So, we’ve been using a mineral bar (20 free choice minerals) with our doe herd for going on three years. I can attest that it has made a HUGE difference (for the good) in our herd. Glossy coats and a marked increased the health of newborn kids: no knuckle dragging or floppy kids since the summer that we started with it.
I’ve always wanted a bar in our buck barn but never figured how. This is our doe mineral bar , which uses 11″ long, black, 2-hole mineral feeders from TSC (10 of them) which is quite a lot of wall space needed. (About 10 feet.)
Recently, I saw a post on a FB group for mineral bar users by Lura Huff who used these reinforced pig feeders (available at Amazon and Walmart).
Each feeder unit has five holes, so you need 4 feeders for a full 20-mineral bar. Here is a picture of Lura’s design. It’s a portable version (which is what I thought I’d do when I ordered them, and may yet do in another buck barn).
It is ingenious because it can be unbolted quickly in order to service the dishes or to move it to another spot on the farm
The trouble was, of course, getting time to make it.
Photo Credit to Lura Huff
As I took inventory of our second barn’s interior space (where we usually house junior does in winter and/or bucks during breeding months, I realized that we had about 8 feet of wall space… enough to easily put all four, five-hole feeders onto one 8-foot 2×4. So, we screwed them on with lug bolts and washers, measured up the same height as our manger openings, and screwed it to the wall.
We have found that when you put the dishes higher and give goats a step up (in this case, cinder blocks) you have less poop in the feeders.
Our supply buckets (5 gallong Home Depot buckets) are in our main bard, about 200 feet away, so we had to think about how we were going to easily re-supply the mineral feeder in this new barn. We came up with using two file boxes (bought at Staples) to keep 12 quart-size mason jars in perfectly.
You only need 8 jars in the second box, but they stay put nicely with 12, so we double up on some of the most-loved minerals in the remaining 4 jars.
We labeled the tops of the jars, and now I only make two trips to refill all the minerals with ease!
There are many ways to do this, of course. Most of the time, I like to use dog crates of various sizes. We generally put the crate into my Hyundai Santa Fe on top of a tarp that we then secure to the sides of the crate so that goat pee and poo are largely contained. In general, I help my buyers with transport only when I will travel up to four hours (making an 8-hour driving day, max). Most of those trips are made with young kids on board.
However, recently, I needed to take two adult does on an eight-hour trip one way. None of our crates would have contained them comfortably (or fit into my SUV, even). We do have a truck with a cap, but my back does not tolerate trips of this magnitude in that truck. What to do?
Ta da! The goat sling!
We made it out of 1″ PVC. The bar at the top rear is NOT cemented in. It is jammed in at the end, after we put in the goats.
The front and back sections *are* cemented together. The center, transverse pieces over the wheel wells are not cemented, but they are held in place with locking eye-hooks.
After we constructed the sling, we draped a tarp over it. In our case, the basic dimensions of the sling were 48″ wide by 60″ long, roughly. We bought an 8′ x 10′ tarp, and it worked perfectly.
We tied down the tarp in a few places with shock cords, but in truth, the whole sling is so close to the car sides that the tarp was held securely by friction.
Maiden Voyage
I had a two-day trip planned with this goat sling in place. On the outward leg (8+ hours) I took two adult does from WV to OH. The girls loved it. They could stand or lie down, eat, and move about as desired within the sling space.
On the way home, I had two 11-week-old kids (pictured). They were a buckling and a doeling. I was a bit nervous about them jumping the sling to the front seat, but neither tried it. I did have collars on them, and dog ties with me. At one point, the boy got bucky, so I did end up using the collar and tie to restrain him until he calmed down.
If I do another trip with young kids of different sexes, I think I will take along a collapsed dog crate and stick it behind my front seats, just to have that option to restrain/separate them if needed. It was a bit of a sticky wicket when the boy started to be bucky while I was in traffic. Otherwise, the sling was perfect, and I’m sure we’ll get a lot of use out of it in the next few years. It kept my SUV spotless of hay/poop/pee. Very pleased!
This is Part 2 of an ongoing discussion of how to reduce waste in feeding hay to goats. Part 1 gives all measurements for the manger pictured below. This manger is built on exactly the same vertical measurements. It is 3 feet long by 2 feet wide in the horizontal dimension. Note that the place you put hay is only 9” deep!
The reason that this manger got built is that our barn is designed to be highly flexible, and there are times when we quadrant off sections that don’t have our wall mangers.
Additionally, there are seasons where we have more goats in a space than there are linear feet to a manger, and so the weakest get pushed aside.
I wanted to make a manger like the ones we have on our walls, but that was portable and accessible from all four sides.
This has fitted the bill admirably. I’ve seen as many as three adult goats on each side. For smaller herds, this design would prove ideal!
As with the wall version, the key to NOT having wasted hay is to NOT fill it above the level where the goats put their heads through to eat. If they don’t put their heads all the way in to eat, and stay there, this manger is no better than a slatted one, in terms of waste. The whole point of this design is that you drop a leaf of hay horizontal in the 9” bottom, and let the goats pull up on mouthfuls while leaving their heads inside the feeder.
See the demonstration below!
Ours is currently on our goat porch, so it is protected from rain and snow. However, one could easily extend the height of the four corner posts and affix a roof above this feeder if it were used primarily outside.
