🐐 Should I buy a goat?

Wondering if a dairy goat is worth the investment compared to buying milk at the store? A single dairy goat can generate hundreds of dollars in profit each year when you calculate her outputs.

As Heather points out, when you're assessing the value of an animal you really need to weigh the inputs versus the outputs. Plug in your local feed costs and milk prices below to see exactly how much value a dairy goat brings to your homestead.

The core inputs for keeping a dairy goat include daily feed and seasonal maintenance like dewormers. You need to capture every expense to get a true picture of your profit. For a great baseline, use an online hay calculator to determine your exact annual needs.

As Heather notes, Rory costs about two dollars and fifty cents per week in hay. Heather explains that she fed her about a pound a day of a 17 textured goat feed which costs about 40 cents per day. Ultimately, with the hay and grain rolled in together Rory herself cost 352 dollars per year to maintain though she rounded it up to four hundred dollars.

Selling kids is a massive part of a dairy goat's value. You can sell them to other homesteaders for breeding or raise them for meat. If you keep them for meat, they still carry a solid value of $175 to $225 each.

Heather's goat regularly had triplets. Even taking a loss on one buckling, they brought in $775 in a single year. Count your expected kid sales to see how quickly they offset your initial feed and maintenance costs.

To calculate your milk value, compare it to the milk you actually buy. You can measure against premium raw goat milk or standard grocery store cow milk. Even conservative estimates show significant savings over a typical 300 day lactation period.

As Heather says, she is able to bless us with one gallon or twenty dollars worth of raw goat's milk over the course of a full 300 day lactation that equates to 750 dollars. She emphasizes that if you count the sale of her kids and then added in the savings of not having to buy cow's milk that made her value to the farm at 962 dollars.