Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Feed Mixing Day!

What could have put this look of giddy anticipation on the face of my beloved Tulip??



Feed mixing day of course!  

I feed grain here.  This can be a bit of a controversial issue, but it's what works out best for us.  If the time comes when I can phase it out and it not be detrimental to the health of my goats, then I will do so, but where we are and with our working outside the homestead it just won't work right now.  

So to that effect, about once a month or so, depending, it is feed mixing day and the goats get all excited over it.  they hang over the dutch door and beg, and scramble, and look all sweet because they want me to give them a little sample.


So here is all the different stuff that goes into our grain mix here.

  In IL I was very spoiled as all I had to do was call the grain elevator and tell them I needed to order "my" mix.  They had it all on file and in about an hour I'd go pick it up in bags.  Then I'd just dump the bags in the old deep freeze in the barn and that was that.  However, the only grain elevator down here that will do custom mixes, requires that you purchase a TON (yes literally a ton, 2000 lbs), and I don't need anywhere near that much at one time. 


We put 3 parts Omolene 300 horse feed....


1 part beet pulp shreds....


1/2 part alfalfa pellets...... 


and then two big double hand-fulls of BOSS


I mix it all up one "part" at a time in a bucket......


And then dump the mixed bucket in this trash toter....


And then do it over and over, until I've used all the Omolene.  Once I've used two bags of Omolene, I put the remainder of the beet pulp and alfalfa pellets in their respective bags down into the trash tote, all the while with Tulip, Star and Ollie begging at the door......


Once I empty the first bag of Omolene i toss it out the door and one, two, or sometimes all three goats will climb inside to see if perhaps I may have left a delicious morsel or two......


When I'm all done, I let them in to hoover up the scraps that dropped.....



And then all that excitement necessitates a nice long nap........


Until next time.....

God bless!

10 comments:

  1. What a great post. I always love to read about what others feed their goats. So nice you have a real grain mill close by, although that's a bummer about the one ton minimum. The goat photos are priceless!

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    1. Thanks for stopping by Leigh! I too love to read about what folks feed, as I often get ideas for new things! Yes, it is really nice that we have a mill. It's only about 5 minutes from where we work too, but I just can't use 1 ton of feed up before it would get "stale".

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  2. So neat! I didn't know there was such controversy about feeding goats, but I don't have any (yet, haha) either. Yours are SO cute and looks so personable, too!

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    1. Thanks! Well it can be controversial because as ruminants goat's aren't really "designed" to eat grain. And in a "worse case scenario" we might not be able to buy grain and that would require different ways of feeding. We keep free choice loose mineral out for our goats, as well as free choice baking soda. The goats eat the baking soda to help regulate their rumen. A lot of goat raisers have discovered that when they take grain out of their feeding regimen the goats don't eat near as much baking soda.

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  3. Hi Goodwife. You're the first person I have seen write about their feed mixing routine. We do something similar, and also miss our feed mill where we used to have 'our' recipe mixed as needed. Yet another thing I have discovered we have in common.

    I have some questions. What is in the Omolene horse feed? And what is BOSS? I am not familiar with either one of them. We use rolled oats, wheat bran, sunflower seeds, alfalfa pellets and sweet feed in our mixed grain ration. We use 30 gallon trash cans. Scoop in one round of the ration, dump it back and forth between a 2 trash cans to mix it, then start over again. It sounds very similar to your routine.

    I see you have an area on your left hand column that says, "Folks with something good to say." Is that your blogroll? I would be interested in exchanging links, if you do that.

    Thanks again for showing us your feed mixing routine. I find it very interesting.

    Fern

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    1. Hi Fern! Thanks for stopping by! Here is a link to the Omolene 300 analysis http://purinamills.com/horse-feed/products/omolene-300-growth-horse-feed/ It isn't exactly what I'd like to have, but it's the best thing I've found yet, however it does contain soy. It's basically just a high end sweet feed. I like to feed horse quality grain, as the ingredients are usually grain, as opposed to grain by products. BOSS is simply black oil sunflower seed. It does sound like our mixes are just about the same! I do love the beet pulp. I used to feed it to my horses and have always fed it to my goats. I soaked it for the horses, but feed it dry to the goats.

      Yes the "Folks with something good to say" is the blogs that I read. I didn't realize until you pointed it out that it wasn't showing anything! I've fixed that now, and your blog should be showing up now.

      If you've got any more questions please feel free to ask and thanks again for stopping by and commenting! :)

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  4. I love hearing about your goat mix too. I might just have to try this with my girls. So how much do you feed a day to each goat?

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    1. Well it depends, but right now Star and Tulip are each getting half a scoop which is about a pound, morning and night. So they are getting 2 pounds a day right now, to make sure they have plenty of groceries for those babies growing inside them! After they kid and I start milking them, I'll slowly increase that to where they are getting about 4 pounds a day or more, depending on what their body condition looks like, how many kids they have, and how much milk they've got, etc. Ollie only gets like 2 TBSP's but it makes him feel like he's one of the gang......LOL!

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  5. ps I love seeing Tulip and Star too :)

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    1. :) Once again, you've no idea how happy it makes me to have them back.............or wait, maybe you do! You probably do! :)

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