Abstract :
The difficulty of determining the intake of browse grazed by goats is widely recognized.
We suggest that a reasonable estimate of the amount of edible browse available to goats
grazing shrubby Mediterranean vegetation can be derived from actual grazing data of goat
herds that have obtained most of their annual maintenance requirements from pasture
dominated by shrubs or shrubby trees. We have conducted such estimates on three forests
in the Hills of Judea, two of which were grazed by milking herds and one by a herd producing
mainly kids. The estimated long-term annual carrying capacity of the shrubby vegetation
ranged between 457 and 725 grazing days per ha of shrub cover for the milking herds and
735 grazing days per ha for the non-milking herd. Assuming an average daily DM intake of
1.5 kg/goat/day, the amount of browse DM consumed from the woody vegetation was estimated
to be between 686 and 1103 kg/ha of shrubby vegetation. In the literature, estimates
of annual DM production of new growth of shrubby vegetation range widely between 200
and 2000 kg/ha, but as most estimates do not indicate the cover of the woody vegetation,
the actual amounts produced by a unit area of shrubby vegetation could well be higher. The
browse ingested by the goats in the Judean Hills is evidently somewhere between half to
one-third of the annual above ground DM production. The estimates derived in the present
study define a range of useable browse production on Mediterranean woodland that is
derived from actual, long-term use of shrubby pasture by commercial goat herds. They
indicate that the nutritional value of the pasture for goats is, as a rule, more than double
that for sheep or cattle.
