Goat Facilities

As well as a shed, your goat will enjoy a pen to exercise in. Goat pens should be easy to keep goats in and dogs out and provide at least 25 sq.ft. of floor space per goat. If possible, they should be even larger so that your goats can race around and kick up their heels and really exercise if they want to. Meat goats especially need to build a lot of muscle to have a good meat carcass. One of the simplest, but not necessarily cheapest, pens to build is to make a 16 ft square pen using 4 - 6 ft. high steel fence posts (driven 1 1/2 ft. deep) and 4 - 16 ft. long metal livestock panels. The panels can be wired to the posts except at one corner where two sided snaps can be used instead to provide a gate. If you put your posts at the middle of the panel span rather than at the corners, your panels will sag less.

Another good fencing for pens is woven net wire fencing at least 42, and preferably, 48 inches high. An ideal woven fence has a small mesh size at the bottom (to keep kids in) and gets larger at the middle and top.Horned goats need mesh with 12 inch wide vertical spacing to avoid getting their horns caught in it, otherwise, 8 inch spacing is sufficient. Goats can get their heads hung up in 6 inch spacing. Welded wire fencing tends to break at the welds after a year of goats repeatably standing on it, but can be used if a strand of electric wire is run about 4 inches in from it at the top (use “offset” plastic insulators) to discourage goats from leaning on it. Electric wire fences alone are tricky since at least a few times a year you can count on them malfunctioning and losing their charge. Some goats are very quick to notice when an electric fence stops working and upon escaping may head straight for a busy road or your family’s favorite fruit trees or some very poisonous landscaping plants like yew or rhododendron.

5-gallon plastic buckets work fine. Try to hang the waterer high enough (just a little above her tail) so that your goat cannot poop in it. It will save you labor in the summer if you can reach the waterer from the outside of the pen with a hose to fill it. Even so, it will still need to be cleaned out often. In the wintertime, plan on refilling your doe’s water twice daily, as it may freeze soon after you bring it to her. Does that are milking will drink and milk more if you give them warm water in winter.

There are many different designs available for feed mangers. You want a manger that your goat 1) can get her head into easily, 2) not drag hay back out of easily, and 3) not poop or jump in. You will need about 12 to 18 inches of headroom per goat. Mangers should be located where they stay dry. Usually, you need a feed trough that is at least 10 inches wide and 24 inches tall. The walls of it should be solid for the bottom 10 inches. The remainder of the wall should either have “keyhole openings” cut into it for the goat to put her head in or be made of 1 “ x 2 “ parallel, vertical slats with 7 inches of head space between them (9 inches for mature bucks) and angled slightly (@ 30 degree slant). Some folks like to put their mangers up high and have the goat stand on a toe board with her front feet to eat. However, heavily pregnant does can slip off the toe bar and choke to death before anyone can reach them. Always make sure keyhole openings and slats extend low enough that the goat will not choke if it stumbles to its knees. Your goat’s salt can be put in one corner of the manger or in special holders available at most feed stores.