Tree Hay

[The15thMember]

My sister has been doing research on tree hay lately for our goats, since we've got a lot of forested land, but very little cleared land, and the goats prefer leaves to grass anyway.  I was curious if anyone here has any experience with managing trees for hay or pasture?   

[BeeMaster2]

What type of trees are you referring to? Around here they are mostly pine, definitely not browse food.
The brush is mostly Gallberry which is not very good at all, if my cows start eating Gallberry I know they are starving. We also have a lot of palmetto which the cows like hence there is almost none on my original acreage. I have seen a horse rip the entire frond from the stem and eat the entire thing.
Jim Altmiller

[The15thMember]

What type of trees are you referring to? Around here they are mostly pine, definitely not browse food.
The brush is mostly Gallberry which is not very good at all, if my cows start eating Gallberry I know they are starving. We also have a lot of palmetto which the cows like hence there is almost none on my original acreage. I have seen a horse rip the entire frond from the stem and eat the entire thing.
Jim Altmiller

No, I'm referring to broadleaf trees: poplar, locust, ash, willow, etc.  We have plenty of shrub undergrowth that the goats eat live in their pastures (our goats are short, so they can't reach even low tree limbs usually).  Apparently many trees can be pollarded (pruned to encourage growth) and the limbs or leaves dried like grass hay to be fed in the winter.  It's something that was and is more common in Europe than in America, I believe.  I'd never heard of it before, so I was just wondering if anyone happened to have any experience with it.   

[BeeMaster2]

Trees like Maple can bee cut and bent over. The goats will eat the leaves and the tree continues to produce leaves for the goats to eat. This is done down here for helping to provide food for deer populations on managed lands. A friend of mine does this. For more information talk to your Ag agent. They did it on his property as part of training.
Jim Altmiller

[Michael Bush]

Lakota would feed young cottonwood branches to their horses to get the through the winter.  The Europeans used to do "Pollarding" where they cut the tops off of a lot of trees and fed those, then next year they cut them again.  They cut them about four feet high or so.  There is the issue of whether or not things are poisonous.  I know maple leaves are poisonous to horses.

[The15thMember]

Lakota would feed young cottonwood branches to their horses to get the through the winter.  The Europeans used to do "Pollarding" where they cut the tops off of a lot of trees and fed those, then next year they cut them again.  They cut them about four feet high or so.  There is the issue of whether or not things are poisonous.  I know maple leaves are poisonous to horses.

This is really the kind of thing I'm talking about.  And the goats are already eating all of this stuff in their pastures, so there's no real problem with poisonous trees.  We have a section of the property that is not easily accessible and is extremely overgrown, and my sister is planning on utilizing this area for producing tree hay, since we can't put the goats directly into the forest here. 

There's actually not a lot of reliable literature about what is and is not poisonous to goats, but adult goats are pretty good about not eating something that is bad for them.  They don't really like maple, so perhaps it is somewhat toxic for them too, but my sister obviously wouldn't do this with any tree species that they don't love to eat. 

[Michael Bush]

My grandpa always said nothing was poisonous to a goat.  I think he meant naturally occurring, of course and that the goats had free choice.

[William Bagwell]

There's actually not a lot of reliable literature about what is and is not poisonous to goats,

Possibly because it is not an either / or situation but a matter of degree. Large tree blows down in a storm and something they have been safely nibbling on for years suddenly kills them. Wild cherry is one of the worst as wilting concentrates the toxins. At least for llamas, goats may have a greater tolerance.

Wish I could get to the email on my old computer, had a long ago post to a llama list saved that explained this much better than I can from memory.

[The15thMember]

My grandpa always said nothing was poisonous to a goat.  I think he meant naturally occurring, of course and that the goats had free choice.

Possibly because it is not an either / or situation but a matter of degree. Large tree blows down in a storm and something they have been safely nibbling on for years suddenly kills them. Wild cherry is one of the worst as wilting concentrates the toxins. At least for llamas, goats may have a greater tolerance.

Wish I could get to the email on my old computer, had a long ago post to a llama list saved that explained this much better than I can from memory.

This is absolutely the case for goats.  Goats are very "browsy"; they eat a little of this, a little of that.  Very rarely will they down a whole plant, even of something they really like.  According to my sister, this is why toxins don't often affect them, because they usually don't eat enough of something bad to cause a serious problem.   

[Acebird]

We also have a lot of palmetto which the cows like hence there is almost none on my original acreage. I have seen a horse rip the entire frond from the stem and eat the entire thing.

They grow like weeds down here.  We have a neighbor that has horses and goats.  I wonder why they don't collect the fronds from other neighbors for feed.  There has to be hundreds of yards collected weekly right here in the farms.

[Skeggley]

Carob trees are one to look at, I?ve heard they make good horse feed.
And of course Moringa.