MEASURING PRODUCTIVITY

Efficiency of a production system and the per-unit cost of producing the item are things taken into consideration in any profitable business. Yet in meat goat farming or ranching enterprises often the whole herd is all that is considered when figuring profit or loss even though the herd is comprised of many production systems, i.e. individual animals, both bucks and does. While there have been performance test for bucks and good records have been kept on a lot of our bucklings growth, I catch myself wondering how good are my factories in the efficiency department. In that context I’m talking about my does/nannys individually.

While almost any dairy manager can tell you how many pounds of milk a given cow has produced in her lifetime, I have to admit that I couldn’t tell you how many pounds of goat any single one of my does has produced. This is mainly because I’ve treated my different herds as a single production unit without figuring the individual animal performance.

Just for example I can tell you feed cost per head, percent kid crop born, percent kid crop weaned, and gross and net proceeds for my individual herds; most of which consist of 100 to 200 head of animals. I have also in the last seven and a half years since starting in the Boer goat breeding business, been able through selection to produce animals that demonstrate hardiness, feed efficiency, and above average weight gains. However, again my efforts have had a fairly broad area of focus relating more toward buck bloodlines with less attention to the individual dams. This information is to let the reader know that records have been kept and have allowed informed management decisions to be made. I can tell you which of my animals are good goats, but for the life if me I can’t say which ones are the great ones as measured by an objective system. And in production agriculture an objective measurement system is what we must use in order to improve profitability.

Subjective selection systems such as shows and judging while identifying "well balanced", "structurally sound", "most heavily muscled" animals, etc. give us no real measure of productivity!

I would welcome any input or information you members might have in regards to individual doe performance. And I challenge all of you with the time and inclination to do so to keep records on your doe’s production.

To take this meat goat thing to the next level it is going to be necessary to maintain better production records on our female animals. To have a true grasp on productivity we would have to know how many pounds of goat each nanny has produced. All of the offspring of a doe should be weighed at a pre-determined age and their weight factored against the nanny’s weight. As an example: if a 150 pound doe had triplets which weighed a total of 150 pounds at 90 days of age she would have a 100% annual efficiency rating on one kidding per year. While I realize such a system would be labor intensive, involving both physically weighing and compiling the data for record keeping, the benefits would far outweigh the drawbacks. That is if as stated earlier we are going beyond where we currently are in our meat goat production enterprise. We have already gotten performance testing established for our buck kids, but I’m afraid the long term implications of production records on our does is going to require a conscientious effort on our, the producers, part. We won’t be able to ship off our does for 90 days like we do our buck kids and let someone else do the work and accumulate performance data.

Once we get serious and put together a group of does that will consistently wean a high percentage of their weight equivalency in kids we’ll be getting there. When we get a herd of these animals that will do this when bred to top indexing Bucks, and will also produce some show winning stock at the same time, then we will be there.

While the goals outlined in this article may seem like pipe dreams to some, they’re based on objective measurements and hard work. They are obtainable goals and give all of us a destination point for our journey in meat goat production. To any of you out there who are doing this, my congratulations on being ahead of the game, and please do share some of your information and results.