A dozen goats is not a lot. Shelter you can build yourself and you just need enough so they have an escape from the sun & snow. Farmers do most of the medical care themselves except for the rare instances where you need to call the vet, e.g., we just had to put a horse down a couple of weeks ago.

Food is the most important one because it's an non-stop expense, but it's not unmanageable since it scales directly with the number of animals.

That roughly agrees with my back of the envelope math. A dozen dairy goats should be able to provide about $80k/year and it doesn't seem like they'd need too much room (my parents house in the country has enough land out back to do this and the neighbors are far enough away to not complain about goats... and, well, the neighbors have cows and so aren't likely to complain in any case - this isn't an option for someone living in the suburbs though).

Still, animal husbandry isn't something for me. It's not the animals, but rather the business side of it that is at issue.

http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541 (and my commentary on it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26215448 )

I liked your commentary, it was very insightful. It's important to understand what you are willing to do, as opposed to merely what you like to do.

My wife is a horse trainer and also runs a horse rescue operation. Her average day involves 2-6 hours in the saddle. Now, many horse lovers think that it sounds like so much fun. Like video game testing ("oh, you get to play games all day, that must be great"). But the reality is that it's hard physical work day after day after day correcting the behavior of a powerful animal that is multiples of your bodyweight and doing it under conditions where you could be severely injured.

Back to goats: I think you'll find that most small animal producers are doing it as a side income from something they enjoy. I have a neighbor who has a few dozen goats, but they are also running a commercial trucking company.

I'm a bit doubtful about that math...

A Nubian goat will apparently produce an average of 2000 pounds per lactation, which averages 284 days. Since gestation averages 149 days, you're getting less than 2000 pounds per year per goat. (https://extension.psu.edu/dairy-goat-production)

2000 pounds per goat is about 250 gallons. A brief search tells me that you might get up to $5/gallon for milk wholesale, which gives you $1259 per goat per annum, or $15000 for a dozen. That's pre-tax, of course, and doesn't include your expenses.

I guess if you sell directly to consumers for $26.66 per gallon, you could gross $80k.

You can produce cheese and such, but that's an additional enterprise. And of course there's potential for income selling goats for meat, since yearly breeding is going to give you a surplus unless you're looking to expand the herd.

From your source, you chose the the one that's near the bottom of the milk production range. If you're trying to make money with a dairy goat, Alpine or Saanen would be better options.

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https://www.thehappychickencoop.com/how-to-make-money-raisin...

> A goat farmer can earn $8 to $12 per gallon. The most profitable dairy goat breed is the Saanen, in which you can profit up to $36 per day.

From https://backyardgoats.iamcountryside.com/goat-breeds/nubian-...

> Productivity: Average 6.6 lb. (3.9 kg) milk per day/1920 lb. (871 kg) over 305 days with 4.8% butterfat and 3.5% protein. ... Although yield is lower than for most dairy breeds, the high levels of milk solids impart a rich flavor and improve coagulation, making it an ideal constituent for making goats’ cheese.

Compare with https://backyardgoats.iamcountryside.com/goat-breeds/saanen-...

(digging) - this gets to https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/640/3/0... - the saanen appears to be about 15% - 30% more milk in the same time frame depending on the source.

The "sample dairy goat budget" on the page you provided is an interesting resource.

The price for goat milk - https://milklife.com/articles/nutrition/differences-between-...

> ... For about a quarter per 8-ounce glass, cow milk offers more nutritional value than just about any other beverage you can buy at this price. Goat milk is nearly five times more expensive, ringing up for $1.24 per 8-ounce glass.

The budget worksheet puts the milk at $6.50/gallon.

My math was based on a that very rough $36/doe/day math without accounting for expenses. I was interested in the "is the herd size a dozen? two dozen? or a hundred? ... in order to live ok?"

The worksheet puts a rough estimate of the total receipts which the worksheet puts at $1,323.10/doe/year.

The returns over variable costs per doe per year is $359.01 and returns to management is $225.72.

> The worksheet puts a rough estimate of the total receipts which the worksheet puts at $1,323.10/doe/year.

So my rough estimate was only about $75 off?

Let's look at that $36/day figure, because I don't trust those blogs.

The PSU page puts the absolute top production for the Saanen at 4870lb per lactation period. Add in the gestation and you're getting 4870 lb per 433 days, or 11.25 lb per day -- 1.4 gallons per day average.

At $12 per gallon, that's $16.8/day per doe, or $6132 per doe per annum, for a grand total of $73k gross receipts per annum on your herd of a dozen.

That's if you can get the top of the market price for the milk, and if all of your goats produce at the absolute top capacity and you get them bred the day after they dry up (but in this case you should probably be breeding your wondergoats for sale, or making money selling semen from the wonderbucks).

It appears so. I am suitably impressed that your envelope has better math than mine did.

One of the parts that the worksheet brings in is all the expenses - both fixed and variable. This is where there is a "yes, you could have a dairy goat heard and make money, but in order to make more money, you need to better vertical integration of the operation" which gets into the growing your own fodder which gets into other economies of scale and ends up looking more like a regular dairy operation growing oats whatever.

The "have a heard of goats, milk them twice a day and live off of that with lots of free time between the milking" isn't something that is easy to do.

Yeah, I'd previously thought about dairy goats and decided there's just too much damn milking. Given some pasture land, I'd choose to raise sheep for meat. It's not a huge amount of income, but it's a lot less work than dairying. Plus you're keeping your own family supplied with lamb--and pork, it's easy to keep a couple hogs around--which is a big savings at the grocery store.