The goats have had free run of the 3 biggest pastures since late September – able to go in and out of the pastures whenever they felt like it. When the new tenant cows arrive this spring, we will need to rotate the goats into different pastures opposite the cows. While this isn’t a problem in terms of the amount of grass they will have available to eat, it does present an issue with trying to feed them a little bit of hay over the summer while the cows are here.
The outer barn has ample space to spread out hay in various locations so all of the goats can feed at once without fighting over it. Once the goats are rotated off of the pasture with the barn to the other pastures, there are many fewer places to spread out the hay. We decided to design and build a new homemade goat feeder to feed them their hay.
Here is a video of the goats testing out the new goat feeder:
Unfortunately, the first test was only partially successful. The goats successfully ate some hay from it and were not able to knock it over or lift up the roof. However, they began to eat pieces of the wood off of the feeder itself around the corners. We had to remove the feeder from service until we can make some small tweaks before trying again.
Click through for a more detailed description of the goat feeder.