While planning out our own garden year, it's also time to take stock of how our goat-fodder garden worked out over the last twelve months. You can see my number-crunching preparatory post here, and this is what we actually planted for our two spoiled darlings:

Crop	Square footage for goats	Conclusions
Butternut Squash	135	We'll probably run out in early March. This is the goat favorite and the seeds are natural dewormers, so I'm glad I grew far more than I planned to!
Carrots	60	We ran out in January --- not bad since I planned on feeding concentrates to a single goat and ended up feeding two. (I'm currently feeding Abigail to help her regain weight after drying off and Artemesia to keep on her weight since she's hopefully pregnant.)
Mangels	15	Our goats didn't really eat these without lots of begging and pleading, so I composted most of the fodder beets and won't grow them again.
Sweet potatoes	45	I planted these in a bad spot and didn't get a high yield. We've mostly been saving the crop for human consumption since they're one of Mom's favorites, but our goats like what I've given them too.
Sunflowers	75	For some reason, almost none of my sunflowers came up in 2015. I know from past experience that our goats love them, though, so I'll do better next year.
Field corn	60	I grew this mostly for leaf-matter production since I'm dubious about feeding grain to ruminants. The goats loved eating the corn when I let them have it, but they refused field-corn stalks and leaves in favor of sweet-corn stalks and leaves. I won't grow field corn again for our spoiled darlings.
Sorghum	15	Our goats love sorghum stalks and leaves and the plants are easy to grow...but I got spooked when I realized the food could potentially poison our girls if eaten after a drought or freeze. Nothing bad happened, but I'm on the fence about growing it again.

So, focusing just on goat-approved crops that did well for us, a plan for one goat might consist of:

Crop	Square footage for goats
Butternut Squash	80
Carrots	45
Sweet potatoes	45
Sunflowers	75

Of course, that's just concentrates above and beyond the hay/wild-grazing ration. In addition, I'll admit that we also feed our goats about a pint apiece of alfalfa pellets per day and we splurge on fancy kelp for minerals too. But the plan above is a good start on a healthy goat diet that will keep total feed costs for a herd of two goats about even with the cost for a flock of ten chickens --- not bad.

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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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