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What is your schedule for bottle feeding?

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9.5K views 29 replies 16 participants last post by  Necie@Lunamojo  
#1 ·
I'm seriously considering bottle feeding my kids this year. However, I work 4 days a week.

I've heard that when the kids are born most feed every 2 hours. I'm not sure that's realistic for us! Is there any other way to bottle feed and not have to be feeding every 2 hours around the clock??

Thanks everyone!
 
#2 ·
What hours do you work? You could feed them before you go to work and when you get home. As long as they are kept warm during the time you are gone and have hay and feed left out for them (when they are a couple weeks old or older) they will be fine. On the days you are home you could slip in another mid day bottle to them.
 
#3 ·
I work and the 4 days a week. What I do is give them all they want before I go to work and again when I get home. I also feed again right before I go to bed so they get 3 feedings a day. It works for me and once they are eating well, I do away with the late feeding although by then they are a few months old.
Theresa
 
#4 ·
I do morning feeding (at 9 or 10), then afternoon feeding (between 3 and 4), then go to work, then night feeding (12-1).

Last year I had kids born right before going to work (called them to say a was gonna be a *bit* late), got them fed and got to work, and the kids got fed again when I got home. They were fine. Sleeping...not even bawling that they were hungry. :)
 
#5 ·
We bottle feed 4 times daily for the first week, then 3 times daily for the next two months. They are then fed twice daily until we get ready to start weaning. They have hay, water, alfalfa pellets, and mineral available at all times. I am lucky because I stay home with my boys, so I have the freedom to space out their feedings during the day. Their first feeding is around 6:00 AM and their last feeding is no later than 8:00 PM. I see nothing wrong with doing what others have said; feed before work, when you get home, then late at night.
 
#6 ·
We only feed 3X/day. A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away we used to feed every 6 hours - getting up at 2AM to feed....

Then we observed the Boers and realized that their dams did NOT get up at night to nurse their kids - so I wasn't going to either, LOL!

3X/day seems to work well for us. We know a few folks who feed 2X/day, but doesn't seem to work for us, as our kids just can't eat 20-24 ounces of milk at one feeding when they are young.
 
#7 ·
Wow- perhaps I am over-feeding my babies... I too am home all day and pretty much offer the oldest baby (almost 4 weeks) as much as he wants (usually about 30 oz at a time) and feed the younger ones (just over a week old) 5 times a day. I figured if they were on their mom's they be able to eat as much as they wanted and grow nice and big so I've basically been going with that theory.
They all have refused completely or not finished bottles at times, so I wasn't too worried about them over-eating. Should I be?
 
#8 ·
If they don't have the runs and they refuse the bottle when full - No, they aren't over-eating.

But....You just might be working too hard! :rofl

There are many ways to get the job done - If you are enjoying yourself (and your family is too) then forge ahead. But a schedule like yours would make me heartily sick of young kids. Eliminating the night feedings made raising/breeding goats much more do-able for us as a family. And our goats grow up very well - show well, appraise well, milk well - so I know that our methods are working for us.

One thing you do want to remember is that you want those kids to start nibbling at hay and grain to develop their rumens. Our Boer kids (which are dam raised) are nibbling by the age of 3 weeks. The Saanens don't really look at grain until 6-7 weeks of age, but they do like nibbling on the hay (in much smaller amounts than the Boers, BTW) at 4-5 weeks. Many breeders try to feed a moderate amount of milk for a moderate length of time (like 10-12 weeks) because while it seems like one is doing well for their kids, in the long run the "rationed" kids actually do better as older kids and adults. Personally, I think it is all about the rumen...
 
#9 ·
The older one has been eating a handful or two of hay since about a week old- he literally nibbles the grain- like he MIGHT eat 3 or 4 pieces 3 times a day. The younger ones are eating a little hay now but also aren't too interested in grain yet.
Our son is able to feed the babies by himself after I make the bottles and at almost 2yo, he thinks its the greatest coolest thing ever, lol. He feeds in the morning and afternoons and hubby comes home and feeds once in the evenings and I'm a night owl so I feed them around 2am one last time.
I wish the older one wasn't alone, I think if he felt he had some competition he might be more apt to try to eat more grain.
 
#10 ·
I leave kids on mom for the first week then pull and bottle feed. They get a bottle at 7am right before I leave for work, then another at 5pm when I get home and one at midnight. The kids that we pull right at birth get a bottle at 7am, one at 11:30am, 5pm, and midnight for the first week then they are given 3 a day with the rest of the kids.
 
