Homemade Copper Boluses

Copper is a vital nutrient for goats - what would kill a sheep would only be an appetizer for goats. This comes from goats eating shoots and stems where sheep prefer grass (in fact, a goat on grass-only won't get enough copper). The shoots have more copper (any shoot that will bend has elevated copper, sticks don't have enough) and giving goats brush or shrubs to eat will give them enough.

We realized within a month of getting the goats that they needed more copper - Luna started gnawing on the barn wood, a sure sign of copper deficiency. We started reading about copper needs, toxicity, and supplements.

For four years, our daily top-dressing of copper came from a recipe from Pat Coleby's "Natural Goat Care"

• 4 cups of copper sulfate (from feedstore)
• 1 cup of dolomitic lime
• 1 cup of kelp powder

This works very well at 1/8 teaspoon per goat (50-80 lbs) per day - we got good results even with the darker coat colors. But we couldn't sure that everyone was getting the appropriate dose since we let the does move around between the food buckets during feeding time. Another solution. Boluses? Boluses should last 4-6 months and would make one less thing to add to the food bowl in the morning (and yes, that is less doe screaming, yea!).

Our copper bolus journey started when Laura at Dawnland Farm sent us a link to putting the copper inside a marshmallow (here). We had read about copper boluses as effective long-term solutions at the excellent Saanendoah webpage about copper, dosing, and soil charts (here).

from Saanendoah.com

We tried the marshmallow trick - but the marshmallows were hard to keep closed up. Even fresh ones weren't quite soft enough to fold back up on themselves. And then while some goats may love to eat marshmallows, ours forced us to push them into their mouths and then hold their muzzles shut until they finally swallowed them. (Think of giving a cat a pill - same principle with sharper molars).

So, we went with gelcaps - we load them up by hand with the copper (we use Copasure 12.5 g bolus for calves, unload and reweigh out dosages for the much smaller goats). And that works much easier.

Plus we time them to last 4 months (a good bet to stay on the low end of 4-6 months since our hard water means less copper is available) and we stack wormer, copper, and hoof-trimming into one session on the stand.