Lactation Periods
A lactation period is one milking cycle — freshening to dry-off. It's the container everything else hangs off.
Starting One
Open the doe's profile → 🥛 Milk → Start Lactation, and enter the start date, which is normally her kidding date.
Milk logged from that date forward belongs to this lactation.
Weights logged with no open lactation still save, but they can't produce days-in-milk, a curve, or a projection — the app doesn't know where the lactation began. Starting one takes a moment and unlocks all of it.
Ending One
End Lactation at dry-off. The app then calculates:
- Total production
- Days in milk
- Peak production, and when it happened
- Average daily production
See How to Dry Off a Dairy Goat for doing it safely.
305-Day Projections
While a lactation is still running, Herd Manager projects the 305-day total from the data so far. That's the number that lets you evaluate a first freshener in her third month rather than waiting until autumn.
The maths is a lactation-curve fit with fallbacks for thin data — explained in How Herd Manager Forecasts Lactation.
Comparing Lactations
A doe's lactations side by side show whether she's improving, holding, or declining. That's the real basis for culling and retention decisions — a second freshener who jumps significantly is telling you something a first-lactation number alone can't.
Across the herd, this feeds the doe rankings in production reports.