Dairy Goats and Cashmere: the Honest Position

#Four numbers you will not find

Try to build a budget for a fifty-doe dairy goat herd in South Africa. You need four numbers: litres per doe per lactation, the farm-gate price of a litre of goat milk, the wholesale price of a kilogram of goat cheese, and a mortality rate you can defend. Now go and find any one of them in a Tier 1 or Tier 2 South African source — a department, the Agricultural Research Council, a university, a producer body.

They are not there. Not hidden behind a paywall, not out of date: not published. No producer numbers, no herd sizes, no yields, no farm-gate milk price, no cheese price.

That is the lesson. Not a failure of searching, but a finding about the enterprise — and a rule about what you are allowed to do next.

#How small this actually is

The FAO estimate reported through the National Agricultural Marketing Council is that only about 1% of South Africa's goats are used for milk production — the lowest percentage in southern Africa (African Farming, April 2025). Against a national herd counted officially at 5.1 million, that is a genuine niche, not an emerging sector.

The breeds are the European dairy genotypes: DALRRD names Saanen, Toggenburg and Alpine; the industry press usually says British Alpine (DALRRD 2023). The breed body is the SA Milch Goat Breeders' Society.

The reason it stays small is not marketing. The cited reason is biological: milk goats are vulnerable to tick-borne disease and to heat stress. That is the same constraint that confines Angora production to the Karoo and Drakensberg, and you met its sharp end in the previous lesson — the afebrile heartwater case series confirmed on brain smear includes a Saanen, worked up at Onderstepoort. A European dairy genotype in South African bushveld or lowveld is a hard proposition before you have sold a single litre.

#What the missing numbers mean operationally

Compare it with the enterprise next door. For Boer goats, the Land Bank's 2023/24 budget carries a full line-item structure for 100 does — veld grazing plus about R4 968 a year of lick for the flock, 156% kidding, 140% weaning, animals sold at six months, returning R1 301.70 per doe and R27.23 per kilogram sold (Land Bank Livestock Budget Enterprise Book). Those are 2023/24 figures with arithmetic worth checking, but they exist: you can rebuild them with your own prices.

For dairy goats there is no equivalent, so the enterprise cannot be budgeted. It can only be piloted. That is not a reason to avoid it — Agribook lists named artisanal cheeseries trading right now, so somebody is making it work — but it changes what a responsible first step looks like. You are not comparing your plan against a benchmark. You are the benchmark, and you will not know whether it works until you have measured it yourself.

#The one hard legal fact

There is one specific figure for goat milk that is settled, and it is legal rather than economic. Under the Regulations Relating to Milk and Dairy Products, GN R.1555 of 21 November 1997, made under section 15(1) of the Foodstuffs, Cosmetics and Disinfectants Act 54 of 1972, regulation 4(1) sets the conditions raw milk must meet to be sold. The somatic cell limit is below 500 000 per ml for bovine milk and 750 000 per ml for goat or sheep milk, measured over three successive readings at least seven days apart (Department of Health text). That limit comes out of the regulation text itself, which is why it is quotable when almost nothing else about this enterprise is.

#Cashmere: an even emptier page

Every South African meat goat carries a little of it. DALRRD records that the Boer goat, Savanna and Kalahari Red produce "small quantities of cashmere" alongside meat and skins, and names the Gorno Altai as the dedicated cashmere breed. Indigenous goats carry two coats — a coarse guard hair and a cashmere-like down.

Then the finding that closes the subject: that down has generally measured below commercially acceptable standards, and is not being utilised at all (NAMC 2005, reported by African Farming in April 2025).

Set that against mohair. Mohair has a published market report after every auction, with class indicators to the cent, a certification share and a top price. For SA cashmere there is no price, no volume and no performance data at all — not a stale number, not a disputed number. Nothing. Anyone who tells you what a kilogram of South African cashmere is worth is quoting a foreign market or an ambition.

There is a real question buried in it — whether selecting indigenous goats for down would trade away the meat and hardiness traits the animal is kept for — but it is a research question, not a diversification plan. Treat cashmere as an unharvested by-product, and keep it off your income line.

This course has held to that rule against its own convenience elsewhere: it will not publish a goat-to-LSU conversion factor, because no South African authority has published one, which is precisely why the module opened with browse budgeting instead. Dairy goats and cashmere are the same discipline applied to two enterprises people ask about constantly.

So if goat dairy attracts you, do not go looking for the missing numbers. Go and make them — a handful of does, a milk record book, every input weighed, one full year — and you will end up holding the only figures in South Africa that are actually about your farm.