Who needs to buy 50% crossbred dairy goats?
If you want to keep 50% crossbreeds and you want to be producing milk straightaway,
then you should buy 50% dairy females and at least one 50% dairy male.
If your eventual target is 75% crosses, but you are not confident enough that you
can manage them, 50% crosses can be a good place to start. If they are mated to a
higher grade male, the offspring will be of higher grade, but you will have gained
experience from keeping the 50% mother, before you tackle the 62% (if the father
was 75%) or 75% (if the father was pure) offspring.
The 50% males are mostly used to ‘stabilise’ 50% stock - that is mating 50% males
with 50% females to produce 50% offspring. It is less common for 50% males to be
used for mating with local females, but there are certain situations where it can
be useful:
- If the eventual target is 50%, it is possible to start by producing 25% crosses from
50% males mated with local goats. These 25% crosses would then need to be mated
with a 75% male, in order to get the desired 50% dairy goats.
- If the intention is to join the Kabulya breeding programme, it is possible to start
from 25% dairy goats (first generation from a 50% male mated with a local female)
or to start from 37% dairy goats (from a 50% male mated with a 25% dairy female).
In both cases, the parent stock will give little milk, but by selecting over several
generations it is possible to get adequate amounts of milk combined with the excellent
disease resistance of the 25% or 37% crosses.
- Introducing ‘good mothering’ character into a meat goat breeding programme. Local
goats produce very little milk, which means that their kids grow slowly. But if the
mother stock has some dairy ancestry, the kids will grow much faster. A good strategy
is to mate 50% dairy males with local goats and keep the 25% female offspring for
breeding. These 25% dairy females can then be mated to a 50% or 75% Boer male, to
produce fast-growing offspring to sell.
The main advantages of 50% crosses is that they do not need to be zero-grazed, and
they can me managed by people who have had little training.
The goats available are generally the offspring of pure males mated to local females.
The breed of the buck depends on the area.
For an introduction into how to keep them and the relative benefits of 50%, 75% and
purebreds, click here.
