The Shape of Goats To Come

The irony of being a farmer is that when you breed any animals, you automatically raise yourself up to the level of "breeder." You are now asked to make assumptions about the genetic fitness of the two parents and then it's time to play the "Breeding Game"


Breeding is always exciting - you have to think simultaneously about the past, the present and the future, Christmas Carol-style

• The Past - What have offspring of each animal looked like in the past? Never bred before... oh, now you have to look at that animal's parents.
• The Present - What are they like now? Good characteristics vs bad. Which characteristics seem likely to persist for this breeding? What good traits will be swamped?
  
• The Future - What will we do if the offspring don't look good at first? Or after 1 year? Or 2? How long can we wait?

In other words, you need to keep in mind the heritability of the traits, your breeding strategy, and which animals to keep and which to sell. We have written some long explanations of how we have made our decisions - none of them easy and, given the nature of genetics, none of them truly able to provide predictable results. Click here to find out what strategies we use.

It really almost always comes down to hope. The probabilities are always just that - and since our understanding of the dominance/recessive setup for dairy goats is very low... well, we really don't know what will happen with any individual breeding. The best hopes then go to the "best of the best" breeding at the top farms (or small farms that are lucky to start with outstanding genetics) - those outcomes should be better on average which makes those offspring pricier. Are they better tho? The breeder lists a $600 doe kid for sale - is she twice as good as my $300 one? Or is she 10% better? 25%? Were the outstanding genetics in that breeding heritable, were the traits influenced by the environment, did chance produce an offspring that ends up with recessive, undesirable phenotypes?

It is not just the breeder that sets the price, so do the buyers by putting more value on certain breedings and trusting the assessment of the breeder. Experience helps here, but probability should confuse the issue as well. Art, not science. It is always a great idea to start with the best genetics - it is figuring out which animals have the best genetics that is the challenge.

Here are two daughters from the same kidding - Moonlight and Starlight. Which one do you keep? Why? We can't keep both... and they change as they mature, just like humans. Perhaps they will look better (or worse) when they freshen and have an udder to examine. How many times have breeders sold kids only to buy them back a couple of years later! Click here to learn more about our strategies (imperfect as they are).