreet.com
One entrepreneur that noticed the goats’ ability to clear land had a revolutionary idea: rent out the goats as a kind of living lawnmower. This idea has had varying success across regions, but a few companies, like “Rent a Goat” seem to have sticking power. You can even go on Amazon to find a goat renting service near you (here). These companies generally operate by sending a representative out to the property of an interested landowner, negotiating price for the area and work to be done, and supplying goats and goat care to clear the land. The suggested average is four fully grown goats per acre.
Once they are there, the goats will eat almost anything; they’ll take out the local poison ivy population and trim the grass down to a manageable length.
Goats as an alternative to mechanized lawnmowers have proven themselves as an adorable, affordable, and “green” solution to clearing land. There are some problems that arise with using goats as landscaping tools, though. One is that the prescence of high toxicity weeds, such as nightshade (which goats generally know not to eat), and/or herbicide residue could pose a health problem to the goats. They also will need a supplement of nutrients and minerals to keep optimal health, especially if the landscape in question is completely or mostly just grass. The last challenge that arrives from using goats as lawnmowers is purely ascetic: goats have no desire to make sure your lawn is pretty, and will leave chunks of a plant behind if they don’t fancy it and will paw at the ground to make soft dirt beds for themselves. Sometimes using a mix of breeds in your landscaping herd, in hopes that one type of goat will eat what another might reject, can lessen this problem.
Goats make fun and efficient landscapers. If you have goats, and you also have a weed or brush problem, it’s a good idea to get help from your goat friends! If you don’t have goats but want some for a day or week to clear your landscape, there are goats available!
Source: modernfarmer.com
One word of caution: goats are incredibly intelligent and playful animals. If you want them to trim the grass in your sculpture garden or solar panel field, be wary of jumping goats.
Often, in comics and on TV, we see the goat as the ornery farm animal that enjoys eating, and will eat anything! There’s a common image in our minds of a goat chewing on a tin can, but walking near a goat pen you would never see that. The myth of goats eating tin cans actually started when a goat was trying to taste a bit of the past from a can’s label.
So if not cans, what do goats eat and why?
While goats may not be the avid tin recyclers we dream of (due to lack of an ability to digest metal), they are specially equipped to eat many foods that we humans couldn’t dream of eating. Their design makes them perfect for foraging for high-fiber, high-energy foods.
Goats fall into a category of animals called “ruminants”. They’re in good company: cows, sheep, and deer are also ruminants. These animals are cud-chewing and cloven hooved, and thus part of the exclusive group of animals God told Moses on Mt. Sinai were clean to eat. This distinction is shaping diets still today in kosher foods. The bigger biological distinction for this group, however, is their four-chambered stomach.
Now, I know what you might be thinking.
“Wow! Four chambers! That seems… excessive.”
But wait! These animals really do need and use all four chambers for the food that they eat. Each chamber has a special design and function.
When food first enters a goat, it will enter through the mouth. This may seem too obvious to put down in words, but it really is an important step in the digestive tract because of the physical and chemical breakdown that happens with chewing and saliva.
Next, the food travels through the esophagus to the rumen. Here’s where it gets interesting.
The rumen is the largest “stomach” a goat has, and can actually hold from three to six gallons of material. This gut is filled with many bacteria that break down the cellulose in the food eaten into volatile fatty acids, which are then absorbed by the rumen wall and used by the goat. Goats’ bacteria friends in their rumens are the reason that they can eat high fiber forages, and why they obtain nearly 80% of their diets energy from activity in the rumen. Goats will periodically “cough up” material from the rumen to rechew as a cud, called rumination, as part of the digestive process.
The reticulum is commonly used as tripe
The next step in the digestive tract is the reticulum. It lies in front of and below the rumen, and serves as a catch for any heavy pieces in the food. It’s honeycombed lining allows it to hold trash that might have gotten swallowed, so that it doesn’t continue down the system.
After the reticulum is the omasum. This organ in distinctively built with long folds, so that it can absorb excess moisture and leftover volatile fatty acids.
From there, food moves to the abomasum. This organ is the closest to a human stomach out of the four. It contains hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes, which further break down food particles before the material enters the intestines.
In the intestines, the function of the organs is similar to that of human intestines. There is final liquid and nutrition absorption before excretion.
Now, when someone hits you with that fun fact, “cows have four stomachs,” give it right back to them with “goats do too!”
eating, and will eat anything! There’s a common image in our minds of a goat chewing on a tin can, but walking near a goat pen you would never see that. The myth of goats eating tin cans actually started when a goat was trying to taste a bit of the past from a can’s label.
