Savannah Goat Guide
The objectives of this Guide are to acquaint current and prospective owners of Savannah goats with certain aspects off Savannah ownership, on-farm performance evaluation, breed history, breed importation, breed standards, and Registry requirements.
Read More Why Savannahs
Meat goat production can play an important role in stabilizing rural communities by: diversifying existing farming operations; creating new opportunities for value added processing; offering young people a low cost start up venture or lifestyle oriented, part time farmers a supplementary income. At the same time, meat goats can improve land use by providing a biological control for some weed species and by arresting brush encroachment. Minimal resource usage (water and grain) will make meat goats an increasingly important component of the sustainable agriculture equation on a world scale.
Read More South African Developed Meat Type Goats
There are mainly three locally developed meat type goat breeds in South Africa namely the South African Boer goat, the Savanna and the Kalahari
Red. In order to maintain the characteristics of these breeds and to ensure that their unique traits are not lost through continuous selection and
cross-breeding, it has become important to revisit current breed standards and introduce genetic characterization to obtain genetic diversity
parameters.
Read More Comparison of Meat Goats of South African Origin by Dr. Frank Pinkerton
As Boer goat magazine readers and others know, Boer goats first showed up in the U.S. in 1994 as frozen embryos from Landcorp, an arm of the New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture. Similar in-shipments occurred to Olds College in Alberta, Canada in 1993. Thereafter, the live kids born were used by Landcorp to promote the breed in the US market as well as Canada. Embryo prices ranged $250-500 and up while conception and survival rates varied from 20-50%, only occasionally higher. Initial prices for 4 month-old kids ranged $20,000 upward, but such inflated prices were not sustainable, and many latecomers to this betting game lost heavily in 1995 and 1996. Thereafter, prices stabilized at lower levels.
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