We took the goats on their first pasture walk today. While they have a nice size area to browse and forage during the day, it's really not enough diversity for the goats and we'd like them to get accustomed to browsing in the pastures. The plan is to rotationally graze the herd once we get more goats, the electric fencing and some form of mobile shelter and feed/watering arrangement in place.

When I say "rotationally graze" I'm referring to the controlled movement of the goats around the farm to specific areas for specific amounts of time. This will allow us to monitor forage consumption, provide adequate forage regrowth time, and also limit parasite reproduction. By moving the goats on a regular basis the plants can regrow, the parasite cycle is broken without a host, and our ability to optimize browse and pasture consumption is optimized. Rotationally grazing has many benefits that we hope to exploit. However, the rotationally grazing dairy goats is a rare proposition and it isn't nearly as well-developed of a practice as it is for grazing cattle, so it's a bit of an experiment for us. Most goat operations either provide free access to pastures (i.e. continuous grazing, not rotational), or inadequate access to pasture/browse at all. We think neither of those options are optimal, so we're going down a different path. This year we'll be taking baby steps to see how it works. Today was the first step, albeit a very small one.

At first we took the goats out on leads. We were pretty sure they wouldn't bolt on us, but you never know!

 Goats on leads eating a mini-blackberry bushThen we decided that was silly, so we let them off the leads

Sweetbreads with the dogs and goats, turns out they kind of like us and don't want to run away!