Farming Sheep and Goats for milk production.

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Sheep milking

 
Sheep have been one the first domesticated animals in the world.  They produced most things man needed for living: meat, skin, wool, milk and manure. We still associate sheep with wool and meat. Milk, however seems to be partly forgotten.  It is the reason that we do not have many breeds that produce a lot of milk.

 All over the world people are trying to make a living out of milking sheep.

It is very important to get the right information on managing a sheep farm and making a good plan to run the farm.  A lack of information means that a lot of money is getting wasted.

This does not have to be so.

The Grazerie is a company that has been keeping sheep for over 20 years. This, in combination with an 18 year long experience in consulting dairy farms on management, farming strategy and animal husbandry is a good base for solid advice in starting and running a dairy sheep farm.

 References are available from dairy sheep farmers that have worked together with  Grazerie consultancy on various aspects of sheep dairy.

Goat milking

 

 The Netherlands have a good milk goat industry. The goat farms in the Netherlands are of a high standard. The production per goat is good and there are several farms with more than 1000 producing animals.  The Grazerie consultancy has specialized in improving production on farms through increasing milk yield per animal per lactation and through strategic planning of lambing.

Housing, breeding and keeping is the basis of it all. In every farm we make a planning for 5 years and check if our goals are being achieved.

For a good start or development of your farm Grazerie consultancy is an extra asset to reach your goal.

I, (Eric Verstappen) will be the consultant to contact at the Grazerie on all dairy matters.

Louise Liebenberg is my partner in this and she runs our sheep farm.  Our farm is also used by various schools as a learning farm, we invest a lot of time teaching people how to keep and raise animals.

 

 Part 1 

To start or restart a milk goat dairy

 The first thing to do is evaluate your present situation.

Take all your assets in account that being:

Capital, land, buildings, labor, knowledge and market. 

Capital is important. If you have a reasonable sum of money or property to invest it will make things easier to start. Especially, if additional money is needed, one will need some own capital. 

Land is good to have as goats are ruminants and need roughage in their ration. Growing your own feed is a good way to go. The manure is good to use to grow crops again. In this way, the ecological cycle works the way it should.

Buildings are often available, but utilizing old buildings often restricts the development of the farm. Available buildings are often best to be used for raising the kids. Mostly it is better to build new sheds for the goats so all facets like space, routing, ventilation, insulation, feeding space etc, are up to date.

 Labor is a vital asset. To keep 600 goats you will need at least 1,5 FTE (full time employee) to do all the daily work like feeding, milking, bedding, caring, etc. It is also good to know if there can be extra labor available at kidding time.  One can depend on students to help out, however this may not always work out.. There should be a structural amount of labor available.

 Knowledge is vital. Milking goats has a long history. A lot of people have made many mistaking while learning. Making the same mistakes over again is a waste of time and money. It is like reinventing the wheel! Make sure you have a good source of information to rely on when you start or expand your farm.

 Having a market for you product is essential. Make sure you know what the market wants, when it wants it and how much at what price. Here again it is very important to get the information from a reliable source.

 Eric can help farmers work through these issues. Expertise on farming goats is available from our consultant. We do have the contacts in the business to get farmers going properly from the start. We often work as a back up in difficult situations. Crucial decisions are often discussed with us. We have seen many farms going up hill and down hill.

Avoid mistakes/miscalculations/misinterpretations

Part 2

 Starting or restarting a milk goat dairy

The most important thing to do when starting a new farm setup is to have a good view on your goals..

These goals can be various.

                        Expand

                        Specialize

                        Diversify

                        Vertical integration  

                        I will expand on these 4 goals or strategies:.

 EXPAND

Expanding the present enterprise is the easiest way to make more turnovers. All aspects of this form of farming is known to the farmer the only variable is that every thing is just a bit bigger.