#11 ·
Nipple buckets/lambars are really the easiest way to make sure they get plenty to eat. My first kidding seasons I worked a full time job. I left at 7am and got home around 5pm. What I did and still do, even though now I could feed more often if I wanted to is to put out a nipple bucket with just a little more than they can eat until the next feeding. I only feed twice a day and they are learning to use a mini nipple bucket the very first day. By the third day nearly all kids are on the nipple bucket. Sometimes there is a stubborn one that needs more work. It's soooo worth it though.
I like big growthy kids like you see on dam raised babies, so I try to mimic that with free feeding. I also put out free choice grain right away, even though they don't start eating it for a couple weeks and then it's still just tiny bites for a couple more weeks.
I love bottlefeeding kids, especially smaller individual kids, but it is just too time consuming and if you have a lot of hungry kids it can make you very annoyed at them at feeding time.
The drawbacks I've had with the nipple bucket are that in very cold spells the milk in the bucket freezes after a couple of hours. But still, they can continue to drink small sips until it freezes, which is better than nothing. I remedied that one year by putting a heat lamp over the bucket at night but worried constantly about fire.
If you have two or more buckets you can rinse one out between feedings, so they always have a clean one full of fresh milk. If you don't already have a bucket I would recommend making your own from a flat bucket and hanging it on the OUTSIDE of the pen to keep kids off of it. I have a round one with a special holder, but it fits inside the pen and when the kids are done eating they play on it and when they get older they knock it over.
 
#12 ·
The further south you go the more we rely on grain (like the cow info) on building rumens. I will let the kids eat the fine leaves off the alfalfa, but don't want them eating 'hay'. Grain is what builds the rumen, but milk is what grows out the kids the best. And nobody down south has as good of hay as those up north, so don't rely on hay that has sat in hot humid barns and cold humid barns for almost 8 months to grow out your kids like they do up north.

One of my dear friends is a baby lover, be it her nubians her boers or if she took 3 hours she bottle fed each of her kids for 12 weeks individually. For myself if it really took that kind of patience I would not have goats :) I love lambars, they work well for my personality, most of my kids are on the lambar for at least some of the meals by day 2, by day 3 for sure. But I make baby lambars that take very little sucking and keep them full, since I do have such small kids with so many multiples born. In the back of the hoegerrs magazine is the new setup to free feed, on facebook a gal has excellent photos of her setup and they were transferred here on another thread, using the same nipples and holders *buy them from the company rather than hoeggers for cheaper plus you can buy just what you want* and keeping the milk in a container in an icechest, which means cold milk if you want it cold or warm milk longer if you want it warm and without flies!

https://www.biotic.com/httpsdoc/javaorderform.shtml
 
#13 ·
So this may be a silly question to some of you- but how do you get the kids eating grain? We're somewhat lucky on the hay we have. We baled it in November and have good storage so it's still nice and green and fresh. Hopefully we'll bale again by March, then every 45 days until around November again. I read on here someone buying 2 or 3month old kids and not being able to get them to eat grain and therefore the kids not thriving. I don't want that. Will they eventually start eating more than a few pieces on their own or is there some way to "teach" them?
 
#14 ·
My kid are curious, they are in the minerals and snorting it out of their noses at a few days old. I also sit in the pen and run my fingers through the grain, they want to see what mom is doing. But I am much more concerned about them getting milk. I know we have had people on here who will say their goats won't eat grain, I have never had that. I don't wean until kids are consuming 1 pound of grain each....better said, when there are 8 doelings in the pen and I put out 8 pounds of food, it is gone by the next day, then I will even think about moving to once a day lambars or weaning. By then also, forage and hay becomes important because they are ruminanting.
 
#17 ·
Jryan said:
Wow- perhaps I am over-feeding my babies... I too am home all day and pretty much offer the oldest baby (almost 4 weeks) as much as he wants (usually about 30 oz at a time) and feed the younger ones (just over a week old) 5 times a day. I figured if they were on their mom's they be able to eat as much as they wanted and grow nice and big so I've basically been going with that theory.
They all have refused completely or not finished bottles at times, so I wasn't too worried about them over-eating. Should I be?
So you have a four week old goat drinking over a gallon a day?
Or am I misunderstanding?

Mine all get about a pint three times a day.
We're feeding four, and already the Princess and I are looking at bucket apparati.

