Goat production guide Part 3: Keep your goats and your budget healthy

Buying good quality feed is a lot cheaper than buying good medicine. The first line of defence against disease is the quality and quantity of feed that the animals are given. Good feed ensures that the animal remains in a good condition and strong enough to combat infections and illness. But what makes a good quality feed? Obviously, the farmer needs to ensure that the feed contains enough proteins and other nutrients, but the feed also needs to be consistent. This is often neglected. Sudden changes in the composition of the goat’s diet can lead to diarrhoea, which can lead to other diseases in the flock.

Goats can be kept healthy by: • Ensuring that they have access to enough feed of the correct quality. • Ensuring they have access to clean water. • Following a vaccination programme against common diseases. • Keeping internal and external parasites under control.

Keeping sick goats separate so that disease does not spread to healthy goats. Making sure that any goats introduced into the flock are disease-free. Sheltering goats from adverse weather.

Animals that do not spend too much of their energy on getting warm or staying cool are better enabled to recover from disease. It is therefore wise to provide sick animals with shade and shelter from wind and rain to keep them warm and comfortable. If a goat does get sick it needs to be treated. It is essential to keep record of goats that you treat because if a particular animal gets sick often, it should be culled as it is a weak individual costing you money and also passing on bad genes to the next generation.

A sick goat shows the following symptoms: • It will appear dull and listless. • It may have obvious symptoms of sickness such as coughing or diarrhoea. • It may not follow the rest of the flock when they go out to graze. • It may have an abnormal temperature – either too high or too low.

One sick animal can contaminate healthy animals. This can result in the sick animal getting re-infected after it has recovered. Sometimes when a farmer has many sick animals, or a neighbour has sick animals, it means that the occurrence of disease in the area is very high. It is extremely difficult to keep individual animals healthy when there is a lot of disease around. Farmers who are aware of common diseases in their area need to think strategically about how to combat these diseases as a community rather than trying to just keep their own animals healthy. This is also true of parasites that cause diseases, like ticks and worms. If some animals have a lot of ticks or worms, it is difficult to stop the ticks and worms spreading to all the animals in a herd. Ticks are common disease carriers. This is why animals often get sick in early summer when there are a lot of ticks. Once the animal’s immune system is used to the ticks again, the animal can fight the tick diseases. Livestock owners in areas where the heartwater disease occurs must be very careful about buying animals from other areas, because if they come from areas that do not have heartwater, the animals’ immune systems will not recognise the disease and cannot protect them. The animal’s immune system is influenced by the diseases that the animal has been exposed to. If an animal was exposed to a disease and managed to survive, the natural immune system will fend off future infections of the particular disease. One way of getting an animal to have contact with a weakened form of the disease without killing the animal, is vaccination. Some vaccinations must be given every year while others need only be given once in an animal’s life. Another way for the animal to develop its immune system is through the infant animal being born with some of its mother’s immune cells. Infant livestock also develop stronger immune systems if they suckle their mothers very soon after birth to drink the first milk called colostrum, which is filled with the mother’s immune cells given if a problem is positively identi-

(antibodies).

Vaccination

Farmers need to be aware of common diseases that affect goats in their area and then follow an appropriate vaccination programme. Vaccination is only possible for certain diseases. With

healthy animal an injection that will prevent it from contracting a particular disease. This is different to treating an animal once it is sick.

One of the key vaccines you can give a goat is Multivax P • Multivax P will control Pasteurella (lung infections), pulpy kidney, tetanus, and black quarter. • Young goats can be injected at 4 to 5 months and again at 5 to 6 months of age. • Adult goats: Can be treated annually at the onset of the rainy season, and followed up with a second treatment after 4 weeks.

Other vaccinations should only be these diseases, you can give the

fied by a veterinarian or animal health technician, for example: enzootic abortion, Brucella melitensis (also commonly called CA).

In the next edition we shall discuss common diseases that goat farmers should be aware of.

The information in this article is credited to Mdukatshani, Heifer International-South Africa and the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Agriculture and Rural Development who published the Goat Production Handbook in 2015.

Taking care of goats’ hooves is important to keep them strong and healthy. Perform regular inspections so that any problems can be rectified. Pay attention to the goats as they walk. Limping goats should be treated to prevent foot rot and other hoof diseases.

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Ctrack Freight & Transport Index returns its best quarter yet

The South African Logistics sector has just completed its strongest ever quarter of growth to date. As it often happens, the biggest decline was followed by the highest growth. With September being the end of the third quarter, Statistics SA is expected to release the updated GDP figures soon, and all indications are that it will show the strongest growth per quarter in our lifetime. Sub-Saharan Africa will follow closely in these footsteps. In June 2020, the Ctrack Freight Transport Index showed that the logistics sector recorded a decline of 17,6%, compared to the previous quarter, while the growth over the second quarter has improved with 11,8%. According to the Ctrack Freight Transport Index, only two subsectors recorded a decline. Those were Pipelines, which is the smallest subsector and Storage, which is historically very difficult to predict. “The Ctrack Freight Transport Index has been recording these trends for a considerable period of time and we have never seen such growth and recovery, which is excellent news for the economy,” Hein Jordt, Managing Director of Ctrack SA, says. Freight transport tracks the economy in the near real-time, and shows that the third quarter GDP will be the highest on record too. The Ctrack Freight Transport Index has a very close relationship with GDP, and is also strongly correlated to the coincident index. This is of course why we now expect the strongest GDP on record for South Africa and many other countries too. While this recovery might seem remarkable, one must remember that if your turnover is cut by 50% from R1 000 to R500 in one year and you get a 50% increase on the R500 turnover the next (year two), your turnover is now only R750, which is still 25% lower than in year one. However, this does not take away from the strength of the bounce or the

behind the same quarter last year. A complete recovery is only expected in a year’s time. The recovery in the road transport sector may be due to the move towards courier type transport, however long-distance freight transport was at a similar level in September as it was in September 2019. That being said, September 2019 featured plenty of strike action and was also a weak economic

Table 1: The Ctrack Freight Transport Index measured changes

significantly more severe if this

record-breaking nature of the recovery, but it does indicate that everything is not back to normal yet. With normal meaning the logistics sector returning to where it was before the slowdown in mid-2019. The effects of the second wave of COVID-19 are yet to be seen, however now it seems to have hit Europe the hardest. China has recovered and is growing strongly, while indications are that the recession in the US was not as bad as feared. “We expect some negative effects, but we believe that they will not be as devestating as those of the first wave,” Hein says. Internal sectors are faring better than those with a bigger foreign trade factor. The Ctrack Freight Transport Index covers six sub-sectors in the logistics arena. They all behave differently, particularly during a world-wide crisis such as the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Land based transport shows improvements

Rail and Road recorded similar increases of 16% and 16,8% compared to the previous quarter. While both major forms of land transport report disruptions, such as border delays and illegal quarter for the overall South African economy. Pipelines reported the biggest decline at 38,7% quarter on quarter. This is due to the storing of massive amounts of fuel during the second quarter and it may be another month or two before we see quarterly increases again. With many motorists still not driving due to widespread work from home policies, fuel usage remains below par (apart from diesel for trucking which is close to normal). “South Africa is on the verge of climbing on the economic recovery train with companies keen to recover losses and restore their turnover figures. However, if business and the public do not continue to adhere to the basic hygiene and protection guidelines, we could be back into lockdown before we know it. Companies that barely survived the first lockdown will be sent off a cliff in a second round, and the economic consequences will be

strike action, they are both only 7% happens,” Hein says.

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