By expanding, a lot of the production assets are getting utilized more efficiently. Your production costs per unit (milk or animal) will decrease as long as you are utilizing your farm assets to a higher extent.  However, if this expansion means making a bigger building, getting a bigger milking facility, you need to recalculate well to see if your return on this investment will be  high enough.

You would have to learn to work with the larger numbers of animals.

This seems easier than one would think. As long as you decide not to work without hired labor there is no problem. You, as a manager will automatically know everything that is going on because you are doing the work yourself. As soon as you are going to grow to more than 1 FTE (full time employee) you will need to work with hired help. Working with an employee has big advantages in flexibility and gives the farmer the chance to take a day off sometime and to concentrate on other management issues.

The employee can do most of the routine work and the farmer can concentrate on specific jobs on the farm.

To make it work, you will have to go to a system that is easy to work with. This would need to be an efficient work situation.  There must be a good communication system on the farm. Managers of big operations must be able to work well with people that will have a 9 to 5 attitude. There is nothing wrong with such an attitude, as long as everybody acts to it.

If a goat farmer wants to grow bigger than 3000 to 4000 animals he should consider having a veterinarian help out, the farmer will not be able to check all the animals and treat them if needed. Kidding time can be especially problematic.  Feeding must be mechanized and preferably automated as much as possible. The possibility of error must be minimized as one small error does have big effect.

 

SPECIALISE

A lot of farms start of with a very broad spectrum of jobs. With this I mean that most farmers harvest their own crops. A lot of machinery is involved and I doubt if the efficiency is high enough. As soon as a lot of these machines need to be replaced or need large repairs is the moment to decide if specializing an option is. This means spending the labor involved with harvesting into producing more milk and calling in a contractor to harvest the crops. In many cases this is easily calculated as the right way to go. There is however, often a big resistance from the farmers, because they like the different work as a break from daily routine. A lot can be said for this, because the well being of the farmer is the most important factor in the whole enterprise.

 

DIVERSIFY

If you are producing so much milk that you don’t want to grow bigger it is maybe good to look at diversification. This means taken on other activities to enlarge the turnover and the profit. We can think of farm related tasks, like contracting, selling farm products, organizing excursions on the farm.  We can also think of completely new activities, innovation is a key word here.. Most of the time farmers stick to odd jobs related to the farm. In a well thought out plan it is possible to make these jobs very profitable.

 

VERTICAL INTEGRATION

With vertical integration one must think of, for example, making your own concentrated feed for the animals, processing the produced milk, selling the milk actively on the markets.

These activities often work when some farmers work together in doing it, a cooperative. The main issue is to be able to get enough milk to carry the expense of this integration.  Vertical integration often follows expansion. First get the size and production cost efficient, then start making money out of the rest of the market.

Part 3:

a good planning of your actions over a period of some years. I like to think about a 5 year plan and evaluations on a yearly basis.

 
Lecture given on the Dairy Sheep Days in Zwolle 3 and 4 Nov 2006

Grazerie

History Grazerie
History Consultancy/    resume

History Grazerie

•   Interest in farming but no capital

•         Possibility organic sheep farm in nature areas

•         Demand for guided sheep flocks

•         More projects on dykes/golf course/heather

•         4 FTE at the moment

Dairy Sheep in Holland

      –        Development since 1998

–        Start to get more professional- know how

–        Expansion is on its way

–        Milk sheep takes more labor than goats

Consultancy Grazerie

–        On demand consultancy on farms 

–        Difficult development because the connections with supplier and buyer were stiff

–        A lot of the business around the farm was taking the profit

–        Little profit because of unprofessional approach

–        Consultancy on feeding to improve milk yield

–        Consultancy on farm strategy i.e. expansion

–        Grazerie knows the weak spots on the farm and in the industry

–        The next step is tracking and tracing

 

Consultancy to improve milk yield

•         Feeding is the easy part (today)

•         Management (this year)

•         Breeding (the next 5 years)

•         Building (long term)

 

On demand consultancy on farms

•         Feed rations

•         Flock management

–        Breeding (period)

–        Breeding (selection)

–        Planning (winter milk)

•         Work planning

–        Machinery

–         Labor

How to build up a ration

•         What is the milk production?

