American demand has created an export market from NZ and Australia. Three decades ago, I had a client who paid 63k NZD for a buck, but he still made money on the deal, as the progeny fetched between 5–10k each, and he had hundreds of does. Exporting this fabulous breed to the United States has earned significant money for some farmers here, and I expect the same goes on in the US. I’m not sure but I don’t think of goat meat as being the first thing I associate with Americans. I think of beef and chicken as being more the order of the day there, but as society becomes more multicultural I expect the demand for goat meat will gradually increase. It is a high quality lean meat. I expect the market in the US is partly about this breed being a good pet or first goat for people that are not accustomed to looking after goats.
As a breed of goat they are attractive, good natured, low maintenance, and good eating. They are a meat breed so don’t have all the disadvantages of small ruminant dairy systems, ie a much lower prevalence of diseases that are spread by feeding pooled milk to kids, such as Johnes disease, mycoplasma’s, and caprine arthritis encephalitis. As a meat breed both males and females are welcome, so there is no nasty euthanasia practices selecting for a single gender, as occurs with the dairy systems. Not having to euthanise kids shortly after birth is better for everyones sanity. As a breed they have good reproductive potential, with better fertility than cattle and more offspring born per adult female. If you are thinking about this from an economics perspective the investment costs make sense, provided you maintain a healthy breeding population and sell the offspring, in the original sense that is what farming is.
As a source of protein, they are relatively clean, the word caprine is derived from a similar root as capricious, i.e fussy eater, and so given a choice goats eat clean sources of fibre and leaf material. Goats meat in the main is not from eating plant byproducts on a feedlot, the way beef is. Intelligent civilisations (again the US does not come to mind) have recognised this for a while and goats meat is a favourite in more non-US countries, in fact its consumed more broadly than lamb. Is it healthy to eat ? - yes, it’s kosher, clean and nutritious.
This is an attractive, easy-to-care for animal, with good reproductive potential, that tastes good, and is a good source of food. In most countries of the world that sort of ruminant is very valuable. It is also an attractive intelligent animal that carefully chooses its food, so even Americans can keep them as pets.