Our plan at SKB Farm is to be strictly a commercial meat goat operation. All of our goats are percentages. I prefer this to a fullblood because a percentage will have hybrid vigor.



Boer vs Kikos
I didn't own goats when they started importing the Boer goats but I do believe the Boer has been bred out of the hardy meat goat I have heard it once was and into today's show goat.
If you are into showing, the Boer goat is for you (hands down). Like most people I started out with Boers (I wish I hadn't). I wish I had started with Kikos but they are to a certain degree hard to find. If you are new to goats and starting looking around for For Sale adds the first 100 you look at will be Boer Goat adds.
I haven't owned Kikos long enough to see if they are the great goat that everyone that owns them says they are.
I find it odd that when I walk up to the fence The Boer Goats all come running and start whining for me to feed them while the Kikos are all still out in the pasture browsing.
When I walk into the pasture while its raining I can look around and all my Kikos are browsing and all the Boers are in the barn.
I haven't owned Kikos long enough to know if they are a more parasite resistant goat but they sure seem like they will be much hardier then a Boer.



Copper Sulfate
One of the most common health/ feeding practices for goats is to feed them mineral with extremely high copper sulfate. I always fed copper sulfate because I thought it was typical of a goat to need a higher levels of it then other animals (cows, sheep etc) but mainly thought it helped with parasite control.
We contacted Joan Burke- USDA small ruminant researcher in Booneville, AR.
 She has found this to be completely false.
Feeding copper sulfate does nothing for parasites.
You can read her research Here:




Parasites
If you have goats on a pasture their are worms in the pasture. Worms will only crawl 3 or 4 inches of a stem of grass. This is why we use a rotational grazing system. We use high tensile wire to make paddocks so that we can rotate the goats on to new / taller grass. We rotate every 3 to 5 weeks depending on grass height.
We would like to one day have several paddock systems and a few head of cattle so that we could rotate goats and then run cattle in to help clean up worms faster.
Some good research on parasite control can be found Here:




Fencing
It was once said (by someone) that if it will hold water, it will hold goats.
This may be true to a certain degree but Goats are by nature very curious creatures and there is always the chance one will get to curious someday.
I think the most common mistake is not putting you wire down low enough. You bottom strand must be 3 or 4 inches off of the ground.
Most things say 6 inches is adequate. My first goat fence I put my bottom wire at 6 inches and the goats go underneath.


Our main farm is mainly three board horse fence. I have put two barb wires below the bottom board and then another strand of barb wire between the first and second board and then there is two hot wires on top (The previous owners had it there for his horses so I just left it there). I have never had a goat get out of this fence or try to.


On our rented farm we use 8 wires of 12.5ga high tensile electrified wire. We currently have just one 8,000ft paddock. We put the first 3 wires at 4 inches, the next 2 wires at 5 inches and the last 2 wires at 7 inches. We use temporary t-post corners to pull against and have all wire strainers on a removable post that is wired to a tree or other object in the ground.
We use plastic step-in posts every 10-20yds. The spacing of the wires will very slightly because of going to t-posts to step in posts. You have to watch your terrain very closely and be sure to put t-posts in the dips and step-in posts in the rises. We also have this hooked up to a very well grounded fence charger.
I have watched a herd of about 10 goats that were spooked jump into this fence at once and they all bounced off of it.
This is one of the cheapest fences compared to other types.