The New Farmers Helping Farmers Goat Team

 By Glenna McGregor

Goats navigating the aggressive thorns of the acacia bushes to eat the highly nutritious green leaves.

    This year Farmers Helping Farmers is adding small ruminants, in particular dairy goats, to its Gender Responsive One Health program. Goats are an important livestock species in Meru, Kenya, particularly in the semi-arid areas where the goats are one of the only livestock species that thrive in the dry conditions. Most of the goats here are raised in pastoral systems and are taken out to graze by their owners for many hours every day. Goats are browsers, using their highly mobile upper lip to pick the best of all the food available, this makes them highly  effective at eking good nutrition even amongst the sparse and generally very prickly plants. In Meru goats are milked, primarily for home consumption, as well as sold for meat and their manure used or sold for fertilizer. 

 

Thus far during our time on the goat project we’ve done many farm visits to try to get a better understanding of how goats are raised in Meru, the challenges that Farmers Helping Farmers could help with, common disease challenges, and areas where increased training would be helpful. While on farm we treat animals that are ill, discuss problems the farmers are facing, do health assessments on several animals in the herd and discuss any herd health problems we discover. Common issues we have come across include goitre from iodine deficiency, and abscesses, likely due to caseous lymphadenitis.

Goitre, an enlarged thyroid gland due to an iodine deficiency is common finding on many of our farm visits. The swelling in the neck just below the jaw is the large thyroid gland. 

On farm we often deworm the goats, which is a good opportunity to demonstrate how to estimate animal weight and discuss proper medication dosing and administration.

Bernard demonstrating appropriate medication drenching technique

We’ve done multiple seminars discussing zoonotic diseases, in particular brucellosis, anthrax and more general disease.

One of many seminars for a women's group. Bernard the Farmers Helping Farmer’s small ruminant paravet always leads an engaging seminar with lots of laughter and learning.

The longer term plan is to create a dairy goat manual and for Bernard, Farmer’s Helping Farmer’s goat paravetextraordinaire, to do frequent training on various goat production topics to the women’s groups.

A post-mortem examination on a goat that died the day before our farm visit. Cause of death was Haemonchosis (infection with large numbers of blood-sucking intestinal worms resulting in death due to blood 

This important work of Farmers Helping Farmers is made possible with funding from Global Affairs Canada through the Gender Responsive One Health Project with Alinea International