Breeders and Backyard Milkers
It’s always baffled me when breeders advise other breeders to sell a dairy doe that doesn’t meet their breeding criterion as a ‘backyard milker’. This would be entirely different if the animal in question is a dog sold as a backyard pet or a wether sold to clear brush, but in the case of a dairy doe, the only way to get milk from the animal is to breed her.
Once upon a time I was contemplating which science curriculum to start my firstborn with as I was driving down a country road. My daughter was a capricious 3 year old at the time and I had been perusing kindergarten material to try to keep her active mind busy. The kindergarten courses covered things like ‘eggs come from chickens’, ‘milk comes from cows’, ‘fruit grows on plants’, etc. My daughter interrupted my reflections when she spotted some cows grazing along the road, “If we wanted to drink cow milk, we could buy one of those cows and make sure she had been with a bull so when she had a calf, then we could have milk from her!” Although stunned at the depth of her understanding of how we get milk from cows (who told her about the bull?!..or even the calf, for that matter?!), I immediately recognized that she wasn’t going to get much out of kindergarten science.
Unfortunately, breeders suggesting that does they feel are subpar belong making milk in someone’s backyard don’t display as much understanding of the process as my preschooler did. In order to get milk from a doe, she must be bred to a buck. The genetics behind the buck she’s bred to impact not only the milk production of her daughters, but also her own and the impact is especially pronounced the first three times she’s bred or freshened.
This makes selecting breeding bucks very important, but it also means that selling a doe with extra teats or poor body structure as a ‘backyard milker’ is not removing her genetics from the gene pool even if registration papers are withheld. Native On Appearance registration isn’t necessary to produce offspring, but breeding is. Selling a dairy doe as anything other than little packages of meat pretty much ensures that she will be bred in order to produce either offspring, milk for humans or both. There is a market for recip (recipient for embryo transfer) Nubian does (I’m not as familiar with other breeds and the recip market), but that doesn’t ensure she won’t later be sold at auction and picked up by someone who thinks that since any goat will produce milk and this one looks like a dairy goat, they’ll buy her to breed to produce milk. As a breeder, first understand that all does you sell are sold as breeding stock unless they are in little packages of meat or they’ve been given a hysterectomy.
This is not to say that everyone who wants milk is breeding for the highest quality they can get or that they are passionate about improving the breed they have selected or that they have chosen to work with, but it’s an illusion to think that genetics are removed from the gene pool by anything other than putting down the animal or altering it so that it cannot reproduce. When people tell me that they aren’t a breeder and so quality doesn’t matter, I feel it’s my duty to correct them in the case of dairy goats because unless they are committed to eating all male and female offspring, they are producing goats and typically selling many of them for the purpose of producing more goats, therefore they are ‘breeders’ so the only question is what kind of breeders they want to be. What are their goals for their goats?
This is also usually the first question we ask of people who inquire about breeding stock, it doesn’t matter if they are looking for sheep, goats or poultry. What are you looking for? What do you hope to accomplish by purchasing breeding stock?
If we learn that you want to take kids away at birth, we’re going to be looking for goats that have ‘failed’ our breeding program due to poor mothering. If you indicate you want a goat to eat brush, we aren’t going to recommend a goat that requires a lot of grain or refuses to graze because there are others who are happy to feed their dairy does like divas and that kind of environment would be a better fit for such a goat.
We were once selling some goats to a customer who said their goals were the same as ours, but they didn’t want to pay the higher pricing for animals we felt were best accomplishing our shared goals. I made the comment as we were loading his new acquisitions that he was always buying our ‘culls’. His response was that our culls were the best animals in his herd. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure immediately came to mind. Breeders don’t sell their best animals (although they might work with a friend to keep those genetics ‘nearby’), so the key is to find a breeder whose ‘culls’ are an improvement over your own stock. However, don’t neglect the value of networking with breeders who don’t share your goals. You may need to contact them when some of your stock ‘fails’ to meet your hopes and expectations if those failures happen to dovetail with what those other breeders who don’t share your breeding goals want in their herds.
Keep in mind we bought our first Nubian from someone’s backyard, although they were very serious about breeding spotted goats and they had no use for the doe we bought from them because she wasn’t spotted and didn’t give them spotted kids when bred to a spotted buck. There was a drought and hay was hard to come by so we picked up their ‘disgards’ to get a winter milk source and our respect for the doe that could milk 3000 pounds in 305 days and later would appraise at a 90VEEE inspired us to sell off our entire herd of unregistered mixed breed dairy goats to make sure this registered Purebred Nubian doe’s genetics didn’t get lost. We wanted to honor the work of the breeders that carefully put the beautiful, milky genetics into that package by continuing their work.
We firmly believe that there is a goat for everyone that wants one. The key to happy goats and happy customers is matching the right goat to the right customer.
