1. Goat Meat: America’s Hottest Commodity
Dr. Frank Pinkerton
AKGA Annual Meeting, June 2010
Batesville, MS

2. We are short of goat meat, really!
• In 2009 we harvested over 800,000 goats in
federal and state inspected plants
• We estimate an additional 100,000 goats were
killed, but unreported (informal slaughter)
• We also imported over 700,000 goat carcasses
from Australia in various forms
• On 1 January, 2010 we had just over
3,000,000 goats (about 2,600,000 meat goats)

3. Goat meat marketing
• The aggregate demand for goat meat is
currently unknown
• We do not how much would be taken if
‘sufficient’ supplies were available across time
• In economic parlance, goat meat prices are
supply-driven, not demand-driven (beware
the ‘glass ceiling’ effect on consumer demand)

4. Estimating demand for goat meat
• Research is underway at LSU to determine the
aggregate demand for goat meat
• The project will investigate seasonality of
demand and consumer preferences across
groups and venues
• There will additional investigations on
preferred carcass characteristics and value-
added products (cite producer participation)

5. Future demand for goat meat
• An ‘ethnic’ is one whose folks got here after
your folks got here; many have strong
preferences for goat meat; more ethnics,
more goat sales
• Ethnic numbers and family incomes are
trending upward; distribution is ‘spreading’
• Non-ethnic consumption of goat meat is also
increasing, but at a much slower rate

6. Opportunities for increasing the
domestic supply of goat meat
1. Expand the number of farms producing goats
2. Expand the number of goats on existing
farms and ranches
3. Expand the off-take/farm by increasing
reproductive efficiency (more kids born,
better survival rates)

7. Continuation
4. Increase the average selling weight of
slaughter kids via management fiat, through
improved genetic quality and possibly by
better nutrition
5. Increase percent of boneless yield/carcass via
genetic selection (improved meat-to-bone
ratio and, possibly, improved dressing
percent)

8. continuation
6. Generate more doelings from a herd via AI by
using ‘modified’ semen.
A commercial semen processing company,
SexingTechnologies.com at Navasota, TX has
apparently modified goat semen which
PVAMU is using to obtain an atypically high
ratio of female-to-male offspring; results are
pending, but promising (97:3 for dairy heifers)

9. Constraints to increasing the supply of
domestic goat meat
• Options 1 and 2 (more goat farms, more goats
per farms) require reallocation of resources
• Adaption rates would be dependent on the
expected cost-benefit ratios to be realized
• To make cost-benefit estimates, one can
readily find information on selling prices (as
influenced by season, weight, and grade), but

10. Cost-benefit analysis (continued)
• There is a near total absence of reliable
information about the real costs of market kid
production in various geographical venues
• University researchers have been notoriously
reluctant to undertake such economic studies
• As a consequence, University extension
specialists are better at offering technical
recommendations than economic assessments

11. Budget formats for estimating cost-
benefit ratios
• Most Universities have ‘how to do a budget’
info for livestock enterprises; some have
computerized versions. The logistics and the
calculations are relatively simple
• The difficulty is finding accurate cost input
data (what? how much? cost/unit?).
• Even experienced goat farmers are not much
better ‘advisors’, largely because they don’t
know how much it costs them to raise a kid

12. Options 3, 4, 5 necessitate:
• Producers to combine improved management
practices; more specifically, improvement in
the genetic quality of their herd is crucial
• Producers can ‘do something’ about nutrition,
health, and facilities, etc., but…
• Improving genetic worth is much more
difficult and certainly slower
• How does one improve genetic worth?

13. Selection of breeding stock
• Visually evaluating the ‘breeding value’ of a
goat is somewhat akin to assessing
pornography for content (with experience, it
may be doable, but it is pure hell to describe)
• I can usually beat a gate-cut (by looking at
structure, conformation, and udder and
mouth soundness), but truthfully, not by
much

14. Selection, continued
• The fact is that neither I, nor you, can really
‘see’ certain crucial traits affecting
performance (longevity, fertility, mothering
ability, milk yield, DFI and FCE (ADG)
• This being the case, the correlation between
‘phenotypic appearance’ and genotype-driven
performance is neither high nor reliable

15. Selection, continued
• On-farm performance testing is the best way
to make rapid improvement in genetic value
• You can do this by weighing kids at near 90
days of age and recording this information by
dam and by sire, with necessary ‘adjustments’
• KSU-Frankfort will do these computations for
you, for free, and send you a sire and dam
summary ranking their performance

16. Option 4: Increasing carcass size
• This is the fastest way to increase goat meat
supply, but there are constraints
• Larger slaughter goats have poorer FCE and
thus larger feed cost/lb of gain
• Larger goats reduce by some measure the
number of does/farm and thus fewer kids
• Larger goats have more internal fat and
somewhat lower dressing percent (waste)

17. Major constraint to adding carcass wt
• Culturally-induced consumer resistance to
changes from traditional preferences
• preferred carcass weights 20-30 lb
• discrimination against excessive fat
• aversion to fabricated cuts (rear leg, shoulder,
back-strip, etc.)
• limited interest in ground meat and ‘sausage’

18. Positive aspects of larger carcasses
• Reduced processing costs/lb
• Creation of larger primal cuts for sale as chops
& roasts; more ‘trim’ for sausage products
• But, the current preference is for smaller
carcasses or, with increasing retail prices, for
halves and quarters
• Larger, aged, or lower quality carcasses are
‘cubed’ for sale, and also for cookery

19. Paramount constraint to more goats
• Insufficient rates of return to capital,
management, and labor
• The major reason for the poor rate of return is
not supplemental feed or health costs, or,
until recently, low live-goat prices, but rather
the
• high cost of land needed to provide forage
• The cost of land is increasingly divorced from
its agricultural productivity (has been, will be)

20. Continued
• The cost of land to provide a forage-based
‘home’ for a doe can rarely, if ever, be
recovered from the sale of her offspring
• Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to recover
interest cost (and taxes)
• To illustrate, land costing $3,000/acre and
able to support 3 does ‘year-round’ results in
an ‘opportunity cost’ of $135/acre/year (3,000
x 4.5% tax-free bond) or $45/doe/year (135/3)

21. continued
• Adding $55/doe for all other costs results in
an annual doe maintenance cost of $100
• If she sells weans/sell 100 lb of kids/year, the
break-even price/lb of kid would be $1.00
• If the selling price (after commission) were
$1.60/lb, the doe earns a $60 profit
• Is this good, or bad? Comments

22. How to cope with high land cost?
• If you own the land, ignore ‘opportunity cost’
• If your are buying the land, charge only the
interest and taxes to the goat enterprise
• Consider the cost of the land as a real estate
investment; make the capital payments from
off-farm income and wait for land price
appreciation to make you astute—and
profitable

23. Conclusion
• Livestock farming is that way-of-live wherein
wistful hope triumphs over perceived reality,
every spring, every year
• The sight and smell of green grass routinely
clouds the agrarian mind
• It has been thus since the beginning of time
• Arribe y adelante, mis amigos… gracias por sus
tiempo, vaya con Dios, y adios ahora… se dice
el vieho hombre caprino