Our goats usually are in our woods, rotationally grazing. This setup provides a pretty natural setting for them, which has numerous advantages. It combats intestinal parasites since the goats are moved to fresh ground frequently. It also provides them plenty of fresh, healthy feed (and lowers our feed costs). This grazing also provides them with an activity to do, which keeps them from being bored and mischievous!
Summertime grazing
One challenge to this setup has been how best to provide them with feed and water. We’ve been using buckets on the ground for their water and supplementary feed/hay, which is less than ideal. When the water bucket is on the ground they can put droppings in it, which then requires us to dump the entire bucket and refill. With the feed bucket, being on the ground means it gets pushed around and we have to get in the pen and retrieve it daily. Honestly these drawbacks are tiny in the grand scheme of things, but I wanted to improve the system as we have a trip coming up, and I want everything to be as easy as possible for the farmsitter.
So, I made a feeding rack that holds all the buckets in place! This rack was very simple to make: cut some 2x4s and screw them together. The most involved part was using trigonometry to figure out the angles to cut the legs, based on the length of the legs, how far I wanted them to stick out, and how high I wanted the feeder to be, and that only took a few minutes with a calculator. The horizontal supports on the outside of the legs added a lot of strength to the structure, so make sure to include that piece if you’re recreating this for your own use.
The feeder is about 4ft long, 4ft high, and the legs stick out about a foot on each side. This setup has been very sturdy as the goats haven’t knocked it over! Now that it’s in use, I think the rack would work just fine if it was lower, too.
After assembling the rack and carrying it out, I suspended buckets using baling twine and hooks. Right now I have three buckets, one each for water, feed, and hay. I plan on building a hay rack and attaching it to one end, and we’re going to repurpose some PVC chicken feeders into a mineral feeder that’ll be attached to the other end of the rack. I’ll post about those updates once they’ve taken place.
For now this feeder rack has already been a big improvement. I place it right inside the pen’s fence, which allows me to reach over and empty/fill the buckets without entering the pen. The water bucket has also stayed very clean! Overall this project took less than an hour to make and implement, and it’s probably already saved me that much time by making daily chores just a few minutes faster.
Goat approved!
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