Explore Average Daily Gain of Warm Season Perennial Grasses for Commercial Meat Goats

Commodities

• Agronomic: grass (misc. perennial)
• Animals: goats

Practices

• Animal Production: animal protection and health, feed/forage, feed management

The project plan is to use fields that have been barren for close to twenty years with more native grass establishments and little fescue stands. These fields will need seeding and fertilization to establish stand. Fields will be divided into one to two acre plots to plant the different warm season grasses. Four grasses will be considered for this project due to their history of palatability with small ruminants especially goats. These grasses are: Bermudagrass, Switchgrass, Gamagrass and endophyte free fescue. 

The plan is to establish these grasses in the first year in four separate fields and graze each field in the summer of the second year for the research project by subdividing the fields into smaller lots for rotational grazing. A control group of goats will be divided into four groups with at least 10 to 20 head per group to graze each field that summer. Their weights will be recorded before the first rotation in each field and at the end of the last rotation of each field that summer.