Come to think of it: if someone is at the tail-end of his class, he is called a Goat. But goats are not that dumb at all.

If one does not relish taking every bath everyday and stinks, he is told "You smell like a goat!" But not all goats smell like the proverbial goats. In fact, the Boer goats we have in the Braveheart Farms are given a bath at least once a month complete with soap and shampoo!

But the unkindest cut for the goat is to depict Satan as somebody with horns and a tail looking like - you guess it right - a goat!

The modern goat deserves a better treatment and rightly so. This sturdy animal is now proving to be one of the best hopes of the lowly Filipino farmer in generating additional income from the limited land area that he has in his farm.

Not only does the goat offer economic benefits to the farmer, it could also open the doors to additional sources of organic fertilizer and natural biological deterrents for pests and unwanted insects.

In the early stages of our gamefowl breeding project in the farm, weevils feasted on our stored feeds affecting the quality of the feeds we give to the chicken.

When I started raising goats, the weevils just disappeared and our farm was never visited by parasites that most gamefowl breeders dread - the red mites.

Another problem that seemed to have been neutralized by our goats was the presence of termites in our 16-hectare farm in Barangay Paco, Kidapawan City. The termites would attack our mangos and lanzones killing many of the trees.

When we started using goat manure as fertilizer which was placed around the trees, the termite attack stopped. We are now looking at the prospect of using the goat's fermented urine in our organic farming program.

But of course more than any other benefits that goat raising brings about, it is the income earning potential of the project that makes it very exciting.

Compute this: a fullblood Boer buckling sells at P30,000. Produce 100 bucklings a year and how much would you have? A fullblood Anglo-Nubian doe sells at P15,000. Sell 100 heads in a year and you have how much?

Or produce 100 heads of upgraded Boer goats weighing at least 50 kilos for the meat market. At P100 per kilo live weight, how much would you earn?

So stop scratching that goatee and join the goat craze.

Let's give justice to the goat by proving that this lowly animal after all could still be the farmer's best hope for a better life.