There are many reasons why we might be in a position where we don’t have the right feed for our goats.
Maybe you have sheep as well and ran out of goat feed.
Maybe you weren’t paying attention at the feed store and bought the wrong thing.
Whatever the reason, the question on your mind is can goats eat sheep feed?
Goats should not really eat sheep feed. The two animals have quite different nutritional needs. It will be fine in a pinch, but you shouldn’t make a habit of giving your goats sheep feed. They can suffer copper deficiencies from sheep feed in the long term.
So, if you’ve got nothing else and it’s only a one-off thing, then feeding goats sheep will be fine.
But it’s always best to practice as much caution as possible, to protect your goat’s health.
Sheep feed will ultimately not do this in the long term, so should be avoided.
Is sheep feed good for goats?
In some ways, it can be.
In the sense that goats and sheep have vaguely similar diets, and so goats for the most part can get on well with sheep feed—but only in the short term.
It also depends on the kind of sheep feed you are looking at.
It should provide for their basic needs, like fiber.
Fiber is the backbone of both a goat and a sheep’s diet, so basic feed is generally very high in fiber.
Your goats will not miss out on this important factor by eating sheep feed.
Compared with cows, though, sheep do eat a wider variety of plants.
This means that, of all the livestock feeds available other than goat feed, sheep is probably your best chance.
Goats like to forage and roam around a lot more than sheep do, but sheep feed will provide the closest alternative.
There are general livestock feeds that are suitable for both goats and sheep, and these will do fine as a baseline for their diet—but both animals are going to wind up needing a variety of supplements. Let’s look at the problems with feeding sheep feed to goats.
Is sheep feed bad for goats?
Again, in the short, term, sheep feed shouldn’t cause any issues for your goats.
If you’ve run out of goat feed and need something to tide your goats over in the meantime, then sheep feed will do just fine.
There’s nothing in it that’s toxic or dangerous to goats.
The problems, though, will arise through long-term feeding of sheep feed to goats.
Perhaps the single biggest issue is copper content.
Goats need a much greater amount of copper in their diets than sheep do.
Formulated sheep feed, then, is going to be much lower in copper content than equivalent goat feed.
Copper deficiency in goats is a big problem, leading to weakness, fatigue, weight loss, and a wide range of other issues that can, ultimately, be fatal.
While you can add the necessary copper to the goat’s diet with copper supplements, you will get the copper much more reliably if it is simply in the goat’s feed.
The problem here, though, is that you then can’t really feed that to your sheep, as they can conversely suffer from copper poisoning.
So, the short answer is that yes, sheep feed is going to be bad for goats in the long run.
There may be some added convenience in sharing their feed, but one or both of them is going to suffer for it health-wise.
Don’t give your goats sheep feed in the long term.
But is lamb feed any different?
Can you feed lamb feed to goats?
Lamb feed is also no good for goats.
This is mostly for the same reasons we’ve outlined above—copper content.
Most lamb feeds will be even lower in copper content than sheep feeds, and so are even worse for your goat.
Furthermore, they will also probably be way too high in protein.
Growing lambs need a lot more protein in their diets than mature goats and even sheep, so your goats will end up with excess protein from eating lamb feed.
Again, in a pinch, if you have nothing else and the goats are hungry, lamb feed is certainly better than nothing.
But it’s still not ideal by any stretch.
What is the best feed for goats?
So, then, what to feed goats? Well, the simplest answer is any formulated goat feed.
These are just as widely available as sheep feed, so if you’ve got goats, this is a good option.
As long as they have plenty of snacks like fruit and vegetables on top, a mostly hay diet is just fine, too.
Ideally, though, your goat should be able to roam a pasture and find forage of its own.
Unlike sheep they are natural roamers and eat a wider variety of plants than sheep do. So, the best diet for a goat is a good pasture they can roam in their own time, with some other healthy snacks on top.
So, while sheep feed won’t cause your goats any harm in the short term, it needs to be avoided as a general solution.
If you have goats and sheep, then the simple truth is they can’t really eat all the same foods.
They could share things like hay, but ultimately, they are both going to have further dietary needs you’ll have to meet.
There’s not really a simple and convenient solution—they’ll need a variety of foods!