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Kids with Faster Growth Rate

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paintball-front
Fastest growing buck – R Fainting Paintball

I’m always striving to breed kids with a faster growth rate without sacrificing conformation or muscling to get there.  It’s been a long struggle to get the faster growth rate since the Myotonic breed as a whole has a slower growth rate than most goats.  Our buck Hummer had the fastest growth rate of all kids in his age group on the farm where he was born down in Florida.  As a general rule Hummer’s kids have been some of our fastest growing kids.

This year, however, our fastest growing kids have come from a variety of genetics with little influence from Hummer.  It’s been quite surprising, but I’m also thrilled with these results.  For our kids born Jan – Feb 2012 below is a list of the top growing bucks & does.  Being from a single or multiple birth was also calculated.

Bucks with the highest growth rate (in order):

  1. Paintball
  2. Spy
  3. Heart Stealer
  4. Diamond Miner
  5. Obi-Wan
tapdancer-rt-2.12
Fastest growing doe – R Fainting Tap Dancer

Does with the highest growth rate (in order):

  1. Tap Dancer
  2. Tropical Smoothie
  3. Party Time
  4. Padme
  5. Sunshine

Kidding Season is Here!

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BuggyKidding season has finally arrived.  The last month or so before the kids arrive always seems to take forever, but thankfully Christmas and New Years were able to distract me for a while.  This kidding season we have 20 does bred, most are due the week of January 19th, but we have a couple due in February and March as well.

The does scheduled to kid mid January (not in any particular order) are:

Cherry, Showbiz, Frostie, Lazy Daisy, Nutmeg, Melody, Guinevere, Poke-a-dot, Snickerdoodle, Red Socks, Katara, Charmed One, Surprise, Confetti, Classy, and Diamond.

The does due in Feb. & March are:
Jersey, Buggy (pictured at right), Perfection, and Mona Lisa.

We used 6 different bucks for breeding: Hummer, Rocketman, Dream Chaser, Flash Gordon, Mountain Ghost & Fox in Socks.  We use the pen-breeding method, where we put a buck with 5-6 does and leave them together for a length of time.  It takes a lot of time and effort to move bucks and does around to different pens when all the does are going in heat around the same time, but I think we did much better this year with getting all of our does bred around the same time.  Last year we had does kidding off and on for over 6 months.