Free Choice Minerals

 I know I've posted before about my free choice mineral feeder

but I thought an update might be called for. Still using and liking them. It is interesting to see how the consumption of minerals changes throughout the year. At the moment, the girls are going to town on potassium, cobalt and copper. Don't know why. It's almost kidding, but I've never seen them hit the potassium hard before. Cobalt and copper, yes, but not the potassium. The cows and the boys share a feeder so I'm not sure what exactly the boys are consuming. The cows can't seem to get enough of anything right now. Wow, they are sure going through it!

A couple years ago we finally built the cows and boys a new shed, one I can stand up in. They'd been making do with a small shelter designed for mini donkeys that was left when we moved here. Now there's room for everyone and I can isolate when needed. Anyway, I moved the mineral feeder for that pasture into the shelter.

When I started this, I was using Advanced Biological Concepts 12 mineral system. Everybody liked it and I had good results but it was super expensive. I have since changed to Free Choice Minerals. Either way I have a huge shipping cost, but FCE offers 20 minerals and is cheaper per mineral than ABC. ABC is chelated, so that was a huge plus, but the money savings won out. Everybody seems to like the FCE just as well as the ABC offerings. I did have to add a bunch more boxes, though.

It was interesting seeing how the goats went at some of the more obscure minerals. When I first switched, I went through Boron like you wouldn't believe! It was almost a month before they slacked off of that. Copper is always a pretty steady usage but the others change often. Just a couple months ago, the girls were going through the iron at a pretty good clip. They've backed way off of that now that they are into the potassium, cobalt and copper.

I haven't noticed any patterns in consumption yet, but the last three years we've been in a pretty good drought, so my hay is coming from wherever I can find it instead of my usual supplier and some of it is not the best quality, so I'm sure that greatly affects things.

What have I noticed since using free choice minerals? Overall, better parasite resistance, although we don't have too much of a problem with that compared to some. And I always have 1 or 2 that still need a bit of help, usually at the end of winter/early spring and usually the bottom ranked goat(s). More girl kids than I used to get. I used to get LOTS of bucklings and/or my doelings would be very small compared to their brothers. Now I get more girls and the weights are much closer between the sexes. The milk is better as well, it lasts longer before going goaty. Less joint clicking. Still there on some of them  but it's much better than it used to be.

Another benefit of this, eventually my pastures well be well mineralized as well. I use the manure and bedding out on the pastures and the animals poop all over. All this will slowly add to the minerals available in the soil, improving the soil health and thereby the animal health as well.