Uphoff Boer Goats

Uphoff Boer Goats began in 1998 when we saw the meat goat market developing at Lexington, NE. Our first buck, the only one we could find   within a 100 mile radius of Lexington was "Andy" a black and white paint 1/2 Boer, 1/2 LaMancha. We still have one of his daughters, Little Red. After Andy came Hank, our first fullblood registered buck purchased from Donald and Rita Johnston of Grover, CO.

We now keep from 4 to 6 fullblood bucks and use them in our breeding program and lease some of them to other breeders to improve their herds. We offer registerable  fullblood and percentage nannies, commercial nannies and dairy nannies to breeders who have goats and to those just starting in the goat business. We pride ourselves in our post-sale support of new and existing breeders, keeping them abreast of new developments in the meat goat industry through our e-group of about 300 meat goat producers in Nebraska & surrounding states,  and helping them through health problems that occur from time to time. We tell our customers, "When you buy our goats, you also buy us".

Our bucks include: Wattswood Farms Bam Bam (Mr Bee), our primary sire, a red buck with 8 Ennoblements in his pedigree; Bear Creek BC X342 Taz, a traditional buck with 5 Ennoblements in his pedigree;    Little Tex, a red & white paint son of Texas Warrior, out of Texas Bernadette, a daughter of Troy Powell’s Kalahari.  Little Tex's grand sire is Coni Warrior, who is Ennobled & owned by Coni Ross of Blanco, Texas;  Zeus, a fullblood Savanna purchased at the 4S Goat Expo in 2011 from George & Suzanne England of Midland, SD.  This new addition will be used primarily on our Boer/Nubian nannies to create  3 way composite billy goats for our commercial customers.  In the fall of 2011 we lost one of our  favorite nannies, Uphoff's Countess Dracula.  She was the mother of Uphoff's Elmer Fudge and several other notable offspring, grand offspring and great grand offspring. In the fall of 2012 we were fortunate to obtain Uphoff's Gilbert a dark red son of Uphoff's Elmer Fudge & EDSR Cherry (Witch) We raised Gilbert in 2007 & sold him in the 4S Goat Expo sale to Larry Peterson.  After he was finished with him he sold him to Harold & Teresa Johnson of Windmill Boers, at Hyannis, Nebraska.  The Johnsons traded him back to us for a red son of Mr Bee.  We'll use Gilbert primarily on Mr Bee's daughters.

Our fullblood  and percentage nannies  are mostly of our own raising.

As we have matured along with the meat goat industry we have seen an increasing need for bucks that will go into commercial and registered herds and increase their weaning weights. So, we are concentrating our efforts in producing this type of buck for our customers. We produced the high indexing buck in the first ever Nebraska Range Buck Test held May through October of 2009. He was a son of Easter Egg.

You will notice that we list each goat's weaning weight in it's description on our For Sale  page. One of our goals is to wean some 100 pound billy kids at 90 days of age and nanny kids at 90 pounds at 120 days.

One of our main goals that has evolved from our participation in the various buck tests and listening to the comments and requests of our customers,  is to raise the weaning weights of our customers’ kids just 10# per head.  If we can accomplish this,  and he breeds the buck he buys from us to just 30 of his nannies each year & weans a 170% kid crop & sells the kids in the traditionally high fall/Christmas market for $2.00 per pound, that will result in an Extra 510# of kids he’ll market for an EXTRA PROFIT of over $1,000 from each crop of kids through the use of Uphoff’s genetics.  One of our repeat customers told us this summer (2011) that, “I used to wean 30# kids until I switched to your genetics.  Now I’m weaning 60# kids”.   Another lady told us, "I can walk through my goats and pick out the ones sired by your bucks.  They are  several pounds heavier than the other bucks' kids."  That in a nutshell is our goal in the meat goat business.  It doesn’t matter how pretty a billy goats ancestors were or how many times they were shown on the end of a lead rope; it’s the amount of profit he makes for his owner.  And we also  feel that  a lot of the responsibility of more pounds at weaning lies on the nannies used in a breeding program so we have enrolled our herd in Dr Andries' Production Testing  at Kentucky State University at Frankfort, KY.  We send him the birthweights and weaning weights of our kids and the weights of the nannies at weaning along with some other pertinent information and he sends us back all the figures we need to evaluate our breeding program. We highly recommend this program to all our serious meat goat producers whether they have "2 nannies and a Victory Garden" or a thousand nannies.

The meat goat industry is the fastest growing and one of the most profitable of all agricultural entities. One of the most quotable quotes we've heard about this segment of agriculture came from a County Extension Educator who said, "When you add meat goats to your operation you don't have to take anything else away. If you're raising corn and decide to start raising soybeans you have to raise less corn, but, if you add meat goats you don't have to take anything else out." Meat goats can be a great project for a stay at home mom or youngsters in a family. Many commercial goat operations have grown into a very profitable entity from a few goats that were purchased for 4H projects for the children in the family.   So the future remains bright for serious meat goat breeders.

At Uphoff's we want to help our present and future customers increase their profits through the purchase of our breeding bucks and does. To assist our customers to gain their goals in the meat goat industry we provide support in the management area of their goats. We thank you for visiting our web site and hope we can be of service to you sometime soon.