Using the lumber that we did, this manger is stable: it’s pretty heavy, but I find that two adults can move it easily.
We are still perfecting our infrastructure here at Storybook Farm. Last year, we had three goat litters widely spaced apart, and it was not hard to portion off generous parts of our barn spaces for moms and babies to bond and grow until they were ready to rejoin the herd.
This year, from late February to early April, we’re expecting six does to deliver, and some of those does are due only days apart. We have been doing research on “jug stalls” — small stalls that does and kids can inhabit for several days to bond tightly before rejoining the general population.
In addition, we have really found a benefit in providing a creep pen for kids who have begun to eat hay (which they do at about 2 weeks old). In this post, you can read about the prototype pen we made to see if we liked (or needed) such a space, and we found we really did. However, the creep gate that we bought from Premier 1 was both heavy and expensive, and not the easiest to join to our existing stall partitions. It’s great, and we’ll probably use it outside, but I got the idea of making jug stall partitions that would convert easily to creep gates, so that jug stalls could become creep pens for any number of little kids, should we so desire.
Below are shots of the construction of our three identically made panels. Obviously, you can scale to your space, but for reference, two of ours are 5’8” long, one is 5’7”, and all are framed in 2” x 3” lumber, with 10-gauge, 2” mesh fencing, 4’ high (purchased at Home Depot).
Each has a door that opens toward the humans, with the fencing towards the goats. When desired, the gate swings back and can be locked open, and then 1/2” metal conduit is inserted in pre-drilled holes so that the gate opening becomes a creep gate. There are construction notes on each picture below.
1. Begin the frame.
2. Frame door and hinge it.
3. Drill holes top and bottom
4. Put on wire w/staples
5. Drill holes for horizontal bars
6. Fit conduit and trim to correct lengths
Step 1: framing. We decided to make the uprights the strong part, and so they are a full 4’ long. The horizontal pieces are 5’5”, giving an overall panel width of 5’8”. The center strut (to which we hinge the door) is 45”.
Step 2: frame the door and hinge it. (We made our door openings 24” wide; you can make them any width.) The only thing I’d note here is that I left a sizeable space (a good 1/2” or more) vertically between the overall frame and the door frame because the wood is “on edge” and I didn’t want it to catch when operating. The two uprights of this door are 44.5” (so as to leave 1/4” of space for it to swing top and bottom) and then the horizontals were 19”.
Step 3: If you’re using metal half-inch conduit (which is cheap and can be found in any hardware store) for your creep gate function, it usually comes in 10’ lengths. So, you’ll need a Saws All or hack saw to trim it. (In picture 6, we were just fitting it; we hadn’t trimmed yet).
You’ll need a 3/4” bit to drill the holes in the top and bottom of the frame, swinging the door out of the way first. Half-inch conduit is 1/2” interior; it’s wider on its exterior, so a 3/4” bit works well. In the beginning, I did not drill all the way through on the bottom of the frame, but then I thought of dirt and poops lodging in the holes, and decided to go all the way through.
Spacing is a matter of personal preference. We raise Mini Nubian kids, so I know that we wanted spaces that could be adjusted from 3” (can’t get thru) to 4” (can get thru when itty bitty) to 5” (lasts from about 3-8 weeks) to 6” (about the widest we’ll need). My measurements for these holes (on center, in inches) in a 2’ opening were as follows, left to right: 3, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15, 19, and 22.
Another trick on this step: drill partially through the top of the door frame on the ONE hole closest to its non-hinged, top edge. Then, you can use a piece of conduit scrap as your latch and save money and labor!
Step 4: Affix the fencing wire. We used regular staples on each division of the wire, and then reinforced those with some leftover insulated electrical staples (hence the blue plastic on them). We found that large, standard, barbed fencing staples threatened to split the wood.
Fencing was affixed on the goat side of the partition, because mine LOVE to scratch themselves on woven wire, so we wanted the frame to be buttressing the strain. In this picture, as well, note the pressure-treated two 2” x 2” pieces on either side of the door. They are on the goat side, and are 14” long. (You do not need pressure treated, but it won’t hurt to have it. That’s what we could find, so we went with it.) See Step 5 for how we use them.
Step 5: If you try to simply bore holes for horizontal creep gate restraints in the same plane as the uprights, they will butt into each other. So, you need to create a deeper plane. Hence these pieces. We drilled three holes in each one, after screwing them to the frame, which is more than enough for our purposes.
Step 6: Fit your conduit into all holes to check for alignment, and then trim them to size. In this photo, we have yet to trim.
Final setup: above are our three panels, joined together with bolts and joined to each wall using eye hooks and conduit down thru them.
They will be divided with two 7’ lengths of the same 2” square mesh wire, to create three jug stalls and/or creep pens, depending on our stages of raising kids. We used bolts between the panels to join them together now, and (in keeping with our overall modular approach) to be able to take them apart when kidding season is over and we want the space for other things.
That door at the end leads to an area outside that we call “the playpen.” It is a kid-safe area outside where kids can go on nice days. The wire you see to the right divides this “nursery area” from the rest of the goat space.
Right now, we’re still storing round bales in the jug-stalls-to-be, but we’re going to clear that hay out this weekend and get the kid-warming huts set up, so stay tuned!
