KIKO ARTICLES

KIKO GOATS AT THE KIKO TEST STATION IN COMFORT, TEXAS
an interview with New Zealand's Graham Culliford of Goatex Group, LLC
By Sylvia Tomlinson
Reprinted from Goat Rancher, March 1997

    Graham's words "it's hard country..." kept ringing in my ears as we drove away from the Bob Canales 5C Agriventures Ranch in Medina, Texas, after a tour of the Kiko operation in nearby Comfort. It was early December 1996 and there was no disputing the roughness of the land. Scrub oak, mountain cedar and prickly pear dotted the rocky limestone bed landscape. Nevertheless, I had trouble reconciling the image I carried in my mind of the fat, almost sassy-looking, Kiko does that had just been gathered in from the range, surviving without care on benign neglect.
    The old timers might say there's strength in the browse and sparse grass of the hill country, but I saw their condition as a testimonial to their ability to not only survive but to thrive under range conditions.
    Graham Culliford is a walking, talking resource center on goats, in particular Kiko goats. We left the hill country with a heightened awareness of the traits that are economically important to profitable goat ranching and a better understanding of the formula needed to achieve those results. Using Graham's own words, we'd like to share our experience with you. Following is my interview with Graham:

    SYLVIA: How did you become involved with the development of the Kiko Goat?

    GRAHAM: We started on the Kiko when Garrick Batten was the driving force behind it. My partner, Ken Marshall, and I were only peripherally involved at that time. Garrick was red hot on developing a purpose bred goat for meat. Garrick had served as New Zealand's agricultural attache in Europe so he had a lot of connections and he could just go right past the wire. He had a super abundant knowledge about goats and he had connections.
    Now I'm talking about the mid- to late 1970's. There were a whole variety of reasons why the time was right but mainly because New Zealand was moving all out to re-establish a mohair industry. And a strategy had been worked out whereby Angora goats would be created by upbreeding from New Zealand native goats mated to purebred Angora billies, so that in four generations you'd have an animal that would pretty much pass muster as an Angora goat.
    Now to put this into effect, you needed a bunch of New Zealand native goats. So there were tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of New Zealand native goats being captured, running them by helicopter like they do the deer, and put behind wire to use in upbreeding programs.
    These native goats were pretty much Heinz 57s. They were the offspring of goats that had been landed by the early British settlers and the whalers and sealers to provide meat. And they had been augmented over 170 years by escapes by domestic goats. And on three occasions when New Zealand had major agricultural depressions, whole herds of goats were turned loose by their owners when they became uneconomical. All these goats had bred randomly amongst themselves and because New Zealand's got no predators, they'd reached plague proportions to the extent that the government permanently employed hunters to keep their numbers under control.
    So Garrick organized for about 12,000 of these native goats to be accumulated on a single property. Ken and I contributed some goats in the deal and what happened was that Garrick went through them with a fine-tooth comb, and he selected out 250 breeding females that he thought exhibited the characteristics that were going to be wanted for desirable meat goats.

    SYLVIA: What was the selection criteria for the Kiko goat?

