Tasmanian farmer bucks trend to breed better Boer goats for meat

Callan Morse, Latrobe, said goat meat is becoming ever-more popular, with demand from the ethnic and local community improving.

"Tassy is really the best place to sell goat meat in the country because the farm producer doesn't get priced out of the market with range land, feral and wild goats," he said.

"We don't have the predators that a lot of mainland areas have to deal with in the way of foxes, pigs, and wild dogs."

However, Mr Morse said the goat-meat industry was just starting to develop in Tasmania.

"There's a significant demand in the migrant and ethnic communities but I would say an increasing demand in the Anglo-Australian community as well," he said.

"Tasmania brands itself on being a little bit niche, a bit different, a little bit boutique, and goat meat lends itself well to that."

The young farmer runs 130 goats including 35 breeding does and followers.

He had does joined with bucks when Stock & Land visited this month.

He said they will kid in autumn and his kidding percentage generally sat at around 200 per cent.

"It's unusual for Boers not to twin," he said.

"The average kidding rate by the textbook is about 2.1pc.

"It's unusual if they don't twin or even have more than that.

"Sometimes maidens have a single."

Mr Morse, who first started with the Boers 10 years ago breeds his goats to provide top-class genetics to goat-meat herds across Tasmania.

"I'm trying to breed replacement breeders for myself but also sell breeding stock to other people within Tasmania, bucks and does," he said.

"I think my first breeding season was 2014, I had a muck around with cross breed goats before then.

"The interest came from my dad who had Angoras in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, when I was young."

Mr Morse said he was running a full-blood herd.

"If animals don't make the grade, I turn them off seasonally, as cull stock in the autumn," he said.

"Ideally, you're looking to turn wethers off before you take them through a winter because there's additional costs to that.

"I'm trying to track the data of my animals these days, increasingly, to see which animals and genetic lines are actually performing better in my herd, not just the ones that I might like the look of.

"Ones that are actually putting kilos of meat on the ground, year in year out, they're the ones I want to continue with and breed from."

He said for his sales in Tasmania, most people were looking for a small group of animals, a buck and unrelated does.

"[They want] something that can potentially clean up their herd and provide some correctness," he said.

"I'm onto the fourth generation of animals of my breeding now and I want to offer animals to people that are full breed standard.

"I'm trying to breed animals that are correct and can perform in Tasmanian conditions."

He said while the market had dropped off in recent years, most stud bucks were still selling for four figures.

"It takes quite a bit to get a quality animal to that ideal breeding age of two to three that everyone wants," he said.

"The animals have to pay the bills that they incur but at the same time there's no point in trying to price all the breeders out of the market when there's already such a demand for meat."

When asked what attracted him to breeding goats, Mr Morse said they had different attributes to sheep and cattle.

"I didn't want to shear twice a year and I didn't want to milk regularly," he said.

"I don't have a lot of interest in miniature goats, which is when I landed with Boer goats."

"There are things you have to do with goats that you don't have to do with sheep and cattle but you could argue it the other way around as well.

"It's a little bit more hands on.

"They're very unique in their personalities and they're not so same, same, same.

"The breed hasn't been in Australia for hundreds of years like your British breeds of cattle and sheep so it's probably a little bit more challenging to breed a uniform type."

He said for this reason, breeders needed to be really "switched on" when it came to their genetics.

"If you want to spend more time with animals instead of just casting your eye at the window, then goats are probably something that lend themselves to that," he said.

"They're a bit unique, they're a bit different and they're not common so there's marketing and business advantages in that as well."