Dairy animals have a
saleable by-product: offspring. If you have dairy goats, then you have a
saleable crop each year, but what do you do after those kids are weaned
and you still have more milk than you can drink? You can make a lot of
cheese, or you can use some of it to raise other animals, such as dairy
calves.
Jersey and Holstein calves make premium meat steers, and can be raised
with great success on goat’s milk. Jerseys have a nicely marbled meat and
although the carcass size is smaller, you can still expect 500 pounds or
so of
finished meat from a jersey steer. Holsteins are bigger, and are
usually butchered at about 1,300 pounds, for about 600 pounds of finished
meat. Jerseys and Holsteins make a nice market animal for your own
consumption, or for sale at the auction.
The calves can usually be purchased from a local dairy farmer at variable
cost. The cheapest calf prices are in fall and early winter, when you
will be feeding them over the winter. Because you will have to provide
hay and grain to the calves the price is lowered considerably. If you
have plenty of pasture to graze them on, then it is an easy thing to just
supplement the calves with a creep feed or high quality hay. So, even
raising a calf in late autumn or early winter can be profitable if you
have the right setup. The prices are lowest at this time - we bought
ours for under $50 each.
Your calf will need two or three days on colostrum, usually the farmer who
breeds them will keep them around for a few days to make sure they get a
good start. If the farmer wants them gone sooner, then you will need to
make sure to get some colostrum from the farmer to feed them for the first
few days. Once they have had the colostrum, you can switch them to whole
cow’s milk, goat’s milk, milk replacer, or a mixture of all three. The
calf will need to be fed a milk diet until they are eating well on their
own, usually at least six weeks, and preferably eight weeks.
You can raise the calves on the goat’s milk if you have plenty and for us,
this was a considerable savings. It will cost about $50 - $175 per calf
at current prices to raise the calf to weaning. This is just using milk replacer, at the most inexpensive rate. Milk replacer, besides being
expensive lacks the natural enzymes and proteins that keep calves more
healthy. Calves raised on replacer can get scours or diarrhea so badly
that they die of dehydration very quickly. The good news is there are
plenty of medications available and scours are usually treated with
success. Avoiding scours and cutting costs is always a great idea, so
with a little extra elbow grease you can increase your earnings
considerably.
We had three ways to
raise calves: totally on replacer, on replacer mixed
with goat’s milk and on goat's milk alone. We have seen that using
replacer alone can rack up expense quickly and also has a greater chance
of scours. Using goat milk to supplement your replacer or raising calves
completely on goat milk is an extremely economical way to rear up some
calves. You can raise a calf to weaning on goat milk for as little as $35
dollars per calf. That is a savings of $15 - $140 over milk replacer.
The most economical way to feed the calves is with a dairy goat to produce
your milk for you.
Dairy goats can on average give 8-15 pounds of milk a day, depending on
the time in the lactation curve. Lactation curve indicates when the doe
freshened and when she will need to be dried off before birth. Usually at
least 2 months prior to birth a goat is dried off, to allow her to give
all her reserves to the developing kids inside her. Once the doe
freshens, she will make plenty for her kids and usually even more.
If you were to milk five does, you could expect 40-70 pounds of milk per
day. One gallon is about eight pounds, so you have milk for as many as
eight calves with five dairy goats. That is at a cost of about $17.50 to
$25 per week. That sounds like a lot of money, and it is, however, the
milk replacer for eight calves would cost about $800-$1,400 from birth to
weaning. Feeding and caring for your five dairy goats would only cost
about $140-$200 for eight calves from birth to weaning. That is one
quarter the cost of replacer.
