The S-Bar-D Ranch Story

Past

The goat journey started way before my time when my dad purchased his first goats in the late 1980s. I grew up around them and from a very young age became actively involved in the day to day activities and management decisions. I moved to northern Iowa in the spring of 2018. I did not bring any of my stock with me.

In the fall of 2021, we decided to get back in the goat business. Made our first purchase of 40 Savanna goats from Lloyd Ward out of Sheffield Texas. These were commercial does, straight off his 13,000-acre ranch.
Our goals were simple. Breed hardy meat goats that were profitable on a business scale and accurately keep records of performance and make breeding/culling decisions based off actual data and not just because we “liked” a certain animal. And eventually be able to offer high quality breeding stock to others.

Present

Where we are at?

We are in year 4, and we are excited!!

But we have had many setbacks.

Having to cull many nannies that did not perform like we needed
Cleaning up our rundown place that we bought and building goat infrastructure. Buildings, working facilities etc.
Not having years of accurate performance data to base our decisions on, because we started from scratch up here in Iowa, really has made our progress go slower than anticipated

And the list goes on..

So, what are we excited about?

Each year our kid crop gets closer to our goals! Each year we are seeing a little more consistency in our kid crop.

Our goals have evolved as well. We have been incredibly blessed to be able to be part of a newly formed alliance, the US-SABGBA! An alliance between United States breeders and the South African Boer Goat Breeders Association. With this in place, we now are having South African certified judges coming here to the states and performing inspections on our animals, judging them for correct phenotype for the SA Savanna. Through this incredible process, we are striving to create higher quality animals that not only perform on the range or in the feed lot, but also are structurally correct and so have a higher percentage of meat on the carcass. We just had the judges over for the first time and learned SO MUCH already!

And each year we are adding better nanny kids back into our growing herd! The 2024 kid crop was just beautiful! And the performance was again slightly ahead of last year. Going into 2024 fall breeding season, we have 176 nannies exposed to bucks! The steps ahead have been aggravatingly small, but always noticeable.

Our goals have evolved as well.

We have been incredibly blessed to be able to be part of a newly formed alliance, the US-SABGBA. This a alliance between United States breeders and the South African Boer Goat Breeders Association. With this in place, we now are having South African certified judges coming here to the states and performing inspections on our animals, judging them for correct phenotype for the SA Savanna. Through this incredible process, we are striving to create higher quality animals that not only perform on the range or in the feed lot, but also are structurally correct and so have a higher percentage of meat on the carcass. We just had the judges over for the first time and learned so much already.

In the Spring of 2024 we partnered with Lost Creek Wholesale LLC the U.S. & Canadian distributor of Universal Feeders. We are now a dealer for the Universal Feeders and are happy to be offering these quality saliva lick feeders to our customers. Another resource we offer farmers and ranchers in the full line of BioZyme Mineral Products. Visit our Biozyme Mineral page to learn more.

Future

We are working toward having all our animals enrolled in a performance analyzing program that gives us accurate EBVs.
We are focusing on producing and maintaining only SA Stud certified animals in our herd
We want to be able to consistently produce, quality consistency
As we continue to grow our herd to our goal (1,000 breeding females) we are very excited to soon start offering high quality breeding stock to others.