So, we’ve been using a mineral bar (20 free choice minerals) with our doe herd for going on three years. I can attest that it has made a HUGE difference (for the good) in our herd. Glossy coats and a marked increased the health of newborn kids: no knuckle dragging or floppy kids since the summer that we started with it.
I’ve always wanted a bar in our buck barn but never figured how. This is our doe mineral bar , which uses 11″ long, black, 2-hole mineral feeders from TSC (10 of them) which is quite a lot of wall space needed. (About 10 feet.)
Recently, I saw a post on a FB group for mineral bar users by Lura Huff who used these reinforced pig feeders (available at Amazon and Walmart).
Each feeder unit has five holes, so you need 4 feeders for a full 20-mineral bar. Here is a picture of Lura’s design. It’s a portable version (which is what I thought I’d do when I ordered them, and may yet do in another buck barn).
It is ingenious because it can be unbolted quickly in order to service the dishes or to move it to another spot on the farm
The trouble was, of course, getting time to make it.
Photo Credit to Lura Huff
As I took inventory of our second barn’s interior space (where we usually house junior does in winter and/or bucks during breeding months, I realized that we had about 8 feet of wall space… enough to easily put all four, five-hole feeders onto one 8-foot 2×4. So, we screwed them on with lug bolts and washers, measured up the same height as our manger openings, and screwed it to the wall.
We have found that when you put the dishes higher and give goats a step up (in this case, cinder blocks) you have less poop in the feeders.
Our supply buckets (5 gallong Home Depot buckets) are in our main bard, about 200 feet away, so we had to think about how we were going to easily re-supply the mineral feeder in this new barn. We came up with using two file boxes (bought at Staples) to keep 12 quart-size mason jars in perfectly.
You only need 8 jars in the second box, but they stay put nicely with 12, so we double up on some of the most-loved minerals in the remaining 4 jars.
We labeled the tops of the jars, and now I only make two trips to refill all the minerals with ease!
