Meat and Livestock Australia

30 Livestock Randall is currently running 4,000 breeding goats with a capacity of 7,000-9,000 goats in good seasons. While data is not collected to calculate kidding rates, anecdotal evidence indicates that there has been some decline. An indicator of this is a large paddock that in the past Randall would stock with 2,000 goats and muster 5,000 in a years’ time. More recently he will not muster more than 4,000. This is thought to be a result of predation via increasing dog pressure and declining seasons and associated hard culling. Calculation of reproductive rates is also made difficult by the inconsistency of selling times. Goats are sold primarily in response to feed availability rather than number of stock or time of year. As seasons improve and there is ample feed available, numbers are allowed to build, whereas numbers are drastically reduced as conditions deteriorate. Over the past five years, annual sale numbers have ranged from 12,300 to 3,600. About 2,500 Dorpers are also run in order to give some market diversification to the business. Dorpers provide an alternate end product to goats while still complementing the low input system being run. Randall notes that Dorpers have very similar grazing habits to goats so they are not complementary in the context of feed utilization. However they are able to be managed in very similar ways allowing simplification across the business. He also warns against running Dorpers and goats in the same paddock as they tend to learn to avoid being mustered as a result of experiencing musters targeted at the other species. Randall is intending to re-balance his enterprise mix to a 50:50 split. Husbandry Goats are weaned once annually or twice in drier years, with all saleable bucks sold and all does and smalls bucks retained. At all mustering events, any goats with strong rangeland characteristics are culled. Breeding It is estimated that 70 per cent of the total goat herd would be cross breeds, an increase of five per cent over the past five years. Previous goals had been set to reach 100 per cent of goats being Boer composites, however as Randall realigned his focus to developing a low cost, commodity based enterprise, the importance placed on this has been reduced. A primary factor in this has been the resources required to achieve reasonable survival of Boers. Since a reasonable portion of Boer cross does have been established, the effort and investment associated with cross breeding is no longer warranted. Randall also believes there has been an increased influence of rangeland goats as he has begun running crossbred goats in two large paddocks on the boundary where incursions are more common. Goats that have strong rangeland characteristics such as long coats and unruly horns are culled. However there has been a substantial reduction of intensity from times when any pure rangeland bucks seen in the paddock would be caught and removed from composite herds. Bucks are joined year round, primarily due to the risk of rangeland bucks joining cycling does if bucks are not present within the managed herd at the time. The primary focus of all culling and selection is carcass weight. The influence of Boer genetics has increased both weight gain and dressing percentage of carcasses, however Randall expects that these traits would be on the decline with reduced Boer influence. Goats displaying heavy Boer influence