? regarding cost of keep of goats

[Guest guest]

We recently sold our milk cow and switched to dairy goats (Nubians). We love

them and their milk. We thought one of the benefits would be that they ate less

and therefore would cost less than a milk cow. We had a full-sized Jersey. But

our 3 dairy goats eat a lot of grain in comparison to what our one Jersey ate,

and that gets rather costly. I used to feed them Purina Goat Chow, but have

switched to Nutrena Top Goat and a sweet feed of COB with molasses, 1/2 and 1/2.

That has cut the cost of the grain almost in half, but not quite. Still very

expensive compared to our cow's consumption of grain. Of course the milk

production doesn't compare either. We were getting about 3 gallons a day from

our Jersey and we get about 2 to 2.5 gal/day from our 3 goats.

Reasons for switching to goats:

A2 genetics (it was my understanding that all goats are A2)

Health reasons

Ease of keep - dc more comfortable with a smaller animal, cleaner, easier to

clean up after (all of which are true in our case)

We thought they would be less expensive to keep.

What is your experience in keeping goats? What do you feed them in the way of

grain? How much? Is the grain necessary? (If they don't eat their ration,

their milk production does drop.) Some folks don't feed their milk cow any

grain at all.

Any advice, experience, thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks so much!

Dona