Meat Goats, Indigenous Veld Goats and the Live-Goat Market

#The best-recorded goat herd in the country says stop chasing triplets

Between 1978 and 1989 an experimental Boer goat flock at Adelaide in the Eastern Cape recorded 1 985 does and 3 336 kids. It is still the best long-run reproduction dataset South Africa has for a meat goat.

Of the kids born, 9.6% were singles, 52.8% twins, 34.8% triplets and 2.9% quadruplets. And the mortality: 20.1% of singles, 13.7% of twins, 22.1% of triplets, 19.8% of quads, averaging 17.7% across the flock (Marais & Scheltema I).

Run the arithmetic. A doe with twins weans 1.73 kids. A doe with triplets weans 2.34. Triplets do win — but not by the third you paid for, and the authors' own conclusion is the one to teach: selecting for multiples beyond twins is not always desirable, because the mortality penalty eats the gain. Add the extra feed a triplet-bearing doe needs in late pregnancy, the extra labour at kidding, and the third kid that will not get enough milk, and it gets thinner still. Prolificacy is not the Boer goat's constraint. Kid survival is.

#The age curve, and what it does to your replacement rate

The companion Adelaide paper followed the same flock by age. Net reproduction rate — surviving female replacements per doe — climbed from 0.48 at two years of age to 2.33 at eight. Reproduction culminated at 4 to 4.5 years and then stabilised rather than collapsing. Doe body weight peaked later, at 5.5 years. And of 1 000 does entering the flock at 1.5 years, 351 were still alive to join at 7.5 years (Marais & Scheltema II).

Three practical things fall out of that.

First, a two-year-old doe is barely paying her way. Nearly five times as much comes out of an eight-year-old. Every young doe you keep is an investment that only starts returning in her fourth year, which means culling on a single bad season in a maiden is usually a mistake — and keeping a barren six-year-old never is.

Second, the survivorship curve is your real replacement rate. Roughly two-thirds of does are gone by 7.5 years, mostly through death and involuntary culling rather than choice. Plan a replacement rate without allowing for that and you will be short of does and buying in — which is how a closed herd becomes an open one and how disease walks through the gate.

Third, age-group structure is a lever you control. Keeping eleven age groups pushes replacement down to 15–20%, which sounds efficient but drags the flock average toward the older end. Five age groups puts replacement at 20–25% with a younger, faster-turning herd. Neither is right. It is a decision, and most herds have never made it.

#What Indigenous Veld Goats actually deliver

South Africa recognises several Indigenous Veld Goat ecotypes: the Eastern Cape Xhosa Lob-Ear, the Northern Cape Speckled (Skilder), the Mbuzi or Nguni type of KwaZulu-Natal, plus the Kunene of Namibia and a feral Tankwa population in the Tankwa Karoo National Park (ecotype review, 2022).

The field handbook's production norms for these animals are modest and honest: gestation 150 days; birth weight about 2.5 kg; weaning weight 12–15 kg; mature female 35–40 kg; mature ram 45–50 kg; first breeding at one year; a ram-to-ewe ratio of 1:25, or four rams per hundred ewes; main kidding seasons April–June or September–December; a lifespan of 10–12 years (Indigenous Goat Production Handbook).

Read those figures and it is easy to conclude the indigenous animal is just smaller and slower. Then look at what the same genetics do under different management. Under improved management indigenous goats reach 20.0 kg at 12 months and 29.5 kg at 24 months; under village management, 13.0 kg and 21.5 kg (ecotype review). A 54% difference at a year old, in the same animal. The gap is management, not genotype.

Two caveats have to travel with that result, and a lot of people quote it without them.

It was not a veld trial. All animals were raised on hay and natural grass ad libitum plus a measured commercial pelleted ration, for six to eight months, to reach 30–35 kg. The finding is that the indigenous carcass holds up at equal weight under supplementation. It says nothing about an unsupplemented IVG on Highveld grassland getting there at all.

Castration flips the fat story. IVG bucks gave the leanest product in the trial at 71.0% meat and 5.9% subcutaneous fat — the figure everyone quotes. But IVG wethers were the fattest, lowest-meat group in the whole trial, at 10.5% fat and 67.4% meat, against Boer wethers at 9.1% and 69.5%. In this trial sex and castration moved carcass composition more than breed did; the breed effects were not statistically significant and the sex effects were highly significant. Quoting only the buck result is cherry-picking.

There is a real evidence gap here. No South African performance dataset could be located for Savanna or Kalahari Red goats — every figure in circulation for those two breeds is a breeder or encyclopaedic claim, not a trial result. Ask any consultant who quotes you a Kalahari Red kidding percentage where it was measured, by whom, and on how many does.

#The one channel the abattoir rule does not block

Meat Safety Act 40 of 2000, section 7(1) makes it unlawful to slaughter an animal anywhere other than an abattoir, to permit such slaughter on premises you control, or to sell or provide meat for human and animal consumption unless it was slaughtered at an abattoir. Section 7(2)(a) then exempts slaughter for own consumption or for cultural or religious purposes. And section 7(2)(b) closes it: "No meat or animal product obtained from an animal slaughtered as contemplated in paragraph (a) may be sold to any person." (Act text)

That single distinction explains the shape of the whole South African goat sector. DALRRD reports that only about 0.55% of goats are slaughtered in the commercial sector, while more than three million goats a year are slaughtered informally (Agribook; DALRRD 2023). Handle that three-million figure with care: one industry source attributes a similar number to the whole of Africa rather than to South Africa, and nobody has reconciled the two. The order of magnitude is what matters. A course taught off abattoir data would be teaching the wrong animal — the live goat, not the carcass, is the product.

And the live market has a calendar. The NAMC's Goat Section 7 Committee investigation found live-goat demand peaking at Easter, in December and through the winter months, driven by festive seasons and ceremonies (African Farming, April 2025). The field handbook reaches the same conclusion from the auction floor: markets timed around March/April and November/December work best, because goats are in good condition and both sides want to transact then. The handbook adds a design point worth copying — run breeding auctions and slaughter auctions separately, because the two buyer groups want different animals and mixing them depresses both. Note too that most goat trade here is private, out-of-hand sale rather than auction; NAMC records that goat auctions have lessened in importance in production areas.

Join that to the reproduction data. A herd that mates in November or December and kids in April or May has weaned, well-conditioned animals coming into the December peak and again into Easter. That is the reason to hold a defined six-week breeding season rather than running the ram all year.

Decide your breeding season this week, not this year: a six-week window mated in November or December puts saleable, well-conditioned live goats in front of ceremonial buyers at Easter and in December, makes your barren does visible, and keeps your kids as one manageable group. Then go and find out, in cash, what those buyers actually pay.