Milk & Meat Withdrawal Tracking
When you treat a goat, her milk and meat usually can't be used for a period afterward. That waiting time is the withdrawal period, and getting it wrong means drug residue in the food supply — a real safety issue and, if you sell, a legal one.
Herd Manager tracks the clock for you. Every medication you log carries its own milk and meat withdrawal days, and the app works out when each animal clears.
How It Works
- Log a treatment on a goat — medication, dose, route, date
- Withdrawal days fill in automatically for common medications, or you enter them
- The app counts down from the treatment date for that specific animal
- You get told when a treated animal turns up somewhere it shouldn't
Milk and meat are tracked separately, because they're usually different. Ivermectin, for example, carries a 9-day milk withdrawal but 35 days for meat.
Built-In Medication Library
Around two dozen common goat medications come with default withdrawal periods already filled in, across dewormers, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, coccidiostats, and vaccines. A few examples:
| Medication | Milk | Meat |
|---|---|---|
| Ivermectin | 9 days | 35 days |
| Safeguard (Fenbendazole) | 0 days | 8 days |
| Valbazen (Albendazole) | 7 days | 9 days |
| Cydectin (Moxidectin) | 0 days | 14 days |
| Prohibit (Levamisole) | 3 days | 4 days |
These defaults are a convenience, not an authority. Withdrawal periods vary by formulation, dose, route, and country, and extra-label use prescribed by your vet changes them entirely — often dramatically. The label on the bottle in your hand and your vet's instructions always win. Herd Manager lets you override the days on any treatment; do that whenever your situation differs.
Where Withdrawals Show Up
Once a withdrawal is running, it surfaces in several places so you don't have to remember:
- Dashboard — active withdrawals with days remaining
- Calendar — the date each animal clears, listed as an upcoming event ("Juniper — Milk withdrawal ends"). It's framed as good news you can plan around, not an alarm.
- Goat profile — the animal's own record shows any active hold
- Milk logging — see below
- Meat and lot views — before animals go to processing
The Milk Logging Warning
If you log milk for a doe who's still inside a milk withdrawal, the app stops and tells you which does are affected, what they were treated with, and how many days remain.
It warns rather than blocks. You can proceed. That's deliberate — there are legitimate reasons to record milk from a doe under withdrawal:
- You're correcting a back-dated record
- You milked and dumped, and want the production data without the milk entering anything
- The withdrawal was entered wrong and you're fixing it
The point is that you never do it unknowingly.
Withdrawals from Treatment Plans
Multi-day treatment plans carry withdrawal days per step. Completing a step logs the health record and starts that step's withdrawal automatically, so a five-day antibiotic course doesn't need five manual entries to track correctly.
Practical Notes
- Withdrawals are tracked per animal, not per herd. Treating one doe doesn't hold the rest of the string.
- Only active goats appear in withdrawal lists. Sold or deceased animals drop off.
- A withdrawal of 0 days means no hold — the medication is logged, nothing is withheld.
- The countdown runs from the date administered, so back-dating a treatment correctly back-dates the clear date too.
If you sell into any regulated channel, your buyer or processor may require records of treatments and withdrawal compliance. The health export and compliance report in ☰ More → 🏥 Health produce that from what you've already logged.