Milking Maude Through
Choosing to milk a goat through the dry season
8/19/20264 min read
Milking Through
Most dairy goats follow a familiar yearly rhythm: breed in the fall, kid in the winter or spring, milk for most of the year, dry off before kidding, and start all over again.
But does a dairy goat actually need to have babies every year to keep producing milk?
Not necessarily.
This year, we're trying something a little different with Miss Maude. Instead of breeding her this fall, we're going to milk her through and see where it takes us.
What Does “Milking Through” Mean?
A doe begins producing milk after she kids, but that doesn't mean she automatically stops producing milk when the next breeding season rolls around. She does usually decrease in production, though.
Milking through, sometimes called extended lactation, simply means continuing to milk a doe beyond the usual annual lactation instead of breeding her again that year and drying her off in preparation for another kidding.
As long as she continues producing a useful amount of milk and maintains good body condition, her lactation can potentially continue well beyond the traditional season.
Eventually production will decline, and every doe is different. Some goats are much more persistent milkers than others. That's part of what we're interested in learning.
Why We're Trying It With Maude
Our normal breeding schedule creates a couple of unavoidable problem: the dry season (end to lactation/no milk,) and a lot of kids.
Pregnant dairy does need a dry period before kidding, which means that when the whole herd follows approximately the same breeding schedule, eventually everybody is dry at approximately the same time.
No goats in milk means no fresh goat milk.
We considered breeding Maude this year, but ultimately decided that we don't particularly need babies from her right now, especially with her daughters being able to be bred this year. What we would really appreciate is milk through the winter.
So Miss Maude gets to skip breeding this season.
We'll continue milking her and see how well she maintains her production, body condition, and milk quality over an extended lactation.
This Might Become Bigger Than Maude
Maude is our test case, but if she does well, milking through could eventually become part of how we manage the entire dairy herd.
We're currently still in a period of fairly rapid herd development. We're breeding does because we're trying to produce better replacements, evaluate crosses, and build the herd we ultimately want.
We're getting close, though.
As our younger does mature and freshen, we're reaching the point where we'll have more nice does we'd like to keep. That also means some of our mature animals will eventually move on to make room.
Once we aren't trying to build numbers so quickly, we can afford to take a much more relaxed approach to breeding.
And that opens up an interesting possibility.
What If Only Half the Herd Kidded Each Year?
Our eventual goal could be to divide the mature milking herd into two groups.
One year, approximately half of the herd would be bred. Those does would kid, begin fresh lactations, and follow a fairly traditional dairy cycle.
The other half would skip breeding and continue milking through.
The following year, we'd switch.
The does that milked through would be bred, while the other group continued their lactations.
That means an individual doe might kid roughly every other year rather than automatically being bred every fall.
It also means we'd always have a group of established milkers producing through the period when the pregnant does need to be dry.
In other words: no farm-wide dry season. Just a lower production season.
Fewer Babies Can Actually Be a Good Thing
Kids are wonderful when you're trying to build a herd.
They're considerably less useful when you already have the herd you want.
Every kidding means another pregnancy and delivery for the doe, plus more kids to feed, manage, evaluate, sell, retain, or process.
Right now, those kids are important to our breeding program. We're still selecting for the traits we want and improving the next generation.
But eventually, we don't need every doe producing replacements every year.
This is particularly true of our Nubians.
Our primary goal with the Nubians is excellent household milk. We don't need a constant supply of Mini Nubian babies. If a good Nubian doe can maintain a productive extended lactation, we'd be perfectly happy letting her do exactly that.
The Oberhaslis are a little different.
We're still actively working toward the Oberhasli herd we want, and the next couple of generations are important to us. With Tails contributing to the upcoming generations, we're hoping to make some significant improvements fairly quickly.
So, for now, there is good reason to keep breeding our Obers more regularly.
But eventually, we expect to reach the same point with them, having the goats we want.
At that point, there's no reason to make babies just for the sake of making babies.
It Gives Us Another Trait to Select For, Too
Milking through may also teach us something important about our individual does and our breeding program: lactation persistence.
Peak production gets a lot of attention in dairy animals, but for a small homestead dairy, persistence can be just as valuable.
We don't necessarily need a doe to produce an enormous amount of milk for a short period.
A doe that produces plenty of delicious milk and then just...keeps going...can be incredibly useful.
If we eventually have does capable of maintaining good production through an extended lactation, that's a trait worth paying attention to, and potentially selecting for in future generations.
First, Maude Has to Prove the Idea
All of this is still theoretical, she is our first experiment.
We'll continue milking her through the coming dry season and watch what happens. We're interested in how much milk she maintains, whether her production remains worthwhile, how her body condition holds, and whether the quality of her milk remains as good as we've come to expect from her.
We expect that she will continue to decrease in production, but we also expect that she will likely continue to milk a useful amount. Many does that get milked through do still increase milk production again the following year, so we're expecting her to do the same. What we don't know is how much. And if she decides she's done and dries herself off, well, we'll have learned something there, too.
But if Miss Maude happily keeps putting milk in the bucket through the winter?
Our future breeding calendar may look considerably different.
Instead of asking, “Which goats are we breeding this year?”
We may eventually be asking:
Whose turn is it to take the year off? or Who do we want babies from this year?
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