Goat Poop and Hay - Hey!

[SassyLife]

We have an automatic composter. No, we have a couple of dozen (and sometimes a lot more) composters!

During the winter months, as in now, we usually feed our goats a lot of hay to make up for the less of greenery this time of year. What hay they don't eat will lie on the ground and sometime (coming soon this year) the hubby will take his skid loader, equipped with bucket, and pile all that hay into one mound. Of course, mixed in with that will be goat droppings.

More goat pellets will be added once the goats discover this freshly made mini-mountain, that is super-fun for them to play "king of the hill" on.

Hubby will flip that pile over once, well before spring, and it will continue composting. Because of the heat that is produced under this Texas sun (even in the cold of winter; hey, we are really mild, usually), it will compost very quickly and be full dirt by the time it's time to start tilling my garden.

After our garden is tilled, hubby will take about three skid loader bucket fulls and combine it into our garden dirt from last year. It is wonderful. I usually don't even let it sit for a few days before I begin planting as it has never seemed to be too

strong, only 'just right'.

Attached is a picture of last year's garden; well an angle of it, I should have done a panoramic; this picture doesn't do it justice at all!

 

[firelily99]

Goat poop is awesome in a garden, I've used it and the results were spectacular. It's also not smelly which is a big plus as well.

 

[Mariam]

Nice, I have considered borrowing the neighbors horse poop. I love goats, I have been dreaming of owning some. I like there antics and they are so cute. My cousin told me they were more trouble than they are worth. What do you think?

 

[SassyLife]

@firelily99 you are so right its not smelly since it's a nice and compact little pellet, lol. Luckily I don't have to touch it and it's dissolves nicely into the compost.

@Mariam I think it's wise to decide what type of goat you want first. There are dwarf goats that make very cute pets. You can keep them in a smaller area and they are super fun for kids to play with. The only thing to consider on them is that the males tend to impregnate the girls before the girls are big enough to carry, so you would not want to mix the sexes together until breeding time. If you are raising and breeding them for money, the dwarves don't tend to bring as much at the auction as larger meat breeders do, but selling dwarfs individually as pets does fairly well.

We raise and breed boar goats. These are fairly large and usually have horns. Since ours are played with since birth, they are very tame and we've never had a problem with our own goats or ever been frightened of those sharp pointed horns. Boer goats do eat anything and are very rough on fence lines; rubbing their big fat bellies on them and distorting and pushing out the fence (lots to repair). But they are a meat goat so they bring quiet a bit at auction. We treat ours like pets and already know all males will go to auction, since we only need one billy to bread (this also prevent incest).

So that's probably more than you wanted to know so I will quit there. Other than to say spanish hornless goats are also great friendly goats as well!

 

[firelily99]

Nice, I have considered borrowing the neighbors horse poop. I love goats, I have been dreaming of owning some. I like there antics and they are so cute. My cousin told me they were more trouble than they are worth. What do you think?

By all means go with the goat poop, I like it so much better than any other available pop.

 

[gata montes]

Some of my neighbors keep chickens, goats, rabbits and horses, so I'm lucky enough to be given a choice as to which of the four types of to use, but would agree that goat is very definitely the best choice followed by rabbit especially as chicken and horse always seems to have an odor and I'm always a little wary of using horse because unless its old and sterilized it tends to burn the roots of young plants.

 

[Kansas Terri]

The only way that I use chicken poop is by scattering it about! If it is thin enough it will not smell or burn the plants.

The term "scatter about" sounds labor intensive but it is not: I just take a shovelful of poop and fling it in the right general direction and it scatters! Of course I do not do that on my salad plants because that would be gross and dangerous but it works very well for blackberries, trees, corn, and other such plants!

There was a problem out here when some commercial melons got contaminated with e-coli, and people across a third of the nation got sick, but that is flat out bad management! I have never been foolish enough to use poop on any plant that was even close to fruiting! Early in the spring or after harvest is the time to use poop in the garden! And never on a salad plant. It would just be SO! wrong to use poop on a salad plant! A few years back people got sick from commercial spinach because poop had been used on it: how stupid was THAT?!

 

[Mariam]

Thanks, Sassylife, for the info! My husband likes the idea of meat goats. He figures if all else fails, we could eat them. I would love the option to have a little extra something for my compost pile, too.

 

[gata montes]

Kansas Terri - your post just reminded of the cucumber / chicken scare a few years ago, that brought Spain's export market to halt, which found that a lot of the commercial growers were using unsterilized chicken in order to cut costs, which of course contained high amounts of E-coli bacteria - which just reinforces what you were saying, in that you need to know what you are doing when using animal as fertilizer.

 

[Kansas Terri]

Well composted or sterilized manure never makes a problem, as the e-coli bacteria has finished its job and died.back. But, as an amateur I do not know enough to be certain when the compost pile has reached the proper temperature, been turned so the cooler outside manure *ALL* reaches the proper temperature, and so forth. So, I do not rely on the composting process to kill all of the e-coli bacteria.

Instead, I have always played it safe and applied any manure that I have to the young plants as SassyLife has done, or with the perennials when they are not fruiting. That way, by the time the plants fruit the manure will have all broken down, and there is simply nothing left of the bacteria. People have used poop as fertilizer for thousands of years, and the various safety techniques are well known. I have no sympathy for a professional who contaminated his cucumbers and made people sick by doing so!