boer buck to my nubians?

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I have 4 dairy goats, 3 nubians and 1 nubian/togg. I use them for our own milk supplies and these 4 will do us more than well enough, so I was thinking of breeding next year to a boer and selling/using all the kids for meat. There seems to be a good market here. Anyway my question is will the boer kids be too big for the nubians to birth without significant problems? I read on one site that the kids are 10 pounds plus. I am not really sure how big my kids were but nowhere near that size, especially the twins/triplets. Also, since I use the milk for house are boer meat goats also weaned at about 12 weeks or usually left on longer. The market here likes to see 30 pounds hanging, does anyone know how many weeks that would be for a boer/nubian cross?? Thanks for the help.

-- Terri in NS (terri@tallships.ca), March 17, 2002

Answers

I've been looking at boers and from what I've learned the boer nubian cross is a good one. The kids weight 7 to 10 pounds at birth and grow to 30 to 50 pounds in about 12 to 16 weeks. Runs about the same amount of time for weaning. There are many excellent boer websites.. www.boer.com is a good one. Just type in boer goat or meat goat in your search engine. Another good site is the Empire State Meat Goat Producers. There's lots of help because meat goats are just starting to catch on. Only 10 % of the world's population eats beef... the rest (90%) eat goat (chevon). If you have a Muslim population in your community there's your market.

Good luck

-- Ken in Maine (kenjan@pivot.net), March 17, 2002.


Believe it or not, the Boer is actually smaller then the Nubian. It's just more muscular as it gets older. My foundation does are part Alpine.

My doe just had triplets (the cat was bigger then the kids)and I was worried about them all getting enough to eat since they are not milking goats but she seems to be handling them all fine.

-- Dee (gdgtur@goes.com), March 17, 2002.


Terri also remember that your does will milk less bred to a meat goat. And of course you can cross Boer into any dairy breed. A purebred, American or cross Boer are more than likely desendants of Nubians or other dairy goats. And if you have older fullbloods than more than likely somewhere in the mix a Nubian doe in Texas carried the great grandparent as an embroy transplant. Without both the influence of dairy stock through the cross or the surragote, the Boer industry would have had a much slower start! Vicki

-- Vicki McGaugh TX (vickilonesomedoe@hotmail.com), March 17, 2002.

Vicki, why would a dairy doe milk less if she's bred to a Boer? Wouldn't that be like saying a Jersey cow will give less milk if she's bred to an Angus (a common practice with Jersey heifers in commercial dairies)? Did you perhaps mean that any surviving doelings, once they kid, will give less milk than a purebred dairy doe?

-- Laura Jensen (lauraj@seedlaw.com), March 18, 2002.

Hi Laura, a Jersey bred to an Angus will give the cow a lowered production. We just discussed this, but perhaps it was over at Dairygoats? Here is one of the exerpts, also an excellent article in Hoards Dairyman. I thought the original posts on this were bunk, so I went to the University to read the articles and to prove it was just that bunk.................I was wrong. To make this a little more embarassing, when David Funk did this test there were no boers to use, so the "low production bucks" that he used were Nubian, choke :) Vicki

Why does it affect the milk?

The chemical stimulus for udder development prior to freshening comes from the placenta and the effect is really important in the first-freshener who is developing an udder for the first time. The placenta has the genetics of the fetus - half from the dam and half from the service sire. This has been researched and known in dairy cattle breeding for many years. Sometime in the '80s David Funk in New York tested it out in his herd. He bred sets of twin and triplet doelings to very dairy bucks and to bucks with low genectic potential for milk production, for their first freshening. His results were published in DGJ and DGG. There were charts showing that the sisters bred to the dairy bucks had higher peak production and sustained a better lactation curve than the does bred to the non-dairy bucks. If I remember correctly, the does bred to non-dairy bucks didn't even average 10-month lactations. He carried the experiment on to the second freshening and found that the effect of the non-dairy buck on the initial udder development carried through to subsequent lactations. Does bred to dairy bucks the first time and non-dairy bucks the second time still had higher peaks and sustained lactation than the does bred to a non- dairy buck the first time and a dairy buck for the second lactation.

MJ

-- Vicki McGaugh TX (vickilonesomedoe@hotmail.com), March 18, 2002.



Cool

-- Dee (gdgtur@goes.com), March 18, 2002.

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