Are you trying to provide fresh foods to supplement your dairy goats’ diet? Here are some simple goat forage ideas from your backyard. 
For those of us raising dairy goats in our backyards it can be a challenge to find healthy forage to give the goats to supplement their diet. A goat cannot live by alfalfa alone.
Goats are browsers by nature and, although they don’t particularly care to eat off the ground. They’ll happily eat vines, twigs, branches, leaves and anything remotely resembling your prize roses.
All of which can be classified as goat forage in your backyard.
Goat Forage in Your Backyard
Just to warn you, if you are a tidy gardener, you may be uncomfortable with the following tips. The reason for this is because a large number of them involve allowing native weeds to sprout and grow in your garden.
Why? So you can feed them to your goats, of course!
Weeds are expert nutrient foragers and grow without input from you. These are highly desirable attributes!
More Forage & Goat Resources
Natural Dietary Supplement for Goats
Spring and Summer Forage
During the spring and summer, it’s not too hard to find scraps from your garden, as well as prunings from various plants and non-toxic weeds in abundance to give the goats as forage food.
My goats particularly love:
- Alfalfa, rye, and other “green manure” crops – these can be grown in any empty garden space to harvest and feed to livestock.
- Pigweed (Amaranthus retroflexus) – which is great because it grows in abundance where I live.
- Mallow (Althaea officinalis) or anything in the Malvaceae family – which is a very healthful herb. However, the goats will only eat it in the early spring when there’s nothing else coming up.
- Lamb’s quarter (Chenopodium album) starts coming on in the early spring, too.
- Borage (Borago officinalis) – which is technically an herb but reseeds and grows like a weed, is also a favorite and its one of the first things to pop up in the spring.
Weeds=Goat Forage
We often use wheat straw as mulching material in the garden and there are always seeds left in it that germinate. So, we get wheat sprouting up everywhere. You guessed it – we let it grow and harvest it once it sets a seed head but before the seed dries and falls off and into the soil!
Weed is a very relative term. I’m grateful for my weeds and use them all year round to supplement my animal’s feed.
Incidentally, poultry will eat most of this stuff too, but since they hog most of the kitchen scraps, I usually save the big stuff for the goats.
Quick Safety Note:
A few things we routinely pile up for winter are listed below, but the bottom line is to be creative and safe with finding goat forage. Make sure you peruse this list of edible and poisonous plants from Fiasco Farm to be aware of what plants grow near you that may be harmful to your animals.
Goats are usually smarter than cows about what they eat but they also have been known to eat the paint off the barn so we won’t be completely trusting their judgment, now will we?
If you don’t have much in your yard, don’t be shy about asking around with your neighbors. Many will be happy to have you cart off their garden trimmings. Make sure you find out what kind of pesticides and/or herbicides they use, if any – none is preferable!
Winter and Early Spring Forage
Once the weather turns cold and you can feel winter approaching, the leaves have fallen from the trees and it’s harder to scrounge up quality forage to give your goats.
A few ideas for backyard goat forage include:
- Fall leaves (mine eat them like potato chips), which can be bagged up and saved for winter treats as long as they’re bagged dry.
- Try ivy or any vine that you know isn’t poisonous and that might need a good fall prune. Intrepid reader Bethany suggested berry canes below in the comments and I had to add those up here! Some of us have wild canes growing on our land that we’d like to remove via goat. Others of us are too lazy to prune our primocane berries back to the ground every year and would like the goats to help.
- In-ground veggies that you may have planted specifically for your goats – beets, turnips, carrots, radishes. I have radishes that volunteered in my scrap pile and now I have a whole bed of radishes to give the goats and I didn’t even have to plant the seed!
More Goat Forage Ideas
- With a few cold frames dedicated to your goats during the winter, you can be harvesting fresh veggies for them all year long.
- Look around, before the leaves are all gone, for branches from quick forming trees like willow. These are supple and tasty.
- A careful amount of evergreens is also appropriate – pine needles are a great Vitamin C boost.
- If you’ve secreted away extra pumpkins or squash, these can be given the goats during the cold months.
- Persistent fruits (which stay on the tree without dropping to the ground quickly) like Mountain Ash (Sorbus aucuparia) berries, rose hips or crabapples.
Garden of Goat Forage
As you’re planning your garden for this coming year, why not plant a few perennials from which to harvest goat forage?
Here are some ideas:
- Expand your vegetable garden this year to include a bed dedicated to the goats. They’ll eat any seasonal harvest, but you can also plan ahead for the cold months by growing root veggies and pumpkins.
- I grow Rugosa roses that produce abundant hips, which are great fresh during the growing season but that I also dry and parcel out to my goats all winter long to boost their immune systems. I do the same with my Goji berries. If you’re into xeriscaping or using any native perennial bushes, consider tucking in a few extra bushes to cut branches from as the seasons progress.
- Mangels and other cover crops like clover and vetch can be consumed by goats. They’ll eat them like candy.
- Leftover stalks of things planted this season can also go to the goats. Examples are sunchokes and sunflowers, also pumpkins and other squash.
- As I harvest my herbs, especially during the fall, I take whole branches of them as I prune and stash their leafy limbs in the garage to give to the goats later. Fennel stalks with seeds, rosemary spears, branches of oregano for fighting infections are all good choices.
What have I missed? What do you love to grow and give to your goat-dears? Does it store well or is it strictly a fresh/seasonal treat?
