Writers are fond of telling new goat-keepers that our herds are browsers, not grazers. In other words, goats are supposed to crave tree leaves. But do they really?

Watching our goats graze, my answer is --- sometimes yes, sometimes no. If given a choice between a lush stand of vegetatively growing oats and nearly all tree leaves, Abigail makes a beeline for the oats. On the other hand, black locust leaves always hit the spot over vegetation on the ground.

In the end it seems to come down to succulence, protein, and energy content. Even though goats are ruminants, their bellies are relatively small compared to those of cows. And milk production uses up a lot of calories. So a milking doe like Abigail needs to choose plants of optimal nutrition, which seems to consist of honeysuckle, multiflora rose, black locust leaves, spring grass, and oats. She'll eat tidbits of lots of other plants, but those few offerings seem to make up the bulk of her diet when I allow it.

In the summer and with insufficient pastures, black locust is the easiest high-quality leaf matter to wrangle for our goats. Luckily, our herd's pastures are located in subpar soil, which is the preferred habitat of this nitrogen-fixing tree.

The trouble is, my current method of cutting one large limb a day for our herd isn't a long-term strategy. Cut limbs do resprout (as you can see to the right), but I suspect I can only get away with coppicing a tree once or twice a year if I want it to survive.

On the other hand, goats have such sensitive mouths that they're able to pick off leaves one at a time, leaving the thorny branches intact. Which makes me think that if I plan it right, I might be able to bend branches down so they're within nibbling reach, then let them bound back up to regrow. Or, since we rotate our pastures frequently, it's possible I might get away with simply letting tree leaves regrow while the goats are absent on limbs that are always within goat reach.

Plenty of fun observation and experimentation ahead as we build the optimal goat pastures. What fun! I almost miss the days before we figured out the best way to pasture chickens...but not quite.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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