Vitamins and Bananas

The goats got tired of 'Vitamin Sandwiches' so I came up with another way to get them to eat their vitamins. We have trained our goats to eat bananas. Some of them loved bananas when they first got here, others took a few months (Clover-the Nubian) to almost 2 years (Janice-the Saanen from a real dairy) before they liked them.

Each goat gets 1 multi-vitamin and 1 Vitamin C each day. Ginger (the goat with 'udder acne') also gets 2 zinc pills each day to help her skin.

I cut a banana into 5 pieces (we have 4 milking goats and 1 buck) and push a multi-vitamin in one end and a Vitamin C in the other end. The mushier the banana is, the easier it is to push the pills in.

One banana and the pills ready to go.

You can see the vitamins stuck in the ends of the banana pieces.

These goats love bananas! It doesn't bother them one bit to have vitamins inside. This is much easier than making vitamin sandwiches. It is probably cheaper, too, since I am not using molasses every day.

Vitamin Sandwiches

We give the milking does a 'vitamin sandwich' each morning. Our whole family takes vitamins and minerals and the milk goats seem to do better when they have a supplement, too. Their vitamin sandwich is just a regular multi-vitamin and an Ester C vitamin that have been crushed, put on a piece of bread, and mixed with a little bit of molasses. Three of the four does will eat a sandwich. Janice, who came from a real dairy, won't. We are trying to train her to eat sandwiches, too. Right now the only thing she will eat besides grain and hay is raisins. At least she has a treat that she likes.

We like to feed them sandwiches because we can put anything on a sandwich mixed with a bit of molasses and they will eat it. That makes it much easier to feed them other supplements or medications if they need it.

Here is how we do it...

Everything is ready to go. Only 3 pieces of bread since Janice won't eat a sandwich. We mix her crushed vitamins with her grain. She eats it just fine that way. You can see the mortar and pestle, Ester C, multi-vitamins, molasses, and the 4 sets of vitamins.

I put the molasses on the bread to let it soak in just a bit while I crush the pills.

Here are the pills all crushed and ready to go onto the molasses.

Crushed vitamins ready to be mixed with molasses
and then folded into sandwiches.

The piece of bread on the right is all mixed and ready to go. The small container on the right has two sandwiches ready to feed.
You can see the small container that holds the powder for Janice.

This would not work if we were running a large, commercial dairy because it would be too time consuming to make all the sandwiches every morning. Most dairies drench (force feed a liquid) their goats because it is faster. But since we are just a small hobby farm, sandwiches work well for us. Vet2Be loves his dairy goats and he likes to give them as much nutritional care as we can manage. I guess that makes the dairy goats spoiled, but since they are well behaved in the field, on the milk stand, and around people, we don't mind spoiling them a bit!