Just like any other pet, goats need access to good clean fresh water. Seems simple, right? It is as long as you do not have hard water. It took me a long time to figure out that hard water causes all kinds of trouble with the uptake of other minerals, specifically copper. Copper deficient goats are not happy looking goats. I wont get in to the details of copper deficiency, there is lots of info out there on the web (here is a good summary). I am just mentioning it here so that you can maybe avoid the problems I ran into by being forewarned.
Your goats will need a good mineral supplement. “Salt” blocks are not sufficient. DO NOT USE A PRODUCT LABELED FOR SHEEP!! it will not have enough copper in it for your goats because sheep are very sensitive to copper toxicity, so the levels in sheep minerals are kept low. I use loose minerals because part of the solution I found for my copper/hard water issues was adding copper sulfate to the loose minerals; cant do that if you are using a block. Also, take a look at the salt content before you buy. For example, Purina goat minerals has a good level of copper, but it is 41-45% salt. With that much salt, the goats are less likely to eat the volume that they need to consume to get the minerals they need. We use Sweetlix Magnum Milker because it has the same level of copper but only 10-12% salt. The goats need to consume more to satisfy their salt cravings & therefore consume more minerals. We also add vitamins to the loose minerals. We like Equerry's plus because in addition to basic vitamins, it also contains nutritional yeast and probiotics.
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