•         Start of with analyzing feed and production

•         Find info on feed intake and demand

 

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•         Balance the energy and protein level

•         Make sure to get minerals and vitamins in the ration

Milk recording

	Milk recording			Accumulated total
nr	milk	%fat	%protein	kg milk	days	Day average	%fat	%protein	gt v+e/day	total	CVE	LW
8001	3.5	4.56	5.30	98	28	3.50	4.56	5.30	345	255	74	137
8004	2.8	6.02	4.95	204	73	2.79	6.02	4.95	307	216	67	124
8005	2.7	4.59	4.64	127	47	2.70	4.59	4.64	249	159	53	98
8006	1.8	6.07	5.21	618	403	1.53	6.63	5.64	188	251	54	100
8014	1.6	6.65	6.06	1047	528	1.98	6.09	5.29	226	473	80	148
8009	1.4	6.60	5.12	747	333	2.24	5.66	5.32	246	330	71	131
8015	1.4	5.37	4.67	81	58	1.40	5.37	4.67	140	15	33	61
8002	1.3	8.61	6.90	1027	727	1.41	8.06	6.52	206	568	59	109
8003	1.2	6.67	5.91	497	282	1.76	6.00	5.92	210	209	58	107
8008	1.0	8.11	6.16	855	556	1.54	7.44	6.08	208	430	56	103
8016	1.0	8.28	6.00	503	382	1.32	6.67	6.04	167	190	51	94
8018	1.0	7.40	5.25	626	381	1.64	5.98	5.46	188	240	57	105
8007	0.8	7.38	5.74	707	366	1.93	6.19	5.49	226	313	69	127
8020	0.6	7.86	6.74	1225	777	1.58	6.70	5.31	189	526	67	124
8010	0.0	0.00	0.00	503	281	1.79	6.47	5.41	213	200	77	142
8011	0.0	0.00	0.00	710	286	2.48	5.89	5.18	275	322	78	144
8012	0.0	0.00	0.00	0	0	0.00	0.00	0.00	0	0	70	128
8013	0.0	0.00	0.00	748	299	2.50	5.64	5.54	280	359	82	151

Build-up of a ration for dairy sheep

•         A dairy sheep ration must fur fill certain requirements. The first step is to establish a balance between the right levels of energy and protein.

•         For this purpose the intake and quality of roughage must first be determined.  

•         Adapted concentrate is used to establish the right level of protein. When the roughage already contains the right level of protein a concentrate can be chosen to balance the energy and protein.

 Explanation of values

•         VEM is Feed Unit Milk: Is energy to be used for milk production                       

•         DVE is Protein left after the rumen:     Bacteria from rumen + feed protein

•         OEB is protein not used in Rumen: Waste?

A practical ration

•         With the use of the computer a ration is calculated, whereby all relevant aspects in the process are considered.

•         Particularly the elementary products of the concentrates are discussed to demonstrate the effects of the various protein and energy components.

•         Also the several minerals will be. Although the norms for dairy sheep are not yet clear, it is still important to obtain information on the animals’ intake of minerals

Ration in relation to milk production and the fat- and protein contents

•         Discussion about the effect of different nutrients on milk production. Certain feed products stimulate milk production while others stimulate fat and protein levels in milk. (Starch/fat)

•         Optimization of the ration makes it possible to optimize the milk production.

•         Certain kinds of cheese require a specific composition of the milk, which can be realized by adapting the ration for dairy sheep.

            (Fatty acid)

•         Raw materials and their specific effect

•         A number of specific raw materials will be brought up for discussion.

•         Notably the various fermentation fractions of starch and the composition of fat substances will be dealt with.