Raising Goats on Homemade Powdered Milk
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Raising goats on powdered milk, made from our own raw, full-fat, fresh organic milk, is at least as nutritious as milk replacers.
Breeding our goats every fall keeps milk flowing at the farm and provides the extra goats we depend on for a good part of our meat consumption. Keeping a buck around is the easiest way to ensure does are bred. But a few years ago, we grew tired of handling these feisty males and changed our approach.
Bucklings and Bucks
While bucklings are easy enough to manage for the first year or so, 2-year-old bucks can be something else. Their occasionally aggressive behavior, especially during rut, can make them difficult to handle.
Our goats all live together, have horns, and are taken daily to pasture on foot by a family member, which doesn’t make buck management easy. Even at 6 feet 5 inches tall, I don’t feel safe when I’m leading my little herd to the meadows with a buck running freely amongst the lot, raising himself on his hindlegs whenever he feels challenged by my presence (which seems to be pretty much all the time).
So, instead of keeping a full-grown male around, we get a newborn buckling every spring from a breeder, bottle-feed him for a couple of months, let him breed the does in the fall, and when tests confirm our goats are pregnant, we slaughter the young buck for meat late November.
Since most dairy goat breeders end up with an overabundance of bucklings every spring, obtaining one is easy, and we bring in new genes by adopting a buckling every year.
Bottle-Feeding a Newborn Goat
To satisfy the needs of a hungry newborn, some resort to buying commercially available powdered milk replacers to bottle feed. Though we did this several times, we grew increasingly reluctant to continue.
Milk substitutes are becoming more costly, and their ingredient lists are long. On the other hand, pure powdered goat milk is prohibitively expensive, especially if made from unpasteurized, organic, full-cream milk.
Freezing milk takes up a lot of freezer space — one buckling will drink over 25 gallons of milk before he’s weaned — and thawing the frozen liquid beforehand added unwanted work to our daily chores. Thawed milk also tended to be grainy and required some processing before bottling.
And then it hit us: We had been freeze-drying fruits and vegetables for a couple of years and easily made powders from some of them. Why not freeze-dry our milk? The most obvious solutions are often overlooked, and this one was staring us right in the face. Raising goats on powdered milk was our solution.
Freeze-Drying Fresh Milk
Freeze-drying is a process through which water is removed from a product by rapid freezing followed by sublimation of the ice formed until complete desiccation. We bought a small unit from Harvest Right six years ago for about $2,000, and it’s been operating ever since.
Using the four 7.5″ x 18″ x 0.75″ 1-quart trays, we freezedry about a gallon of fresh milk per batch, a volume that roughly corresponds to the milk surplus we accumulate from our two goats every other day of the week. The rest of the milk is used for drinking, cooking, and making cheese and soap.
The process is simple. First, stainless-steel trays are inserted in the freeze-drying chamber. Then, the trays are pulled out of their racks a few inches, filled with milk, and pushed back in. The machine needs to be level to fill the racks to the brim.
Since milk doesn’t really expand during the process, there’s no problem filling the trays almost to the top. Once this is done, close the door, press start, and let the machine do its job. Thirty hours or so later, the milk has been turned into fluffy, crispy cakes ready to be turned into powder.
Scrape the tray contents into a large mixing bowl.
Break the brittle milk cakes apart using both hands.
Once crushed into a fine powder, the whole batch is split between two 8″ x 12″ quart-sized vacuum bags.
Rehydrating the Powdered Milk
Freeze-dried milk is about 10% the weight of fresh milk. When rehydrating it, 1 part powder mixed with 9 parts water will give you a blend with a nutritional content comparable to the real stuff. The proper powder-to-water ratio is best calculated by weight.
To make 64 ounces of rehydrated milk, the easiest way to proceed is to:
- Stand a half-gallon jar on an electronic scale
- Zero the scale
- Measure out 6.4 ounces of powder
- Fill the jar halfway with water
- Use a hand blender to mix everything up
- Then add water all the way to the top, and voilà!
We prepare half a gallon at a time and keep it in the fridge. If we need warmed milk, we pour it into a glass measuring cup and heat it in the microwave before transferring it to our feeding bottle. Though rehydrated milk will keep in the fridge for a few days (if it was freeze-dried fresh), we prepare it daily.
How Much Milk Will You Need?
We start our buckling on four 16-ounce bottles per day (half a gallon) and reduce to two at around 6 weeks or so. By that time, the buckling is starting to eat some hay and a bit of feed. When we wean him around eight weeks after his arrival here, we’ve used about 22 pounds of powdered milk. This amounts to freeze-drying about 25 gallons of fresh milk, which equates to running around the same number of batches in the freeze-dryer.
Given that our two goats provide us with more than 200 gallons of milk each (over 6 to 7 months), this comes to freeze-drying only a part of our surplus milk. However, more could be freeze-dried for easy, shelf-stable storage.
It Works For Us
Full-fat powdered milk can be used to make about anything you can prepare with fresh milk, but we mainly use it to feed newborn goats. And how well does it work? Well, if bottle-fed kids don’t get quite as big as fast as some dam-raised do, they still seem to develop normally.
For me, the ultimate test remains fertility, and year after year, our bottle-fed bucks have successfully settled our goats. This proves to me that raising goats on powdered milk, made from our own raw, full-fat, fresh organic milk, is at least as nutritious as milk replacers. Of course, I believe our homemade powdered milk is the best, but that’s a bias all of us homesteaders are known to have.
A great milking season to all!
DOMINIC LAMONTAGNE lives on a small farmstead in Québec, where he leads homesteading workshops and advocates for small-scale farming rights. He’s the author of La Ferme Impossible (The Impossible Farm), L’artisan Fermier (The Artisan Farmer), and La Chèvre et le Chou (The Goat and the Cabbage).
