Prominent Problems in Goat Farming and Countermeasures

????Prominent Problems

Blindness in goat breed selection. When many goat farming investors first enter the goat farming industry, they do not know what breed is suitable to choose. When purchasing breeding goats for the first time, they are generally in a state of blind breed selection and purchasing. It takes two or three years of detours before they basically figure out what breeds to choose and establish a suitable breed structure.

Lack of planning in forage reserve. Due to lack of farming experience and technology, they have no experience regarding what forage goats need or how much is needed. When winter comes, no forage supply has been prepared, and therefore no reserve has been made, resulting in winter weight loss in goats and malnutrition in lambs.

Nutritional or anti-nutritional factor diseases occur frequently. Using farm household products and food processing by-products (such as okara, distillers' grains, sweet potato residue, seven-bean residue, etc.) as goat feed is an important way to reduce feeding costs. However, the incomplete and unbalanced nutritional composition of these by-products, as well as the anti-nutritional factors in the by-products, have also brought major economic losses to the healthy growth and reproduction of goats. According to reports from farmers: after feeding ewes mainly with okara or distillers' grains, the mortality rate of the lambs produced reached 50% due to clinical symptoms such as weakness, emaciation, and inability to stand. The main reasons are insufficient or unbalanced calcium and phosphorus as well as the anti-nutritional factors in okara.

Artificial supplementary feeding methods are unreasonable. Most goat farmers, due to lack of basic knowledge of scientific supplementary feeding, generally give emergency artificial supplementary feeding to goats ready for market in the 3 months before marketing. Those not going to market are generally not given supplementary feeding. At the same time, even when supplementary feeding is given, generally only energy substances such as corn and wheat bran are supplied, while the appropriate supplementation of protein, minerals and other raw materials is neglected. This not only leads to waste of materials but also causes nutritional imbalance.

?Causes

Lack of relevance in training content. Livestock and poultry breeding technology trainers often gather all farmers together and speak in general terms about livestock and poultry breeds, feed preparation, disease prevention and control, feeding management, etc. There is less training on prominent problems in production practice, and it fails to truly improve the practical operational level of breeding technology and disease prevention and control.

Practitioners lack basic nutritional knowledge. Many goat farmers do not have knowledge of feed nutritional composition and livestock and poultry nutritional requirements, so when using a certain raw material, they often attend to one thing and lose another, leading to nutritional deficiency diseases in goats.

????Solutions

To solve these problems, farmers or investors cannot wait to rely on others. They should start from the actual situation of their own farms, target the problems, classify and distinguish them, and solve them one by one.

According to market needs and their own actual conditions, choose different types of goat breeds: For roast lamb-type breeds, mainly choose local small breeds such as White goats and Black goats, because their high multiple birth rate (3 per litter) and relatively small body size are more suitable for roast lamb consumption needs; for cut meat consumption-type breeds, mainly choose relatively large breeds such as Boer goats and Jianyang Big-eared goats, to suit the needs of segmented consumption after group slaughter.

Plan the forage plan early. Plan forage according to an annual consumption of about 1500 kg per goat, and use methods such as dry storage or silage to reserve the forage needed for winter according to the number of goats in one's own herd.

Use methods such as biological fermentation and heat treatment to remove toxic and harmful substances in agricultural and sideline products. For example, before using agricultural and sideline products such as okara, sweet potato residue, and potato residue, they should be cooked or fermented to remove anti-nutritional factors, which can greatly reduce the occurrence of gastrointestinal diseases in goats.

According to the differences and deficiencies in nutritional composition among different feed raw materials, reasonably supplement the missing components. For example, when using okara and distillers' grains, because the calcium-to-phosphorus ratio is imbalanced, mineral raw materials such as stone powder and calcium hydrogen phosphate should be appropriately added. The specific amount is determined according to the amount of okara and distillers' grains used.

Inject relevant vaccines in advance. In addition to inoculating with the triple vaccine and four-prevention vaccine, vaccines such as sore mouth vaccine should also be inoculated to control the occurrence of diseases in the goat herd.

Strictly check the physical condition of breeding goats. Implement a culling system for breeding goats with subcutaneous abscesses, or breed them only after thorough treatment, so as to control the occurrence of abscess disease as much as possible. For the treatment of non-breeding goats that have already developed abscesses, after "first lancing the abscess to remove pus," disinfect the wound with disinfectants such as iodine tincture.