Happy New Year! With the year starting off fresh, it means tax season and checking on how the farm did. 2021 was my first full official year into goat ownership so let us take a look at what I spent to get started in my goat adventures and what my projections are for the future.
A few things about my goat business model. I picked the myotonic goat for a few reasons which were mentioned in this video. So who is my customer base? Small size and the fainting factor make these a novelty breed for family pets. My first priority of sales is as pet and breeding stock. My projections are based on the selling to this market vs meat price at auction.
You can click on the photo to make it bigger but here’s the low down on what this sheet means.
- Initial cost of purchasing my foundation herd. This includes cost of the animals themselves, shelters, fencing, registration, feed etc. This number came out to just about $5,500! Not a small chunk of change! But it got me 6 girls and 2 boys.
- I started out by purchasing 2 bred does who did kid out without complications. My hope was for girls but mother nature gave me 3 boys and 1 girl. UGH. I sold the boys on cheap just to get them off the farm. I didn’t want to feed or house them and the longer they stayed the more they’d cost me. I took the sale of those and subtracted it out from my initial costs.
- On to projections for the future. I picked up a few young does who cannot be bred until late 2022 for 2023 kids. This leaves me with only breeding back my initial 2 does. Fingers crossed I get kids Spring 2022 which can be sold. The rest of the numbers are total guessing, as mother nature will tell me how many kids and what sex.
- By year 3 I figure my young girls will kid out. Typically first freshening’s are single kids so I planned my sales projections accordingly.
- Assuming nothing dies and I get at least twins, by year 4 this farm will start turning a very small profit on the goat side of things!
Good news, I have a waiting list for goat kids! I’m not to worried about having to keep baby goats around longer than weaning which should make my feed costs of foundation stock fairly consistent.
Looking at these projections one thing I can do to make things move along is hunt for some more 2/3 year old does either bred or ready to bred to add to the base herd. With the wait list I currently have this is on my to-do list for 2022.
What do the colors mean?
Left hand column, if you see “black” bold lettering this is the initial investment of animals, Fencing, and shelter. this is a fixed 1 time cost in my calculations
The lower half of the left column is “blue” bold. These numbers are reoccurring yearly. When working out my projections I always added this number to the previous years profit/loss before adding my sales projections to it. This is why it’ll take my a minimum of 4 years before I ever show a profit with my current herd of 6 does and 2 bucks.
These numbers also assume I follow standard kidding flows of 1 kidding a year. There are accelerated formats I could follow which allow for 3 kidding’s over a 2 year period. But for now I’m going to stick with 1 kidding in late winter early spring until I get a better feel for the process.
I hope my little sheet helps you understand the cost of being a small scale breeder. Please note I did not factor in any of the other costs such as my labor, taxes, insurance, power, mortgage, etc.
One thing about raising livestock are the razor thin margins to make a profit. Adding goats to my farm should add some income to compliment my other sources selling horses, eggs and mud control products. To raise and sell goats by themselves I’d need a MUCH larger herd.