How can we Improve the Dairy Goat Industry in Canada and Globally?
Answer: Register your dairy goats. By doing this data can be collected from them and purebred lines stay pure.
Use Programs such as milk testing and Type classification as well as possibly show your goats. By using programs like these offered you will see your herd improve by having reliable usable data to go by.
Bucks: Tag the best and band the rest, too many bucks are sold that are low quality and should be used for meat instead of reproduction. Band bucks that you would not like as a herdsire on your own farm. Use quality herdsires and look into artificial insemination to improve quality in your animals.
We need second generation goat farmers. When a minimum of 90% of dairy cow farms are second generation or more and less than 10% of dairy goat farms are second generation you can see that most dairy goat farms have not built up quality genetics over years or had time to purchase farm land as well as have experience passed down to them.
We have to get away from thinking goats are a poor man's cow. Goats have the ability to be incredible dairy animals that are prolific high producing animals. Just because they are smaller than a cow should not mean they are less of an animal.
More experience is needed, and farmers need to get experience with goats before setting up a dairy farm. Because no quota is needed to milk goats often farmers get into dairy goat farming with little to no dairy experience and do not last.
More research is needed to be done on dairy goats globally. Production has not gone up in the last 30 years in dairy goats as compared to cows where production has doubled.
Goat Meat sales need to increase in price. This has a direct influence on dairy goats as when culls are $100 each the farmer keeps a cull goat around for another lactation and retains kids from it. When cull prices are $300 a farmer sells the cull animal and no more offspring is then reproduced from these low quality animals making the herd improve automatically without purchasing new genetics, or feeding higher quality feed.
We need more long term milk processors and more stable dairies. Longevity will be key in making this industry sustainable, too many dairies do not last and that is too hard on processors to invest on infrastructure, equipment, marketing etc.