If you live in a place where grass and green herbacious growth is abundant and you’re looking for an animal to put into your system, consider geese.
Unlike other poultry, geese eat primarily grass and forbs (and occasionally leaves and twig-tips from lower shrubs, and occasionally will girdle an apple tree in winter, but mostly grass). Their lifecycle is adapted to places with a seasonal flush of spring green. The cycle looks like this:
A pair can be fed for a small input cost over the winter. They’re very efficient animals, and eat less than my ducks.
They’ll start to lay as the days lengthen.
Eat the eggs until six or seven weeks before your first grass comes up.
Let them sit on their eggs from six or seven to four weeks before your first grass comes up.
They’ll hatch out a clutch of babies as your first flush of fresh grass comes, and the parents plus the offspring will ride the curve of fresh grass into summer, and will then fatten on grass seeds. If you plant them a nice grain, they’ll self-harvest and fatten on it, but they should be fat enough without that if you time everything carefully.
Like any animal that eats fodder, they must have good-quality forage to do well without supplementation through the summer. Old, tough grass stalks will not sustain them. This does require some reading on forage, or you can toss them garden scraps if you have enough, or a tough of grain.
When the goslings are nice and fat you can slaughter them, hopefully in your climate this is before a dry period or winter means they can no longer eat grass, grass seeds, grain, or forbs.
Now you have a nice low-input pair to overwinter again.
I supplement with grain and can do 20-30 geese per acre to the level where they don’t really touch the grain through the summer. YMMV with your land’s capacity.
This is a great way to get a yield off land that naturally likes growing grass and forbs, that you don’t want to till or mow (though they won’t prevent a pasture turning back into a forest as well as mowing will), that may have a disease burden for more traditional homesteading animals. Geese need very little infrastructure - they don’t need an indoor space, just some space out of the wind with a little straw if your winter gets cold, and mine don’t really go inside until -20C - and they’re a very reasonable size to slaughter on-farm, unlike the many hundreds of pounds involved in pigs or cows. Unlike goats, they don’t climb fences, and unlike goats and sheep they kill themselves at a fairly low rate. They’re a little bigger than a lot of poultry, so although a fox can still take one it’s a lot harder than it is to take a chicken.
Remnants of a landrace geese even already exist: the cotton patch goose is a landrace goose from the US. Males and females have different markings, making selection of breeding stock easy; much of the breed has been lost but much remains. Or, of course, you can mix and form your own landrace that will adapt to your area, your size requirements, your particular vegetation and wild/protective vs friendly/closely housed needs.
The old landrace geese were driven through crop fields at particular times, when the crops were unpalatable, to weed them. I’m just learning to manage this system; geese tend to like to eat what they’re fed on as babies so feeding them lettuce scraps because they’re cute and you want to win their trust is counterproductive. There’s lots of experimentation to be done in this regard.
I do things in a particular way. I take the breasts off, and confit the rest of the body. That gives me about 2 cups of meat and 2 cups of fat (confit is basically cook at a low temp in the oven for several hours). The meat is crunchy and crispy where it was above the fat, and I eat that straight up. Where it was below the fat it’s soft and melting and can have veggies tossed and fried in it. This part is definitely a dark meat but not as gamey as the breast.
The fat is amazing for frying things in, especially potatoes and greens. Or using as a fat in mashed potatoes. My favorite thing about my pigs and geese is they remove my dependence on oils of questionable provenance, i don’t need to worry about the workers or environment getting a fair deal.
The breast has a layer of fat on one side. I fry it fat side down, then turn it to sear the other side briefly, and eat it rare with a little salt. It’s a very dark meat. I’ve had people say it’s too gamy for them, but that’s usually if it’s the breast cooked till its dead done without much else happening to it. Maybe think a very very rich lamb?
The big ones here are goose eggs. As your see, they are very large. They are also seasonal, though there’s huge variation in the number of eggs and length of lay from different goose breeds in a year; a landrace based on egg- laying strains of Chinese geese, well-supplemented, may lay 5x as many eggs. Following the geese theme of fat, goose eggs are richer than chicken eggs, with larger proportional yolks. They can be a bit rubbery if you scramble them; where they shine is in baking, from custards to breads to cakes to waffles. They make baking extra fluffy, and extra rich.
Note to add: geese are super social. They wander around constantly talking quietly to each other. They loudly greet each other when one has been gone, and they’ll loudly greet you when you’ve been gone. If you greet them back, happily and loudly, they’ll settle. If you run away from them instead, they may well follow; a lot of people get stories about being chased by geese this way.
That all sounds very interesting! How much tendency do they have to wander around? Does their honking tend to annoy neighbors?
We had a turkey fly into our yard and wander around randomly for an hour a few months ago. I had no idea where the turkey escaped from, but it was highly entertaining. After it had wandered around in our yard a bit, it then flew over the fence and spent awhile wandering around in someone else’s. Apparently everyone in the neighborhood was amused and had no idea where it had come from.
My geese stay within my yard. I’ve had ducks leave, but not geese nor chickens. If you had them in a small space, they were hungry, and your neighbour had great grass? I’m not sure. I’ve had a fence-hopping once, to get to a mate,
Mmmmm… you’ve got me thinking about the one time I was blessed to eat goose. One of my friends who I was living with at the time had 2-3 buddies that had gone on a very successful hunting outing and came by the house with their haul.
They hung out, cleaned the birds, and cut off the breasts into some surprisingly big “steaks.” They were super generous and offered to share it with us, which we obviously accepted. So the guys put together a little vinegar based marinade for it and a while later threw them on a charcoal grill.
Like @Greenstorm mentioned, they weren’t overcooked, still tender and juicy… and man… those things we tasty. And pretty big too.
I have no idea how the size or I guess even flavor of a goose migrating over Wisconsin compares to the varieties one would be raising, but I imagine it would be comparable at least… probably depends somewhat on diet as well.
I have toyed with the idea of raising geese before, but only on a VERY vague level. I’ve never really dug into the idea. This thread has me actually considering it more seriously than I probably ever had before…
Do you ever have to clip their wings or anything to keep them around or even to keep them in a fence? Does that depend on the breed (I believe with ducks it does? But dunno if geese are different.)?
I assume the ones bred for laying more eggs aren’t as heavy on the meat side, but is it safe to assume that the more meat focused ones aren’t as ridiculous as they are with chickens- where they’re basically a walking heart failure… without the walking? (Especially if actually raised the “optimal” way they’re bred for, where they’re legs are basically a useless accessory and all you need to know to predict what they’re doing is whether the light is on or off.) I’m kind of imagining they might be something closer to the “all-purpose” chicken breeds? Or maybe slightly more skewed towards meet than eggs compared to that. (I realize the whole comparison to chickens is a little bit off since they simply aren’t going to lay as many eggs as a rule and when they do it is more seasonal.)
I really love the idea of just planting some extra out there, and then the geese self-harvesting the vast majority of their own feed.