It's too cold here to give babies cold milk.

Bless up!
 
#20 ·
Katie,

I only feed a night bottle the very first day or two, I have the kids in the house and they are up and hungry at night. After the first two days healthy thriving kids sleep through the night and don't wake up so they go from the late feeding (9 or 10pm) to morning feeding (7 or 8am). We feed every 3 hours a day the first week , then switch to 4x a day, then 3x a day (at 1 month) all they can eat. By then everyone is drinking 20oz or more. Especially with December babies outside the warm milk in their tummies keeps them warmer. I switch faster if kids are not finishing bottles or walking away from lambar.

Jessica, the younger kids out of Andrina won't be drinking 20oz yet, 16oz is pretty normal for their age.
 
#21 ·
Jessica, the kids you are referring to that wouldn't eat grain, were dam raised boer kids that were 4 to 5 month olds. They had only been on mom and pasture. They had NO CLUE what grain was, the owner of the goats only fed cow range cubes to the adults and that was a "treat". So, they thought we were trying to poison them with the feed. We tried every feed (including goat, rabbit, chicken, horse, alfalfa pellets, etc.)/grain (corn, oats, etc.)/top dressing (powdered kid replacer which is VERY sweet smelling, calf manna, etc.), acting like a goat eating it, pretending of course, to give them the hint of what it was for (that was a big laugh for my kids, lol), nothing worked, we were told to try restricting hay to see if they would at least try it. After a few days of them not eating... it was apparent that nothing was going to work. They would rather eat the occasional leaf that fell into their pen or shavings off the floor than food. We worked with them for a month and a half and all we saw was lost body condition, heartache, and many $$ down the drain. :/
BUT! you are raising those kids and they see you as the feed source. Whatever you give them tastes good, right?! So, it shouldn't be a problem if you put it out for them early on so they can nibble on it and get a taste for it. The problem that I had, no one that I talked to, breeders of meat or dairy goats, or even the county extension agent (who raises boers herself) had EVER heard of my problem with those goats!
 
#22 ·
If they were on mom they would only be able to drink as much as mom produced, with trips the two more aggressive ones getting more than the third kid, so not all they wanted. Bottle raising is not like dam raising. They would be getting a sip here and there very frequently, but not long drinks like a bottle.
 
#23 ·
prairie nights said:
If they were on mom they would only be able to drink as much as mom produced, with trips the two more aggressive ones getting more than the third kid, so not all they wanted. Bottle raising is not like dam raising. They would be getting a sip here and there very frequently, but not long drinks like a bottle.
That's not exactly what I find with my dam raised kids. The kids will eat in the morning. Then the herd will head out for their morning browsing. Then they head back to their pen. Once they get there the babies hit the udders and the does hit the water. They then lay down and rest for a couple hours or so. Then go out to eat again (haven't noticed if the babies eat when they get up from their little nap- they may). Then they head out for their afternoon eating just as before. The babies never eat while the herd is out browsing, which is a lot of the day! But as soon as they get back to "home base" it's eating time. Then they rest in the night and yea, I don't think they eat all night.
 
#24 ·
Ashley, I remember the same thing about our other goats, it was like there were specific times and locations they would nurse but it wasn't just little sips here and there.
I am feeding them 14, 12oz bottles between the three of them over each 24 hour period. That's roughly 175oz a day, a gallon is 128oz, so its just over a gallon and a quart (right? My brain isn't working properly due to being sick). Their mommy, Andrina, gives about 10oz short of a gallon per milking. So if they were on her, they'd have quite a bit more milk available than what I'm feeding.

Oh, and my oldest lil guy ate a whole handful of grain last night! :) I'm so proud of him, lol. He learned to be a goat!
 
#25 ·
Thanks everyone! I think a lambar is the way to go for us. My husband is very handy so I'm going to have him make some buckets. Our feeding times would be 6am, 4:30pm, 11pm. Does that work? Even if we did bottles??

I'm sooo excited for kidding season this year! I have 13 does bred.
 
#26 ·
<<So if they were on her, they'd have quite a bit more milk available than what I'm feeding. >>

That's with 14lb milker. A single kid out of first freshener on a bottle drinks just as much as the kid out of 16lb milker.

Ashley, we had kids eat through the day on and off all the time, if the dam would stand still, obviously at eating or drinking time she will be most likely to let them suck while browsing most of our does are constantly on the move. Haven't dam raised enough to see if there are different patterns with different situations but goats are opportunistic.