    GRAHAM: Conformation was part of it. The structure of the
animal. And the hardiness of the goat, its ability to withstand adverse conditions and not succumb to worms or foot problems. They were all important. But there were other factors too.
    We knew right from the outset that the thing that actually made
the meat goat was the ability of the mother to milk. If the mother wouldn't milk, the kid would never grow out to adequate size at weaning. If it was below size at weaning, it would never grow on profitably. If the mother wouldn't milk, you were just simply wasting your time. So, the milking ability of the female was figured into the equation.
    Once Garrick had the herd down to 250 females, he went out and canvassed all the dairy goat producers in New Zealand. Now in New Zealand we've arguably got some of the best milking Saanans in the world, and many of our Nubians are really without peer. And from amongst these he acquired some males from top milk producing bloodlines. It was Saanens and Nubians that he concentrated on because he was looking for the high quality of the Nubian milk and the quantity of the Saanen milk. Now what Garrick did (and this is where Ken and I started to get involved) was to set up the basis of a selection regime. Ken and I both farmed substantial numbers of dairy goats and we contributed select males into the breeding herd to infuse the milk producing qualities.
    You see, we have goat selection systems in New Zealand that are computer based. We take the production traits that we are looking for and we rate the animals according to those production traits. We have incredibly sophisticated programs for Angoras because with Angoras you are not dealing with a single production trait. With Angoras, you are dealing with production traits that give you the weight of hair that is grown in a six-month period, the micron of that hair, the scoured yield (that is the amount of grease that is in it) and the percentage of kemps; so you are working with four production traits. The computer programs that calculate why this goat is better than that goat are complex and they consume memory like its going out of fashion. Then those production traits are tied to a whole lot of economic factors. For example, if you get paid more for high scoured yield than you do for micron, then that's all weighted into the breeding factor.
    We took those programs and modified them for a single production trait that was going to be assessed on multiple occasions. The single production trait was rate of growth. The animals were weighed at birth, at weaning (which was generally 90 to 100 days) and then they were weighed at eight months to a year. The grams per day gain on the animals were ranked. We take the kid crop, weigh them all, rank them all and then take the bottom right out, get rid of them. And the computer does it all for us.
    The males' selection criteria was infinitely more rigorous because with the males, we would take out at weaning the bottom 50%. They would go straight to slaughter at 100 days. Then the balance would be run through until they got to eight months to one year old, depending on the management regime that was in place that year. Then we would make another cut so that we'd be left with 10% of the original number, and they'd be subjected to additional testing. But the initial selection would always be on grams per day gain.
    Anyway, selected dairy bucks were bred back into the base herd. And while many of our Nubians are milkers, a lot are kept for meat and the bucks that we were using would be half as big again as any Nubian I've seen in the States, so they had size and rate of growth. And the Saanens were prolific milkers. So that's basically how we established the style and type of goat.
    We knew early on what the secret to the deal was going to be. The secret was to try and replicate New Zealand's lamb production system but to do it with goats. Now with our lambs, on the day we put the rams out, we are fixing to send the bulk of our lambs to slaughter at around 100 to 120 days. At that point they've had the benefit of being on their mama that entire period so as long as the mothers milk well and are good doers, the lambs will be big lambs that we haven't had to spend a bunch of money on. If we can get them up to a good slaughter weight at 100 days, they go to slaughter.
    Now with goats there is the added advantage in that worldwide a premium is paid for milk-fed goats; worldwide a premium is paid for white goats; worldwide you double your money for a white, milk-fed goat that has never had a knife to its testicles or ear; and worldwide you add an additional premium if you slaughter them on a halal basis. What we were looking for was to produce, at 100 days, a goat that would give us a carcass that, crudely speaking, was near to 20 pounds.
    A ten kilo carcass is what we want. Milk-fed it hasn't cost us anything, it's unmarked and we halal killed it. So that's the way the program developed.
    In addition, we didn't want to have to give any care to the females because once you start to care for the females, you might just as well run Angoras. And in New Zealand we've come to the realization that the care Angoras require make them poor substitutes economically for sheep.
    Anyway, that's what we were endeavoring to do - create an easy-care animal where the size of the goat was secondary to its rate of growth and where the rate of growth would allow us to attain predetermined target carcass weights to service identified markets.

    SYLVIA: What made you decide to establish a Test Station in the
United States?

    GRAHAM: Well, when we first shipped Kikos to Texas, Ken and I were convinced that they would thrive in the country west of I-35. The problem was that the U.S. really at that time was a breeders market, and many people with smaller, more intensive properties have obtained Kikos and pen raised them. And they feed the living tripes out of them so they grow big to meet a breeder's market.
    We'd always believed that they were suited to range conditions but, of course, Texas ranchers are notoriously difficult to convince of the worth of new livestock varieties, especially when the only examples they see are pen raised. And they quite reasonably argue that it might grow well in a pen but it'll perform differently on the range.
    So we figured we'd establish a test station in Texas and our aim here is something completely different. We wanted to put the Kikos into rough country, turn them loose to see if they would survive, and see if they would thrive, which they are doing, and breed and grow at an appropriate rate to make them commercially viable in Texas range conditions.
    And our reasoning for doing this was two-fold: firstly, we wanted to establish a really large-scale meat goat herd in the Southern United States and we wanted to base it on Kiko bloodlines. And so we had to be sure that the goats were suited to the terrain and that they would perform in the manner we projected they would, otherwise our computer models might just as well go in the garbage. And secondly, we wanted to show the skeptics that, hey, these goats can really cut the mustard in hard going.

    SYLVIA: Why did you chose Comfort, Texas?

