Thapelo Sedibana – African Farming

GOATS

Thapelo Sedibana, Ga-Molekana (Mokopane), Limpopo

We are starting to prepare for the rainy season and will be vaccinating our goats against heartwater and other diseases prevalent in the wet season, with Multivax P. The vaccine helps control and prevent lamb dysentery, pulpy kidney, tetanus, blackleg, clostridial metritis (malignant oedema of the uterus), bloodgut and other clostridial infections. We believe that prevention is better than cure and this works well for us.

We don’t dose our goats as they are well adapted to the area and we only have a few cases of sick animals. We use a tetracycline – Ultratet – to treat gallsickness (anaplasmosis), heartwater, pneumonia, and footrot.

We began to prepare for winter in March, which was when we bought in extra lucerne and baled grass when prices were still good.

Ours is a semi-intensive operation where the goats graze for a few hours every day. We feed them a mixture of lucerne and grass as extra feed and give them NutriFeed goat pellets and maize chop, Voerdokter and crushed yellow maize in the evening.