Goats

In addition to core vaccines, there are a number of vaccines available for farms with certain diseases present or at high risk in their herd. We can help with the decision to add additional vaccines and the appropriate schedule for each vaccine.

For many of our goat herds, internal parasites are not a major concern. We can still help tailor external parasite control plans and coccidiosis control for each farm.

As resistance has become more common to available dewormers, having a Parasite Control Plan including reducing reliance on mass treatment, monitoring treatment effectiveness, deciding when and who to treat and managing your farm to reduce parasite pressure is very important. We understand the biology of the worms and the challenges of modifying perfect textbook plans to work on your farm. We offer in house Fecal Egg Counts and teach courses on the McMaster technique along with other tools to monitor parasites on your farm.

Reproductive performance of the herd is paramount to the success of an operation, and especially to the continuous production of milk throughout the year. We are experienced in the subtle changes to breeding programs to increase success. We also offer Breeding Soundness Evaluations on bucks – as well as freezing Owner’s Use Only semen. We also perform vasectomy surgeries to make Teaser Bucks.

We offer ultrasound pregnancy diagnosis starting about 35 days after the last breeding. Pregnancy diagnosis allows producers to make decisions about drying animals off, exposing them in the next breeding group or the decision to cull. Knowing conception rates sooner also allows us to make changes to our breeding programs and plans as required.

We work with producers to reduce disease through good nutrition, facility management, vaccination and other measures. We work with producers to record disease events for future monitoring and are here when disease outbreaks occur to develop the best treatment plan in real time. We also enjoy teaching producers to properly diagnose disease early, and have treatment plans ready for routine illnesses.

There are a number of chronic diseases of goats that can have severe economic impacts. We are actively involved in testing for CAE and Johne’s Disease and are part of the National Scrapie Program and can tailor other disease monitoring programs to your herd as needed.

We recognize that for many of our producers, treatment of individual sick goats requires our input – both by telephone and farm visits. While we like to teach producers to manage many of their own cases, we are available to examine and treat individual animals as needed. We offer the same diagnostic services for individual goats that we do for cattle and horses. We also recognize the growing number of goats that are kept as individual pets and are happy to treat them as the loved animals they are.