Garrick Batten creates a new breed: The Kikonui

    Garrick Batten, the New Zealander responsible for the development of the Kiko breed, has jumped back into the meat goat production business.
    Inspired by the growing interest in Kikos in the United States and the ever increasing demand for goat meat worldwide, Batten has reactivated the breeding program that he abruptly ended in 1992, according to a wide-ranging article in the February 2005 issue of Country-Wide Stock-Land, a New Zealand farm magazine.
    Using Kiko semen that he had stored years ago and buying back the progeny from another Kiko flock, his company, Caprinex, is in the second year of developing a production animal he has named the Kikonui.
    Batten has developed a nucleus flock of Kikonui goats and plans to expand with satellite flocks to build up numbers, just as he did in the 1980s with the Kiko.
    "We provide a Kikonui buck and take the first pick of the progeny," he said. "The farmer gets the opportunity to get some high quality genes and we get the chance to get crossbred progeny out of the gene pool."
    It's a win-win situation, Batten said. "It's to our advantage to use the best bucks in satellite flocks because that is where we will improve the most, and an advantage to the farmer, who gets the use of the best animals."
    Batten plans to establish more satellite flocks, using one Kikonui buck to 50 does. As the number of offspring increases, then he will get a better profile of the breed.
    With two kid crops on the ground, Batten said his selection parameters are simple. "We haven't done anything in terms of selection except focus on growth rates, improving milk supply and survivability. At the moment, the principal objective is increasing numbers."
    The ultimate goals are to produce kids with quick growth and high carcass weight, he said.
    Meat buyers "don't pay on anything other than weight," Batten explained. "Farmers feel they should be paid on carcass confirmation, but they are paid on weight."
    That means early growth rate is important, which in turn means greater milk supply from the dam.
    "People believed meat goats should look like meat animals," he said, "but what we want is faster growing animals. It doesn't matter what they look like. It is just weight and weight gain."
    "All we are trying to do is demonstrate we can make money out of focusing on a few things instead of getting sucked into other things people think are important."
    In recent years, the Boer has been the meat goat of choice in New Zealand, just as in other parts of the world. But Batten said he was quickly disenchanted with the Boer goat.
    "I got frustrated because the Boers weren't delivering what commercial farmers wanted," he said. "They stayed at the bottom of the hill, had crooked feet and died."
    Boer goats are great goats if you look after them, he said. "They are the Rolls Royce of goats if you treat them like a Rolls Royce," he said. "However, it needs to be very well fed and cared for to be able to express its potential. That just doesn't happen on our commercial, pastoral farms, especially on the 90 percent that is hill country."
    Batten admitted the Boer was muscular and its unique coloration had eye appeal. "Breeders believe this is important and have used it as a selling point," he noted.
    But the goat meat export market doesn't recognize muscling or coloration, he said, only carcass weight.
    "So from a commercial point of view, growth rate to slaughter and kidding rate are the two main profit parameters."
    Batten also sees little use for breed societies, registration, rules and "all that sort of nonsense."
    With his focus on little else but meat production, Batten's Kikonui may never be pretty or famous, but it should be well-liked by everyone down on the farm.

    (The information in this story is derived from an article written by Marie Taylor, a writer for the New Zealand Farmers Weekly and its associated publications, including Country-Wide Stock-Land.)