A feeding solution—for goats
Nigerian dwarf goats rank high on the cuteness scale, with their wispy beards, wide-set eyes, and gregarious personalities, but their table manners are slightly less charming. Unlike cattle, which are content to eat from individual buckets, goats prefer family-style dining, the more the merrier. More often than not, someone’s hooves end up in the food bowl.
“Goats are very social, they want to be all up in each other’s business eating together,” laughed Assistant Professor of Engineering Emma Brace. “It’s funny but it can be a headache for farmers. Goats love to jump, hop, and climb in their food, so as you can imagine, it gets dirty very quickly, which leads to a lot of waste.”
Brace teaches in BC’s Human-Centered Engineering program, where seniors spend an entire year designing solutions to challenges faced by real-world clients. Past projects have yielded ceramic water filter banks for families in Ghana, wearable EpiPens for allergy sufferers, and a localized rain gauge network for community scientists. This year, five students signed on to a project led by Brace to develop a new feeding system for Sunflower Farm Creamery, a goat dairy farm in Cumberland, Maine. They called themselves, “Team Goat.”
The project kicked off with a visit to Sunflower Farm, home to a herd of 31 Nigerian dwarf goats whose milk is used to make cheese, yogurt, and fudge. Students joined farm owners Hope and Chris Hall for a midday feed, pouring grain into plastic bins hung along a split-rail fence. The challenge was immediately apparent, said Sarah Ryan ’26, as the goats jumped in and out of the open bins.
“That’s the biggest obstacle,” she said. “They want to climb on top of stuff and get into it, and everything gets dirty.”
Back on campus, the team brainstormed ideas for a system that would reduce contamination while still allowing the goats to feed communally. They considered existing technologies like the mechanisms used in trash cans and automatic cat feeders, and researched the ways that other livestock, like cattle, are fed. Using the resources of The Hatchery, BC’s community makerspace, they came up with nearly 10 designs, and constructed two full-size prototypes.
Sarah Ryan '26 takes a cuddle break.
Testing out the two prototypes.
A goat illustrates the challenge at hand.
In the spring, Team Goat returned to Sunflower Farm to test their designs. The first, a lidded container that opened when goats stepped onto a platform, proved too noisy, scaring the animals when the lid snapped shut. The second design utilized a similar platform mechanism, but instead of opening a lid, the goats’ weight caused a bucket to move toward them from under a box-like enclosure. When they stepped off the platform, the bucket returned to its original location, where it was sheltered from both the elements and potential goat hooves. This version was a hit.
“At first they were ignoring it but then we saw the social aspect in action because as soon as one goat figured it out they all corralled around it and were more than happy to use it,” said Brace. “It was very funny.”
The winning prototype in action.
The students made a few on-site adjustments to the design, which needed a larger platform to allow the goats to operate it smoothly. Otherwise, the prototype was met with excitement by the farm owners, who appreciated the fact that it required no electronic components, and could be built using cheap and durable materials like aluminum or plastic.
“Their design is really smart,” said Hope. “Chris is considering ways to scale the design up for a whole herd feeding system and we’re having fun thinking about the cleanest and most efficient way to give the goats their grain.”
Ultimately, the project illustrated the myriad challenges that even the most straightforward problem can present, said Brace, while pushing students to stretch their design thinking, prototyping, and construction skills.
“When you're working on a real-world project versus a homework problem things are not ideal,” she said. “You have to navigate different opinions, the client's desires, and in this case, animals. How do you balance all these different variables and still arrive at a workable solution?”