Finally, the procurement of our breeding herd was completed last week. We procured 11+1 each of Tellacherry goats, a native of Kerala (also called Malabari) and the more prevalent breed Kanni Aadu (Aadu means goat in Tamil). This lucky group will be our α ( 'Alpha' for non-techies among us) herd to be used for propagation and growing our herd size.
Our vision is that we will start 2 production lines. Tellacherry is popular for cross-breeding so it will be primarily to meet our breeding needs and to help develop associate farms. In contrast, the focus with Kanni would be for meat harvesting. During our purchase phase, a lot of farms were trying to sell us Boers. Personally, I feel Boer (a native of South Africa) is largely hype at this time due to limited meat appeal. In the coming years, Boer may become mainstay but that remains to be seen. Moreover, Boer's main appeal - it's gigantic size, can be a challenge while crossing with other smaller Indian breeds.
Procurement was done from 2 farms near Melur and Arrupkottai. The former was handled by 'farm managers'. We did not get to deal with the owner of the farms and subsequently a lot confusion ensued. The selection process and purchase experience was utterly mismanaged by the available managers. We were looking to procure medium sized animals which the sellers did not take a fancy to. It took multiple calls to and from the owners, their family members and others before we were able to secure the desired animals. The chaos peaked during our selection process when we were trying to finalize on two particular Tellacherries which usually have white fur. As the manager repeatedly asserted that these animals were indeed Tellacherrie goats, the two young nubians escaped into another cell and started milking on a black furred Kanni! We looked at the manager while he wore a queer look with a big oops expression with growing confusion. Finally, we let him off the hook and accepted his explanation of these kids may be a cross-breed though they looked like Tellacherrie.
Unfortunately, most farms do not maintain records of the animals since they are interested in quick turnaround and trading. They buy kids, fatten them and sell them to new farms for raising or breeding. It was a long day and but we felt accomplished that this project had finally taken off after much delay. The new goats are happy and are feeding well on CO4 and a concentrate mix which we are making in-house. More details on this in the next post.
A load of Kanni goats, with a few Tellacherrie look-alikes in white.
All the animals were given a nice warm wash the next day!
Tellacherry goats acclimatizing to their new shed.
Kanni with characteristic facial white stripes near the eyes.
In conclusion, our initial learnings were that we should have insisted on visiting the new / unknown seller prior to the buying visit. Since most breeders and traders remain small scale operations, it is always advisable to deal directly with the decisions makers - be ready to walk away, it will save you trouble later. Over the coming weeks, we will start building out the goat health checklist. Our immediate priorities are vaccinations and de-worming. We shall also start to add natural supplements to encourage weight and size growth. It would be great to see examples of health checkup schedules, maintenance checklists or growth trackers that our readers may have developed. Feel free to send documentation directly to our inbox and we'll make it available for all.