    GRAHAM: It was fortuitous. Our New Zealand operation has had
an ongoing joint venture relationship with Bob Canales and 5C Agriventures in Medina in a number of livestock projects in the course of which we took a lease on this ranch. When we decided on a test station, we started looking at places around Bandera and Kerr counties and then we settled on the Comfort ranch. This is hard country, but while it's hard country, it's still got a lot of fertility and relatively beneficial rainfall. But the critical factor is that the water is good. Cypress Creek has water year round.
    One of the reasons why so much meat goat production is poor is the water. It's not generally appreciated amongst ranchers that if you can't drink the water yourself without treatment then there's no way its going to be suitable for your goats. So if you've got poor water, you've lost before you've begun. And poor water comes in a host of guises, but real high pH is one I seem to encounter a lot in Texas.
    Anyway, Comfort became the obvious choice. And with Bob Canales and 5C Agriventures, we already had in place the management regimes under which we wanted to run the goats. And we've got established computer links so that production results can be fed into the Texas computer and analyzed by the New Zealand one. The whole thing just fit together.

    SYLVIA: What considerations motivated you to look at large-scale meat goat production in the United States?

    GRAHAM: The simple answer to that is to make a chunk of change. But there are a whole raft of additional reasons. Basically, we had become pretty disgruntled with the profitability of New Zealand agriculture because New Zealand agriculture is incredibly efficient, technical, scientific. Our total costs of inputs are comparatively low in international terms relative to the magnitude of our production, yet we are progressively being frozen out internationally.
    You've got GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade, which says that New Zealand can produce sheep meat, for argument's sake, and export it to all the countries that are signatories to that agreement, of which the United States is one. And it can be done without a tariff barrier being erected. That's all fine and dandy except in many signatory countries the agricultural lobby is very strong and highly subsidized. So what happens is that the importing country becomes real crafty and says: "yeah, you can bring in all the meat that you like, providing it meets our health standards" and then they crank the threshold standards up to impossibly high levels.
    In New Zealand we have torn every slaughter house in the country down to bedrock and rebuilt them. There are setups where you could go in and you could eat your dinner off the floor. They are just pristine. And the meat inspection procedures are horrendously rigorous. I've been in outfits where goat carcasses have been condemned for export because of a single hair on them. And all this has made the cost of slaughter impossibly high. And that way, the U.S. and the EEC erect non-tariff barriers to protect domestic agriculture.
    You've got to understand that there are no subsidies of any sort in New Zealand agriculture. We succeed or fail on the efficiency of our enterprises. Now the price we are getting for our product is good, but the cost of production has become progressively higher and higher. It's not the cost of production on the farm, it's the cost of production past the farm gate - especially processing and freight to overseas markets.
    In New Zealand we know how to produce meat on low input systems. We've got the technologies, the management systems, the computer programs. So we asked ourselves: what are we doing in New Zealand? What we should be doing is being in the country with the highest rate of return for goat meat in the world, where the market is 90% undersupplied and where we've got the goats that can do the job. America is the land of opportunity for goats!
    So we loaded up more Kikos and sent them over here to Comfort. Basically, what we are doing here is building a herd of developed meat goats by replicating New Zealand selection procedures. We've developed a computer model for Texas that shows just how profitable large scale meat goat production can be. It's got all the market parameters built into it, which shows that if you can increase your average carcass weight by 250 grams (8 ounces), the downstream effect is significantly greater than the percentage gain you have made. And the way to increase that carcass weight is by enhanced genetics and developed management programs.

    SYLVIA: Is everything on the Test Station purebred Kiko?

    GRAHAM: Everything in this pasture is a purebred Kiko, however, we still have five or six hundred Spanish goats, some more Kikos, Kiko kids and numerous halfbloods out on the range.

    SYLVIA: There appears to be some trophy hunting for deer done on the Test Station land. Do the hunters ever shoot the goats?

    GRAHAM: The hunters know there's valuable goats running here.
The large horns of the male goats, like Terminator, get sprayed luminous orange during hunting season. But generally before the hunting season gets too far advanced we've pulled the bucks and they've been returned to the buck pasture where there's no hunting.

    SYLVIA: How long do you keep a doe in the breeding herd?

