FAMACHA isn’t a disease or condition. It’s a scoring system that helps you decide which goats in your herd need deworming for barber pole worm, the blood-sucking parasite that causes anemia. The system works by comparing the color of a goat’s inner eyelid to a standardized card with five color grades. Goats scoring a 1 or 2 (deep red to pink-red) are healthy and don’t need treatment. Goats scoring 3 (pink) are mildly anemic and borderline. Goats scoring 4 or 5 (pink-white to white) are anemic and need immediate deworming plus supportive care.
How To Check FAMACHA Scores
Pull down the goat’s lower eyelid and look at the color of the mucous membrane inside. You’re comparing what you see to the official FAMACHA card, which shows five shades ranging from deep red (score 1) to nearly white (score 5). Score 1 means the goat is not anemic. Score 2 is still considered non-anemic. Score 3 indicates mild anemia. Score 4 means the goat is clearly anemic, and score 5 signals severe anemia that could be life-threatening.
Check your herd every two weeks during warm, humid months when barber pole worm is most active. Only treat the goats that score 3 or higher. This targeted approach is central to the entire system, and skipping it defeats the purpose.
Why You Shouldn’t Deworm the Whole Herd
The reason FAMACHA exists is to prevent you from deworming every goat at once. When you blanket-treat an entire herd, you kill off all the drug-susceptible worms and leave behind only the resistant ones. Those resistant worms reproduce, and within a few generations your dewormer stops working entirely. Resistance to common dewormers has been confirmed across multiple drug classes and in herds across Europe and beyond. In some tested herds, dewormers reduced egg counts by less than 55%, and in one case by less than 10%, meaning the drugs were essentially useless.
Leaving your healthy goats (scores 1 and 2) untreated preserves a population of drug-susceptible worms on the pasture. Parasitologists call this “refugia.” These susceptible worms breed with any resistant survivors, diluting the resistance genes and keeping your dewormers effective for longer. In practice, this means treating only the goats that actually need it, based on their FAMACHA score.
Choosing and Dosing a Dewormer
Three main drug classes work against barber pole worm: benzimidazoles (like albendazole and fenbendazole), macrocyclic lactones (like ivermectin and moxidectin), and imidazothiazoles (like levamisole). Your veterinarian or local extension service can help you determine which class still works on your farm, because resistance patterns vary by region and even by individual herd.
One critical detail: most dewormers are labeled for sheep, and goats metabolize these drugs faster. For levamisole, the correct goat dose is 1.5 times the sheep label dose. For all other dewormer classes, you should use twice the sheep label dose. Underdosing is one of the fastest ways to breed resistant worms, so weigh your goats rather than guessing.
To verify your dewormer is actually working, run a fecal egg count before treatment and again 10 to 14 days after. This is called a fecal egg count reduction test. If the egg count drops by less than 95%, resistance may be developing. If it drops by less than 90%, the worms on your farm are considered resistant to that drug, and you need to switch classes.
Supportive Care for Anemic Goats
Deworming kills the parasites, but it doesn’t fix the damage they’ve already done. A goat with a FAMACHA score of 4 or 5 has lost significant blood volume and needs help recovering. Start with hydration. Offer goat electrolytes freely, or drench them directly if the goat isn’t drinking on its own.
High-protein feed and alfalfa hay are important because protein is the raw material for rebuilding red blood cells. For male goats, alfalfa carries some risk of urinary calculi, but during active anemia recovery the protein is more important than that concern.
Injectable fortified B-complex vitamins support red blood cell production. A common protocol is 1 cc per 20 pounds of body weight, given under the skin once or twice daily. For severely anemic goats (score 5), injectable iron at 4 cc per 100 pounds can help replenish iron stores. Iron is typically given once daily for two to three days in severe cases, then once weekly until the eyelid color improves to a safe range. Some goat keepers also drench daily with a 50/50 mix of raw apple cider vinegar and water (about 30 cc total) to support gut health during recovery.
Copper Oxide Wire Particles
Copper oxide wire particles (COWP) offer a non-chemical option for reducing barber pole worm burdens. These are tiny copper wire fragments given orally in a gelatin bolus. Research on meat goats found that doses as low as 0.5 grams were effective in reducing fecal egg counts in young kids, while 5 grams worked well in adult goats. The effect typically lasts about three weeks before egg counts begin rising again, so COWP works best as a supplement to your broader parasite management plan rather than a standalone treatment.
Copper toxicity is a real risk in goats, especially certain breeds like sheep-influenced crosses, so don’t exceed recommended doses or combine COWP with high-copper mineral supplements without knowing your goats’ copper status.
A Biological Option: Nematode-Trapping Fungus
A feed additive containing the fungus Duddingtonia flagrans (sold as BioWorma) takes a completely different approach. The fungal spores pass through the goat’s digestive tract without germinating, then activate in the manure on pasture. There, the fungus grows sticky nets of filaments that physically trap and kill worm larvae before they can crawl onto the grass and reinfect your animals. The recommended daily dose is about 1.5 grams of the additive per 25 kilograms of body weight, mixed into feed. It must be given daily to every grazing animal in the group to meaningfully reduce larvae on pasture.
Pasture Management To Break the Worm Cycle
No dewormer strategy works long-term without pasture management. Barber pole worm larvae hatch in manure and climb onto grass blades, where goats ingest them while grazing. Rotational grazing disrupts this cycle by moving animals off a paddock before larvae reach the infective stage and keeping them off long enough for larvae to die.
In warm climates, a system of about 3.5 days of grazing followed by a 35-day rest period works well. Dividing your total pasture into 10 paddocks makes this rotation practical. In temperate climates, larvae survive longer, so you need roughly 5 days of grazing with rest periods exceeding 65 days. Some producers rest pastures for 3 to 9 months to achieve a substantial reduction in larvae, though this requires more total acreage.
Keeping grass height above 4 inches also helps, since most larvae concentrate in the bottom 2 inches of forage. Avoiding overstocking and not grazing pastures down to the dirt are simple steps that make every other part of your parasite program more effective.