Limit grazing or supplementation with other crops

Limit grazing is a strategy used to meet goat nutritional requirements with grasses of differing nutritive values, or with a cool-season grass and legumes sown in separate pastures. Adult does could be maintained on a low quality, warm-season bermudagrass or switchgrass after frost. They could then be allowed to intermittently strip graze a high quality, winter annual forage such as cereal rye, annual ryegrass, wheat, or oat as a protein supplement. The same principle can be used with a low quality, cool-season grass grazed during the hot summer months, and warm-season legumes such as soybean or the fodder trees black locust or mimosa. The foliage quality of these legume plants changes little throughout the growing season, thus they are referred to as protein banks.

Luginbuhl, J-M. 2006. Pastures for Meat Goats. In: Meat Goat Production Handbook, ed. T.A. Gipson, R.C. Merkel, K. Williams, and T. Sahlu, Langston University, ISBN 1-880667-04-5.