TIFFIN, Ohio – Pressley Buurma, Ohio State University Extension agriculture and natural resources educator for Seneca County, and a lifelong goat fancier, was always the go-to person for questions when it came to goats.

“People have always come to me, before I even started this job, with general dairy goat questions and I would try to look for the answers in various places in the dairy goat industry,” Buurma said. “Although (goats) are huge among hobby farms they’re not huge in the commercial setting, like cattle. So, there’s not a lot of information out there that’s easy to grab for those backyard farmers with general questions.”

Her current position and experience with goats helped her develop a six-part webinar, All About Goats, hosted by the Ohio State Extension Small Ruminants Team. The series ran from March through May and featured two monthly sessions.

The webinar, designed for goat novices, examined dairy and meat goat breeding, management and production. The target audience included youth exhibitors, people who wanted to get started with goats, or people who had one or two pet goats and wanted to get more into the production side.

The group is planning a fall series geared toward a different audience.

“We are currently in the works for a fall webinar that will dive deeper into more specific areas or topics and try to help any experienced producers or people with backyard livestock who want to amp up their operation,” Buurma said.

When Buurma started her job, she wanted to answer people’s questions about goats in an easy-to-use platform that would “provide research-based scientific information that can help that backyard farmer who cares greatly about their goats and wants to succeed,” she said. In addition, the platform would provide contact information for individuals throughout the state with goat expertise.

Following several discussions with Dr. Brady Campbell, OSU’s small ruminant extension specialist, it was decided that a webinar would be the best way to attract the largest audience possible.

The number of participants per session varied. “We had different numbers of people attending each webinar because we had multiple topics,” Buurma said. “Some people only need to attend one of those topics to get their questions answered.”

Webinar topics included Getting Started with Goats, Live Animal Evaluation, Goat Management, Feeding Your Herd, General Reproduction, and Estrus Synchronization & AI. Each webinar topic dealt with different aspects of raising goats so attendees tailored their participation based on what they wanted or needed.

“We had talked about doing an all-day event, but we wouldn’t be able to hit certain people if they were busy that day, and it would be one entire day of all the information,” Buurma said. In addition, the entire series was recorded and released to all registered participants for self-paced viewing.

The webinar’s popularity exceeded expectations — in Ohio and out of the state.

“We had 572 people register for the event this year, and we’re ecstatic with that number,” Buurma said. “Our goal was to hit about 350 people and we’ve surpassed that, so we are thrilled. And I know for a fact we’re getting people from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and other states.”

Goats continue to gain in popularity in Ohio, bucking the national trend. According to Ben Torrance, state statistician of the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service Ohio field office, there were 11,000 milk goats in Ohio as of January 2024, unchanged from 2023, and 50,000 head of meat goats – 1,000 above 2023 totals.

“A lot of people are getting goats, one or two goats for pets – there are some miniature breeds that are great for pets,” Buurma said. “Or they want to have their own operation, where it’s just a couple of goats for themselves to get milk.”

Buurma’s experience is similar. Before she went to college, her family raised goats for her 4-H and FFA projects and sold animals to her friends as junior fair projects. The operation has since evolved.

“We still sell offspring to kids who want to take goats to the fair, but we have moved more toward a milking dairy,” she said. “We milk all of our does and use the milk for our other farm animals we also use the milk to make soap.”