Buying Grain - in bulk

Once upon a time I owned one small goat. We feed her one bag of grain a month (spread out of course). Once that little doe was milking we bought a couple 50lb bags a month. Eventually when her daughters were milking too I got up to 5 bags or so a month. Never in a million years did I think I would every buy grain by the ½ ton – honestly I didn’t even know it existed until a few years back. Now that is the most popular way we buy grain.



Every year we start off buying the first few rounds of grain in sacks. It is easy when we need 1 or 2 bags to get us through a few weeks. Plus it helps to replenish our grain sack stash. After you use the bags for a year or more they start to really wear out.


Then once the milkers start producing and we have plenty of milkers, it is time to go buy in bulk. Find a sunny day, line to bed of the truck with a clean tarp, and off we go.


The cool thing about buying in bulk is that you can decide what you want to milk in. Sometimes we want to add a little extra molasses, sometimes we feel like we want to boost the protein, or maybe we want some other feed additive put in – whatever we want, we can put in! So then we wait around while the feed gets mixed up and ready for us. We position the truck under the shoot and shortly they are dumping it into the bed of the truck.


Of course the real work begins when we get home. We have the great fun of shoveling (and I do mean shoveling – with a shovel) into a bags and a trash can to actually feed to the goats. 1000lbs of grain usually goes into 10 or 11 full bags of grain, or a trash can and a few less bags.

Here’s hoping that it will last a few months at least!