4 QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. [1 Jan., 1900. — 
during much of their lives a big value in milk for market or household uses or) 
for conversion into the most saleable varieties of cheese, such as the Roquefort, 
Mont D’Or, Le Sassenage, and Levroux, of France and Switzerland. So fully 
is the goat available as a dairy animal when bred to that object that in Europe it” 
is sententiously called “the poor man’s cow,” because of the combination of 
value with economy of keeping. ] 
The total number of goats in the United States is only about 500,000, and 
one-half of these are in Texas. One-half of the total number, also, are of k 
Angora fleece-bearing stock, confined chiefly to Texas, Oregon, New Mexico, | 
California, Colorado, and Nevada. ew, if any, goats in the United States are” 
raised for their skins. | 
The cost of keeping goats is less than for any other animal. They graze” 
upon coarse herbs that are not eaten by any other stock, such as ironweed, | 
dock, mullein, briars, buds, and broken sprouts. The wool of the Angora variety — 
possesses the highest felting qualities. The average fleeces from mature - 
Americanised Angora bucks weigh from 6 to 7 Ib. and those from the ewes” 
from 3 to 4 1b. The flesh of the crosses is accounted superior to mutton. i 
The ease with which all breeds of goats can be kept fits them for many | 
mountainous portions of our country, where sheep cannot be sustained to” 
advantage, while their ability and disposition to defend themselves against dogs” 
ive to them another great advantage over sheep. ‘They are free from all” 
sieedaes to which sheep are liable, are hardy and prolific, and experience has — 
proved that they are adaptable to all parts of the United States. The feed of 1 
one cow will keep twelve goats. Cows must have certain food or they will not — 
thrive. Goats will eat anything almost, and still do well, and they have this 
great advantage also: That their milk is not in any way affected by their diet.” 
The goat is a reliable and lifelong botanical scavenger, and can be depended | 
upon to destroy the many undesirable products of cultivated and fallow lands—the 
abundant and persistent weedy vegetation, which so incessantly besets the 
cultivated crops. Other ruminating domestic animals prefer the cereals and 
grasses that depend upon the labour of the farmer. What these reject, goats 
prefer, and cheerfully pass by growing grass and grain for a constant dessert of | 
wild carrot, burdock, mullein, thistle, or cactus. Goats thus voluntarily clean — 
fields of their vegetative refuse before it ripens and scatters its seeds, and so 
thoroughly is this done that the latent seeds of valuable grasses, improving the 
chance thus given them to sprout and thrive, often follow the second or third — 
year of goat pasturage with a uniform carpet, clean and eyen as if made to 
order. The value of the goat as a brush-cleaner can hardly be over-estimated.— 
The goat thrives in all climates, except that of the Polar regions. Long- | 
lived, hardy, agile, and enterprising, itdoes well, if unconfined, in heat or cold, on 
mountains or plain. But it naturally prefers rough, rocky, bushy, wild, and — 
elevated land. As to climate alone, most of the entire area of the United 
States is favourable to the goat family generally ; and much of the Pacific coast, 
the south-west and the south, to the long-fleeced varieties particularly. And in — 
this country it seems that whenever there is a suitable climate there are also — 
suitable uncultivated lands. Over 42 per cent. of the lands in farms in the 
United States is unimproved, amounting to over 265,000,000 acres, against 
375,000,000 acres improved. Thus is presented a vast field for selection of 
favoured localities in every part of the country, and much of the field especially — 
invites the primitive occupation of herding, which precedes and prepares the 
way for agriculture, with inestimable benefit to the soil. In the aggregate, — 
millions of acres of land, at present poor, rough, rocky, and bushy, distributed — 
through nearly all the States, call for subjection and enrichment through animal 
occupation, preferably of the goat. They will furnish in abundance such foliage — 
as is suitable and preferable for goats; and, under such conditions, whatever © 
profit can be derived from herding goats will come near being a total profits — 
‘Wherever foul land is regularly pastured by goats for a few years it become® 
clean, weedless, and bushless, and, being evenly fertilised by them also, it usually 
runs naturally into nutritious grasses. a 
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