Capra Lane Farm: Linear Appraisal

This year we signed up for a linear appraisal session, it has been 2 years since the animals were last evaluated by an official ADGA (American Dairy Goat Association) appraiser.

This is an example sheet I found online, not for one of my goats. Basically each animal is appraised on a variety of inheritable traits that should predict structural and functional durability over time as well as their potential for genetic improvement. Things like rump angle and width can help predict capacity as a milker, udder extension and ligamentous support show how a goats udder will hold up over time. Victoria doesn't make push up bras for goats, so we have to try to make genes do all the work.

There are handy dandy photo guides to help those of us who may need a little reminding. The LA session also helps us, as breeders to turn off our 'barn blindness' which sometimes makes us favor certain animals over others and helps to pull out those with hidden potential.

I'll post official scores on the website on the pedigree pages in the next few months. We were very happy with our results overall, the vast majority of our milkers scored between 87-89, which is in the VG or very good range. Serious long-term breeders shoot for 90 and above, the E or excellent category. It's very tough to achieve, but we're getting there and we've made improvements since our last session 2 years ago, a few of our milkers went up a few points. Everyone involved learned a few things, our appraiser was very informative and complimentary. One of the ending comments was ' you've got a nice little herd here, with a lot of depth'. Overall, a great day and satisfying results.

Being appraised meant I needed to prep and clip animals, I tried my hardest, but with a busy work week I made it about 1/3 of the way through. Still, we have a website that desperately needs updating so I begged my wonderful beautiful funny and very youthful and patient friend to come over early to help photograph goats. Photographing goats is often an exercise in futility. Bring out the camera and the normally docile animals start freaking out and scatter. As you'll remember from last years photo failures. Here are a few new ones!