How to Make $6,000 Per Year Raising Goats

Goats are turning into a really big business in the United States. With consumption of goat meat and milk on the rise this year compared to just the past couple of decades and a steady demand for other products like goat-sourced fiber, it’s a good time to put your herd to work for you…

Believe it or not, it’s easy to make $6,000 or more in a year with even a small herd of goats — if you play your cards right! Whether you’re looking to pad your bank account a little bit or scale your herd enough to turn them into a full-time income, now’s the time to turn your goats into greenbacks.

In this article, I’ll show you everything you need to know and give you plenty of profit vectors that will work with the herd you have right now. Sound good? Let’s get to it.

There Are Lots of Ways to Profit With Goats

The first thing to understand if you want to make a bundle with goats is that there are all the different ways you can make money with them. Compared to other livestock, goats are quite versatile. In fact, they are truly the most versatile livestock species by a country mile!

Depending on your situation, preferences, the size of your herd, and the breeds you have, some of these approaches will be easier and more profitable than others.

Below are what I think are the most straightforward and reliable paths towards an extra income with your goats . We’ll get down to brass tacks in the following section…

Milk

You’ll rarely find goat milk in the average supermarket. It tends to be a fixture in high-end health food stores, ethnic groceries, and sometimes direct-to-consumer or direct-to-business sales. Nonetheless, this stuff is liquid gold, selling for anywhere from $6 to $12 a gallon!

Now, I want you to consider that the average dairy goat, specifically high-yield breeds like Nubians, Saanens, and Alpines, can produce a gallon a day or even more for upwards of 300 days a year. Punch those numbers into your calculator, and it will return nothing but dollar signs!

If you can cultivate the right buyer, or buyers, even a few highly productive does can keep you rolling in dough. The trick to capitalizing on goat milk is all about collection, storage, and navigating a sometimes tricky legal landscape. If you can do that, you’re halfway home.

Don’t forget that lots of prospective buyers will be purchasing the milk to make other goods like soap, cosmetics, and more.

Meat

Your average American has never had goat and never will. But it might not be the case forever. More and more Americans, and generations of immigrants from other countries now, are either trying goat and finding they like it or have always enjoyed it as part of their typical cuisine.

Goat meat runs the gamut in pricing depending on age, diet, and other special factors like whether or not the goat has been slaughtered in accordance with religious mandates.

You can sell meat goats directly for anywhere from $150 to $300, assuming they weigh around 90 pounds, a little more or a little less. A processed carcass can go for twice that.

This is a great way to go for goat owners because it affords flexibility, assuming you cultivate the right buyers…

You might not have to get your hands dirty with the necessity of slaughtering and processing if you don’t want to, and your yearly expenses basically boil down to food and supplements and, occasionally, medical care. Then you start the whole process over again.

If you have Spanish, Boer, Myotonic, or Kiko goats, meat is a market segment you should look into.

Live Goats

If you don’t want to deal with the trouble of extracting products from your goats in one form or another, rejoice because it’s possible to make a small fortune off of them anyway.

Live goats can be big business, both adults and kids. Young dairy does that are reaching maturity will sell for between $450 and $600 all day long, and some can sell for a lot more.

Healthy kids also fetch respectable prices, typically anywhere from $100 to $300 if they’ve been weaned. Naturally, you might be selling these goats to folks who want entertaining pets on a hobby farm, or to other people like yourself who want to embark on their own goat farming foray.

Either way, this can be easy money if the market is there, as all you’ll have to concern yourself with is taking the best possible care of your goats, marketing, and cultivating a list of customers.

You can raise and sell any breed here, but you’ll have an easier time if you sell breeds that are popular for milk or meat, or else trendy pet breeds.

Services

Don’t forget about services that your goats can offer. That’s right, services. In case you haven’t heard, goat yoga is all the rage these days! I’m only half kidding, and some instructors who happen to own goats are making a small fortune out of it.

This, though, is a flash in the pan, I think. A better and more way that goats have been put to work doing for hundreds and hundreds of years, is the clearing of land.

If you own goats, you already know, and if you don’t just ask any owner and they will tell you: goats can clear out vegetation like there’s no tomorrow. Thorny bushes, tough weeds, unwanted shrubs, and a whole lot more.

All you need to do is contain the goats on the targeted property, make sure there aren’t any toxic plants that will hurt them, and then turn them loose for a few days.

Depending on the size of your herd and the length of the job, you can charge anywhere from $300 to $1,500 for such a service, and need to pay only for transporting your goats to and from.

This is a perfect low-impact, low-effort way to capitalize on your goats, and it is a great enrichment activity for them.

A Simple, Straightforward Plan for Making $6,000 a Year with Your Goats

The following is a plan that has worked for me, and it is one that can work for you if you have the right customers. You don’t need many goats, either, and it minimizes herd turnover and completely eliminates the necessity of slaughtering or processing your own animals.

The three profit pillars we will use are milk, the selling of live young, and putting our herd to work for land clearing.

Milk

Assume that you can sell fresh goat milk for anywhere between $5 and $15 a gallon. If you have a highly productive Alpine goat that can produce 1 gallon a day during the lactation period, totaling about 300 gallons a year, you’ll be on track to gross $2,700 from that milk. Accounting for shortfalls in production, loss during collection, and other mishaps, call it $2,300.

Assuming the market is there, adding more does means doubling or even tripling your profit! But if you want to stick with a small herd, even a single stellar dairy goat can be a big money maker.

Selling Live Young

We need to keep our dairy girls pregnant in order to keep them in milk. If we don’t want to significantly increase the size of our herd, we need to find a home for these kids.

A typical, healthy doe in the prime of her life can produce two kids a year. Let’s say we sell those kids for an average price of $200. This shakes out to $400 per doe.

A few does, let’s say four, means you’ll be raking in about $1,600 a year gross, assuming the kids live and are healthy.

This is a conservative estimate; it’s possible to sell live young for considerably more depending on the intended use for the goat and the buyer.

Clearing Land

More and more people are turning to goats as an all-natural, environmentally friendly, and quiet way to deal with overgrown residential and rural lots. Depending on the size of your herd, the size of the lot, and the complexity of the job you can charge anywhere from $300 to $1,500, front to back.

Let’s average it out and say you cart off your herd of 5 to 10 goats for small to medium-sized jobs and charge $750. Doing just four of these jobs a year, each taking a few days, will bag you $3,000 a year. And mind you, your goat’s food is included in the job!

Not bad considering all you have to do is sit back and supervise.

The Tally

Adding all of this projected income together, we come up with $6,900. Yes, you’ll have to account for various expenses attendant to owning, keeping, and transporting your goats, but goats tend to be quite cheap as long as you give them a little bit of care.

Most of this income will go into your pocket as profit! I trust you can see that it is entirely achievable to earn a good income with your goats, even a small herd, if you can cultivate the right business relationships.