    GRAHAM: Five or six years at the most. We change bucks every
year. The bucks are left in for a 35-day breeding season. That guarantees one mating. If the doe won't hold on a single mating, you don't want them in the herd. Then we put a wash up buck up for another 25 to 35 days. We identify the late cyclers and get rid of them. If we didn't put the wash up buck in they would be dry and we would have carried them for six months or so. And so we figure it is more economic to get a kid or kids out of them before disposing of them.
    During the first 35 days of kidding, we walk the pastures and mark the kids. Then we can work out pretty quickly who they belong to and keep those females. Often we'll use a colored buck or a Boer buck as a wash up buck so we can identify the late born kids by their appearance as well.
    Generally speaking, with Kiko does, you don't have problems with them coming into estrus, you don't have mating problems and you don't have kidding problems. That's one of the things that distinguishes these goats in many respects from domestic breeds of goats, in particular, Angoras, Boers and Nubians. And when the kids are born they get straight up. They don't have to be stimulated to rise. They'll get up and they'll start looking for feed straight off. In New Zealand it is said that an Angora goat is a goat born looking for a place to die.
    Which it generally does. That's what we were really trying to get away from in developing the easy-care character of the Kiko.
    The newborn vigor of the Kiko is one of the things that helps limit their susceptibility to predation. They are more like deer than goats in that respect. I had a remarkable example two or three years back and if I hadn't seen it I wouldn't have believed it. An older doe was having difficulty kidding. She got the first kid out and the kid got up while the doe was still down having the second kid. She got the second kid out and promptly expired. I was 40 yards away and right on the point of catching the kids and trying to find a surrogate mother when out of the woodwork, up strolls this old gal. She comes over and starts licking the kids and in two seconds flat they lay into her udder and feed and she already had a kid of her own. She walked off with three kids and reared them. I was impressed.

    SYLVIA: What kidding interval do you stick to, do you try to get three kid crops in two years?

    GRAHAM: You should kid once a year. Three crops in two years
is feasible but is not generally economically viable. Nature dictates that kids are born in spring for a pretty good reason; it is the time of enhanced vegetation growth so that there is improving nutrition for the doe in her final trimester, there is good feed availability for the time she is suckling her young and plenty of available feed for the young animal when it is weaned. Good pasture or range management can enhance feed availability. If you kid more than once a year, you'll almost certainly find yourself in a nutritional bind at some stage where heavy supplemental feeding will be required and that impacts savagely upon profitability.
    Also, replacement females born out of season are always out of sync with the rest of the herd, never one thing or another agewise. And that creates additional management problems.
    SYLVIA: What was your percentage kid crop from these unattended does that were turned out on the range?
    GRAHAM: On the purebred Kikos we got 128% through to marketing. On the whole we're pretty pleased with that, although it's well below what we would expect in New Zealand. About a third of the Kikos were mated to a pureblood Boer buck so that had some effect. As far as we can ascertain we had very slight losses from predators. We did have some single births and we would not normally keep a doe with a single birth. However, we are in a situation where you don't actually know - it's a whole different ball game here. In New Zealand we have no predators and the animals are reasonably visible to us. And we are familiar with the conditions they are running in. Here there are predators and the kidding does are inclined to lay up in the draws and the arroyos. Fire ants can take a kid through no fault of the doe; snakes can kill a kid through no fault of the doe.
    In New Zealand we insist on them having twins and raising twins, but we're not blinkered about it. If they have two kids, then there's a heavy snow and they only turn up with one, we reckon that's a pretty reasonable excuse. And we're relaxed about the deal here because the environment is more hostile than in New Zealand. Our climate is more severe but the only predator we've got is seagulls. If a doe can't fight off a seagull, there's something wrong with her.

    SYLVIA: Do you keep a mineral supplement out?

    GRAHAM: Yes. The thing with goats is that you must keep up the micronutrients to them. So long as you keep the micronutrients up you can feed goats on fresh air and a good view. My personal belief is that cobalt is the most important. Their requirement for cobalt can be up to seven times that of cattle. Their copper requirement can be about twice that of cattle but it's not a big deal.
    Goats especially need cobalt, iodine and selenium. In Texas there's a lot of goiter because of iodine deficiency, yet it's amazing people can't detect what the problem is. In New Zealand, where we have a similar level of iodine deficiency, we tend to inject all of our goats with iodine. I understand that the injectable iodine we use is not licensed in the U.S.

    SYLVIA: What are the symptoms of iodine deficiency?

