Seymour Alternative Farming Expo: Meet Australia’s goat-to man

IN the world of Australian artificial goat breeding, Paul Hamilton is the go-to goat man.

Irresistible: Pygmy goats are bred as companion animals and bond to their owners like a cat or a dog.

IN the world of Australian artificial goat breeding, Paul Hamilton is the go-to goat man.

He has been running his Semtech Animal Breeding Service business for 30 years, and has helped artificially inseminate plenty of goats over that time — everything from dairy goats to Angora.

In fact, he was a goat man long before it was vaguely fashionable to keep a herd of them, and well before treechangers pronounced their love for them on bumper stickers and turned their milk into artisanal soap.

“If someone is thinking of inseminating their goats, they come to me,” he said.

Mr Hamilton can recall working on the margins of the livestock breeding industry during the ’80s and ’90s, when “goats were once seen as the second cousins to sheep”.

“They were viewed as more of a nuisance than anything else by the sheep and cattle graziers, especially during those drought years,” he said.

Things have changed dramatically since then.

According to the Australian Livestock Export Industry, Australia exported 90,950 goats in 2014-15, valued at $9.6 million.

Mr Hamilton is creating a meat carcass trial from the Tennessee Meat Goats he is infusing into the Rangeland goats.

Tennessee Meat Goats produce more meat in the carcass when infused with Rangeland goats.

Tennessee goats suffer from the fainting condition called myotonia congenital, but this appears to lessen when the genes are crossed with Rangeland goats.

“I am aiming to inseminate 100 does and produce 500 kids this year,” Mr Hamilton said.

A handful of the Tennessee Meat Goats will join Mr Hamilton at this year’s Seymour Alternative Farming Expo alongside “companion animals” — chiefly the outright adorable Pygmy goat.

“They have great reserves of energy, they’re very appealing and you only need about an acre to keep one,” he said.

“Plus they are companion animals so they will bond to you in the same way as a cat or a dog.”