Ways to Maintain a Healthy Goat Farming Practice

April 7, 2023November 16, 2023 Agric4Profits

Goat farming (including baby goats) and any breed of goats at all e.g. Pygmy goat, Australian Miniature Goats, Nigerian Dwarf Goats and others involves the raising and breeding of domestic goats as a branch of animal husbandry. People farm them principally for their meat, milk, fibre and skins.

Meanwhile, in order to raise and maintain healthy goats in goat farming business, there are certain processes to follow to achieve that result which is what we are going to be discussing about below.

Goats can be kept healthy through the following activities and methods;

1. By Ensuring that they have access to enough feed of the correct quality.

2. Ensuring they have access to clean water.

3. Following a vaccination program against common diseases

4. Keeping internal and external parasites under control.

5. Keeping sick ones separate so that disease does not spread to the healthy goats.

6. Making sure that any goats introduced to the flock are disease-free.

7. Sheltering them from adverse weather. If any among the flock does get sick it needs to be treated.

More importantly, it is essential to keep a good record of the ones that you treated because if a particular animal gets sick often, it should be culled as it is a weak individual and is not only costing you money but is also passing on its genes to the next generation.

Now am sure the next question on your mind right now is “How do I know if my goat is sick?

Well, If any of them is sick, it will display one or more of the following signs and symptoms below:

1) It will appear dull and listless.

2) It may have obvious symptoms of sickness such as coughing or diarrhea.

3) It may not follow the rest of the flock when they go out to feed and lastly,

4) It may have an abnormal temperature – either too high or too low.

Now let us discuss why flock health management is very important;

One sick animal can sometimes contaminate other healthy animals and cause them to get sick too.

This can also result in the sick animal getting re-infected after it has recovered. Sometimes when a farmer has many sick animals, or a neighbor has sick animals, it means that the amount of disease in the area is very high.

It is very difficult to keep individual animals healthy when there is a lot of disease around. Farmers who are aware of common diseases in their area need to think strategically about how to combat these diseases as a community rather than trying to just keep their own animals healthy.

This is also true of parasites that cause diseases, li

So before we consider how to treat diseases, it is best to think about how to recognize healthy animals and how to keep them healthy.