    GRAHAM: Well, the obvious one is goiter. Enlargement of the thyroid gland in the neck. But by the time that manifests itself there will have been a lot of other damage done. In pregnant does, late term abortion of hairless fetuses (particularly male fetuses) is another indicator. But lack of iodine (or probably more correctly the inability to metabolize available iodine) leads to impaired growth rates, poor fertility, lowered kidding percentages. And often because it's sub-clinical you're not aware of what is causing your problems.

    SYLVIA: How do you treat bad udders?

    GRAHAM: The principle we work on is: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." These does, even if they have, to our eye, an appallingly bad udder, have, at the time of their selection into the herd, born and reared two kids. If you can rear two kids on an udder that looks like nothing on earth, what's wrong with it? We don't care what it looks like - if it has six teats, who cares?

    SYLVIA: These goats look well fed and very healthy. When was the last time they were drenched for parasites?

    GRAHAM: I don't know when they were drenched the last time. It's probably been the thick end of a year. The kids were drenched at the time they were weaned in late June but we deliberately didn't drench the does then. We want to run the does for about another six months and then take fecal egg samples to determine rates of internal parasite susceptibility and to compare them with the results we are getting in New Zealand.

    SYLVIA: There appears to be some Boer influence in this adjoining pasture.

    GRAHAM: These goats are part of the Texas Genemaster program. Basically what we are doing here is a continuation of the program we are running in New Zealand. The program is designed to meld together the best characteristics of the Boer and the Kiko and to capitalize on the resultant hybrid vigor. The program is also looking forward to the day when goat meat in the U.S. is graded and a premium paid for carcass quality.
    In New Zealand where we have good Boer bucks and a lot of Kiko does we are putting Boers over Kikos. Here there are a lot of average Boer does and some good Kiko bucks so we have reversed the matings. The onbred hybrids perform significantly better on average than either of the contributing parents. In New Zealand we are getting up to 20% improvement in rate of growth and we are expecting to be able to replicate those results here. In New Zealand our carcasses are graded and we get paid more for better quality carcasses. The Genemaster carcasses are giving us better returns at an earlier age than either the purebred Kiko or the purebred Boer carcass. But the price we pay is a loss of vigor relative to the purebred Kiko.
    Last year we took a third of our pure Kiko does and put a purebred Boer buck over them. This is what you see here (along with some hybrids imported from the New Zealand trial). We've got a large Genemaster program started here. They are nice goats; they are quiet and they do pretty well since they're not being molly coddled. We think that they have a real future in meat goat production in the U.S.
    There are only limited areas of Texas that are suitable for pureblood Boer goats because they are nowhere hardy enough for the conditions. They are ponderous animals, and the males will lacerate their testicles when you put them out in the mesquite and prickly pear because they are so low hung. They are lazy breeders and idle kidders with generally poor unsupervised kidding rates. But they are large-framed animals with good meat distribution and relatively good meat quality. When that is coupled with the vigor of the Kiko, the resultant get shows exciting promise in terms of rate of growth and carcass cutability.

    SYLVIA: What do you say to the claim that the Kiko goat is nothing more than a Spanish goat from New Zealand?

    GRAHAM: Well, in fact, that's what it is except that it's been hugely selected and developed for particular production traits that have economic significance. And in selection, those production traits have become fixed as breed characteristics. In this respect the Kiko is no different from the Boer - which was selected and developed from Native African goats - with an infusion of Saanen to fix color and milk quality. Or the Nubian, which was selected and developed from Indian native goats for size and milking ability.
    What differentiates the Kiko, the Boer and the Nubian from the Spanish goat is that the Spanish goat is entirely unselected and undeveloped. Now I know of only one person in Texas, and I'm sure that he's probably the only person in the United States, who has applied any significant selection pressure to Spanish goats. And it shows in his livestock, which are appreciably better than the average. But for most folks with Spanish goats, it's the old story of every critter a breeder. Consequently, Spanish goats are pretty ordinary goats. I've seen some Spanish goats that are impressive sizewise, but they're eight years old and they've been pen fed. What the guys haven't come to grips with is that the principle is not how big does it grow, but how fast does it grow? The interesting thing is that people who have Kikos and Boers, universally report that the Kikos grow faster than their Boers. And in our experience, crossing them increases the rate of growth further still.
    At the end of the day, when the rancher faces a commercial return for his investment in cash and in time for his livestock, he has to look to the maximum pounds of meat grown in the minimum time with the least number of dollars possible expended in it's production. That's where his profit lies. That's the future of the Kiko in the United States.