I’m thinking of growing enough persimmons, Asian and American, to feed to my dairy goats year round. I’d like to dehydrate them after harvest and feed them at milking. I’m trying to get some ideas of how many trees I’d need so I was wondering if anyone here had some estimates. I’ve found numbers online ranging from 100 to over 500 pounds per tree.
Thanks
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Can goats eat acorns from white oak trees. crab apples Pears. They produce very well
I would be concerned about Diospyrobezoars
From a diet high in persimmons year round.
Not sure how much of a concern this is really .?
@Lucky_P may know ?
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How would you store that many persimmons? Perhaps everbearing mulberry trees would work for part of the season. Plant a few things that will keep a crop of something happening over the season. Then you only have to store for a few months.
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I’m actually just asking out of curiosity… Is there something in particular with persimmons that helps goats with milk production?
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If there is something about persimmons that enhanced milk production, that would be just peachy
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Not sure of your set up, or how many goats you have, or if this is your main occupation. I have just whittled my herd down to 9. I too would be concerned about bezoars like Hillbillyhort with a year-around diet of persimmons. I can´t imagine prepping, dehydrating and storing enough persimmon to feed my goats year-round, plus doing my milking and other chores. Besides, I´d probably eat most before they reached the goats.
Here in upstate NY apple trees are everywhere in fields and roadsides. When I herd mine out and about in the Fall of the year, they often lead me from one wild apple tree to the next. Too many can cause some to have loose stools though, and I would never feed them on apples exclusively. I have read that some homesteaders raise mangel beets to feed livestock through the Winter. I haven´t done that, but did once buy a bag of shredded beet roots to test it, and the goats did not seem impressed.
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Goats do love crabapples, acorns, etc, but acorns in particular only bear every other year or skip years, plus they’re quite high in tannins and lower in energy/digestibility. I have many white and red oaks but I can’t depend on them necessarily. Apples in general are about 13% digestible solids and the rest is fiber and water; they’re harder to dehydrate and harder to grow here in the humid southeast. Persimmons are about 60% digestible nutrients, have no toxins in the seeds (that I could find online), and are a tremendous source of energy (necessary for steady milk production). Persimmons bear very heavily here and bear like clockwork regardless drought, flood, etc. They’re easy to see, easy to harvest, and easy to dry in our hot fall days.
Right now my goats have their fill of them; there are about 20 enormous persimmon trees which bear heavily scattered over these 22 acres. But every tree has many pounds of leftover fruits which just get eaten by God knows what. If mature trees conservatively produced 100 pounds each, and I harvested 75%, then given their low moisture content I could dehydrate them and I could get 45 pounds of digestible dry matter per tree (dried persimmons). I’d then run them through my big grinder and make a meal out of them so the high energy/high protein seed would be digestible as well. Each goat would get 1 lb persimmon meal per 100 lb bodyweight (big producers would get a little more). If I conservatively got 45 lb persimmon meal per tree that’s 45 goat-days. Milking 20 goats per day for 12 months (40 goats in two cycles of 6 months) means I’d need roughly 20 lb persimmon meal per day or 7,300 lb per year, or 163 trees. If each tree needed 100 Sq ft then I could achieve this on only a little over 1/3 acre. If I spaced them out more then maybe as much as 1 acre.
I wouldn’t worry about bezoars given the wide variety of forages I manage for them. If bezoars become a problem I would address it by adding something to the mix for the goat in question, but they’d only be getting persimmon meal for the 5-6 month lactation.
If, however, I can get 500 lbs of fruit per tree, you can see how that may make a difference in the scheme (or in the number of goats I can supplement).
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That’s way more work than I’d be willing to go to for goats. Or cows. Or horses.
I often question whether the electricity I use dehydrating pears, persimmons - and this season, watermelon - is really wisely spent. From a dollar-cost aspect… is the dried fruit really worth what it cost me in energy consumption to produce?
And… growing that many persimmons is going to take a sizeable plot of ground out of grazing rotation… IDK if anyone has done ‘silvopasture’ plantings with persimmons - but those trees would have to have acquired some significant size, girth, and bark thickness before I would declare them ‘goat safe’ in a pasture.
In ~ 35 yrs of veterinary pathology work, I have seen ONE persimmon bezoar… in a horse, composed primarily of chewed seeds & seedcapsule fiber. I do have a sizeable bezoar and enterolith collection, amassed over nearly 4 decades of dismantling dead animals… but only one was persimmon-based.
Goats and deer have proline-rich salivary proteins which allow them to consume acorns with no concern with regard to the tannins/gallotannins which pose major, and often life-threatening, issues to cattle and horses.
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OGW lists the 10-15 tall trees as 50+ pound harvests.
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Not to say it’s the best option for your use case, but I’d personally check England’s descriptions for finding prolific cultivars. I remember he says U-20A (Celebrity) and one other is enough in combo for an entire family.
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In my observation, Jiro might be one of the most prolific cultivars. It produces so much in the CA central valley that much of the fruit is thrown away. They produce well even in my cool summer climate.
In your much warmer climate, they will certainly produce enough.
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So what does a 500lb fruited tree look like? 50lbs per tree is quite a bit less than I’d like to see but I’m not opposed to planting many more trees.
As someone who is occasionally morbidly curious… do you have pictures of the collection?
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I didn’t even know what a bezoar was until today, but that is indeed an intriguing thing to have a collection of…
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JP, I was thinking of that yesterday…I’ll have you do a photoshoot…some have been in presentations I’ve done in the past, but most have not been photographed.
I was browsing some back issues of the NAFEX publication, ¨Pomona¨ for persimmon information and noticed that James Claypool submitted an article in the Summer 1989 issue, pp. 33-35, entitled, ¨Is There a Persimmon Bezoar?¨ He mentions as primary cause the tannin, called ´shibuol´ by the Japanese, found primarily in the unripe fruit – though also in ripe fruit next to the skin under the calyx and part way down the sides.
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Photo of the persimmon bezoar I removed (at necropsy) from the duodenum of a horse, probably 15 years or so ago. Composed primarily of persimmon seeds and the fibrous seed envelope materials.
Sorry, I’m not tech-savvy enough to figure out how to rotate it 180 degrees.
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Hi,
I know nothing about goats. However, I can say that my Anna Apple yields never stop and my persimmon, though prolific, gives much less fruit and the branches will break if I let it fruit as much as it wants to. Be careful with those brittle branches, they will not hold a lot of fruit.