FYI, if you’re wondering if you made the right decision about getting dairy goats instead of a dairy cow, I encourage you to check out the Homestead Livestock chapter of our book, The Do It Yourself Homestead
I have heard of people renting out their goats in the winter and early spring to municipalities and cities that need their levees and parks cleaned up! One question: If you give your goats herbs, such as fennel or rosemary, does their milk taste or smell like that herb? Thanks for this post as my hubby and I are considering raising dairy goats.
Eh, yes and no. There are some people who say they can taste stuff like that in the milk but I’ve given my goats copious amounts of mint cuttings and have never tasted any mint in the milk. I think they’d have to eat a lot of something and that something would have to have a very high essential oil level for it to come through.
Go for goats – they’re great! And yes, people do rent them out and they’re work amazingly well at clean up. They don’t like to eat grass so much but brush and browse, oh yeah!
Hi Vickie, It depends a lot on the breed of goat you have. I’m a supertaster, my palate is super sanative to herbs, taste, flavors, sugars, etc. I can taste the type of feeds one usually uses, my family cannot. Even when I do not know you have used them, I can immediately taste them and most people cannot so I can detect when the goats have eaten different species of plants. However, after several tries I settled with a LaMancha Goat, because it seldom come though on their milk, and I milk every day and make cheeses on weekends.
Sometimes being a supertaster is a burden, Debbie! Glad to know you’ve found a breed that you can enjoy. Thank you for sharing your experience for everyone to read!
Very informative. Thanks for sharing with us at The HomeAcre Hop!
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Wow – great minds! Thanks so much, Kathi!
This was super helpful! I’ve been looking into what to plant for goats to store in the winter with very little luck. I’m a landscaper and have access to so mush plant waste! Can goats eat dried canefruit canes?
So glad it was helpful! I’m not sure if canefruit is safe – where are you located? If you have an agricultural university, their extension office can probably help you figure out what’s safe for your goats to eat. My first guess is to say it’s probably fine, but you just never know. Short of professional advice, see if you can find a local goat keeper who’s had them for years – they’ll probably know.
Always double check someone else’s research. I was looking at Fias Co’s list, and there are plants on there that are actually toxic. Some may no be deadly, but, can still make your animals sick or cause other problems. For example, Arborvitae has essential oils in it that will cause ABORTIONS!
Always a good reminder, Sam, thank you! The great thing about most, not all, goats is that they’re very intuitive. They often simply naturally stay away from dangerous plants – unlike cows! It’s also important to bear in mind that some plants can cause serious damage only in large doses. Digitalis is a great plant aide for heart ailments, but too much of it will kill you. That’s why it’s always to have many, many good books. The Internet is great, but I always prefer actual books that I can mark and study.
Rasberry! It grows like a weed, you have to thin and prune it frequently. My goats love it.
Great one, Bethany! We have blackberry that does that here. The berries that come off those vines are yucky, so I have no problem feeding them to the goats!
Hi, we just got our first few goats and they love nasturtiums but can’t find anything on if there good for them? They absolutely love them but have only give them a few until we can find more information. Thank fir your time!
Nasturtiums are completely edible – by people, too! – so they can eat them just fine. They’re a little spicy but unless they eat an entire field, I doubt a goat would mind one bit. 🙂
Congrats on your goats – I hope you love having them! Let me know if you need anything else.
Hi, Thanks for sharing your wisdom about backyard forage for goats! I would love to grow goji berries. Could I grow them in the goat pasture? I’m wondering if the goats would damage them, and if the leaves/bark are okay for goats to consume. My pasture is partly shaded. Do you think I could still get a good yield of berries?
Growing your own is a great idea! You’ll need to find a place with full sun and no goats, though. Goats will eat pretty much anything shruby and woody, so your bushes would never have the chance to get started. They’re pretty, though, so you could integrate them into your landscaping at the front of the house or in your backyard garden without compromising aesthetics.
Was that helpful?
Thank you, very helpful! I’d like to incorporate goji berries into my land/garden-scape. I’ll be looking for a good spot!
Wonderful! I hope you enjoy growing them – they’re so nutritious. Good luck!
You better do some further research because pigweed (both spiny and smooth) and ivy are both considered toxic to goats and other livestock. As well, wilted leaves of red maple are toxic, and leaves of black cherry; so if you’re bagging dry leaves you better know which trees they are and that they are not toxic.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
As with most plants, too much of a good thing is too much. Pigweed, for example, CAN lead to kidney failure (if a perfect internal health storm forms inside your goat), but the animal would have to consume a rather large amount to do damage – certainly more than would be present in most backyard situations. If you’re talking about a pasture and you have a particularly “dumb” goat – there’s always that one that eats what it shouldn’t – then it would be advisable to keep its population under control.
Ivy contains saponins and would become unpalatable to most ruminents long before it caused them even to barf it back up. I only ever had one goat that would eat it.
Black cherry isn’t mentioned in this article on purpose because, as you say, it can be toxic, especially when wilted. Which raises an interesting chemistry question – why? I don’t know the answer, but I stay away from them either way.
It’s an interesting thing about plants – by anecdotal evidence, there are people who feed their animals one thing just fine, and yet others feed that same thing and it causes illness or even death. Black cherry is a good example. If you’re ever uncomfortable or uncertain feeding something to an animal, then feed them something else instead. There are a number of suggestions in the article, like herbs and leftover garden produce, that will fill their bellies safely.
The important thing is to add variety to their diet in ways that minimize waste on your homestead and don’t have a high price tag.
Let’s not forget the ancient practice of preparing and storing “tree hay!”
Absolutely!! One of the best and easiest ways to do it, as long as you have trees.
Thanks so much for stopping by!