The Year of the Goat

A kid is born!

Up until the day it happened we really weren't 100% sure that either of our does were actually pregnant. Flyrod just didn't look big enough, and Chansonetta was big, for sure, but then, being half Boer, she's a big girl to begin with. Flyrod's due date came and went, but then this morning, I get a call from Margaret at my office, saying, "Flyrod's in labor, get home quick!" I drive home as fast as I safely can, with intermittent calls from Margaret in the barn giving me a play by play: "she's pushing!", "there's something coming out!", "I can see the head!" and then finally when I'm about 5 minutes from the house, "It's out!" Flyrod's kid, turned out to be a boy weighing 9 lbs, 1oz. We're holding off naming to make sure he makes it, because to be honest, we're not sure what we're going to do with another boy goat. Joshua and Percival, our 2 wethers, are enough for now. For more pictures of the new goat see below.

Snowshoeing with Goats

To celebrate the New Year and a break in the snows engulfing the Northeast, we strapped on the snowshoes and took the goats on a 2 mile hike through the woods behind the farmstead.

Goats in the Snow

The Kids Ain't Coming

Much to our surprise and disappointment neither Flyrod's (above left) nor Chansonetta's (above center) breeding took this year, and so today, a week after Chansonetta's due date and two weeks past Flyrod's, we think it is safe (and sad) to say there will be no kids, no milk, and no cheese this year. Of course, as card carrying members of Red Sox Nation, we know very well, that there is always next year.

The Goats are Growing (horns)

The goats are growing up, and growing horns. Although it is standard practice to remove the horns from dairy goats in the U.S., we decided to leave the horns on. We did this for a couple of reasons. 1. Asthetics. We just like the look of them. 2. Packing. We really want to train the boys to be pack goats, and in general pack goats keep their horns. Blood flows through the horns and acts like a radiator so the goat doesn't over heat. Since you can't keep horned and hornless goats together, we left the horns on all of them. We eventually discovered that there is a good reason that people take the horns off. Actually Karl discovered three good reasons: Bloody nose, bloody ear, and black eye.

Goats Go Outside

We Get Our Goats!

After almost 3 years of anticipation, we finally get our goats! We drove to Appleton, Maine, home of Caitlin Hunter and Appleton Creamery. Caitlin is the president of the Maine Cheese Guild and one of Maine's best cheese makers. We picked out 4 goats, 2 doelings and two bucklings, who we will wether and train to pack. The girls we will breed and begin to milk next year. We named them all after famous Mainers: former governor Percival Baxter and governor and civil war hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. The girls are Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, a early photographer in Maine who photographed rural living, and "Flyrod" Crosby, Maine's first female Maine Guide. We took them home (all four!) in a dog crate in the back of the goat mobile (of course!). Now they are happlily living in the barn!

Milking Lesson in the Matrix

One of our missions in the Southwest was to find Navajo women who'd received goats and sheep as their dowry. Though the custom is not widely practiced today, just a couple of generations ago, it was common among young Navajo to start their lives together with a small herd of goats. We had read an article in the Arizona Republic about elderly Navajo women who continued to tend their animals, but after a week and a half in the region, we had yet to meet any of these women in person. We had spoken with several people who were herding goats along the side of the road, but most were looking after them as a favor to friends, and none of them seemed to have a strong bond with the animals. We had nearly given up our quest to find any Navajo —women or men— with a deep love of goats when we pulled into the Matrix Compound, in Gallup, New Mexico. Just miles from the Arizona border, the ranch is a small patch of desert owned by Bill Hanks and his partner Al Livingston. A seasoned goat breeder, Bill has been raising and showing La Mancha goats for decades, but had sold his herd a few years ago try life without their demands and responsibilities. He found that he missed their companionship, and started to think about rebuilding his herd. It was around this time that he met Al; one of their first outings was to a goat show.

Al, an exquisite landscape painter who by day works with Bill at the Navajo Housing Authority, grew up on a Navajo reservation and was raised with goats, but the world of show goats was entirely new to him. It's one that he's taken to, and his affection for the La Manchas is clear. Unlike the angoras that are generally raised among Native Americans for their meat and hair, La Manchas are prized for their milk and their sweet, docile temperament. Their feed is carefully regulated and their grooming schedule is strict. Their milk production is monitored, and though in the Matrix herd they're milked only once a day, their volume of production is high.

Since we were visiting during evening chores, Karl and I got a chance to experience the milking first hand. Though we'd visited many dairy breeders, Bill and Al were the first to offer us a milking lesson. Explaining how to squeeze the teat, and how the udder would soften as though it were deflating, they chose their mellowest animals and let us take turns at the milking stand. The men and their does were very patient with us, even as the milk missed the bucket, climbed up our wrists, and once showered Al's nephew, Cory, with a foamy white mist. Suffice to say, we weren't naturals.

We were enthusiastic, though, and the experience was phenomenal. Though we were total amateurs and both times needed Bill to take over and finish the job (milking is much harder work, and uses much stranger muscles, than we'd imagined), it felt very rewarding to squeeze even one drop of milk into the bucket. Touching the animals felt surprisingly intimate, and I understood in a different way the connection dairy breeders have to their does. The experience was humbling because it totally changed our perspective on dairy goats and reminded us, yet again, how much we have left to learn. —MMH

Feed Two Goats and Call Me In the Morning

Outside of the expansive sprawl of Phoenix, the land is scrubby, unshaded and sparsely populated. Though ringed by lush mountains, the flat valley is virtually a desert, the natural habitat of snakes and coyotes. For the last six years, it has also been home to the largest full-blood Boer goat operation in Arizona, owned by Leslie Wootten and Jerry Baldwin. The couple bought a farm here in 1996, as a retirement project after selling Jerry's equipment rental business, at which they had both worked (Leslie is also a writer who teaches occasionally in the English department at Arizona State University). Originally, they had intended to raise feeder calves, and at one time had about 50 young Holsteins, which they'd bought from local dairies and were fattening for sale. As that market grew in the late '90s, however, calves became more expensive, and small farms like theirs were edged out by large scale calf ranchers. The size of their farm and its topography turned out to be perfect for goats. Even in the summers, which can get as hot as 110 degrees, the goats are fine so long as there's enough shade and water. The herd spends its days foraging in several adjoining pastures, the kids hopping along after their mothers as they make their way down the fence line. In this environment, the herd has grown to 250 animals, 135 of which are kids born this spring.

The couple has fallen in love with goats, an affection Jerry cultivated in his youth when he had one as a pet. This year, especially, their vitality has been a source of both delight and restoration to him. A handsome, rugged man, Jerry has suffered from two strokes in the last six months, the most recent causing a seizure and slight language aphasia. His recovery, which is nearly complete, was expected to be gradual and lengthy. Both Jerry and Leslie credit the goats with his accelerated return to health.

The first kid of the season was born on the day Jerry returned from the hospital. Over the next months, he was surrounded by a daily burst of new life. Though he couldn't do much in the way of farm chores, neither could he stay inside. Every day brought him into the pasture to attend a birth, or to bottle feed a kid with milk from one of four dairy goats they raise to provide supplemental milk for the kids and fluid milk and cheese for the house. Sometimes he was simply there to watch a kid find its hooves and begin a wobbly prance.

After the anxiety of the strokes, the continuous presence and needs of the animals have been therapeutic, both for Jerry and Leslie. Over an amazing dinner they'd prepared of curried cauliflower and slow-roasted goat, Leslie explained to us that since they began raising them, the care of the goats has kept her grounded: "In this world where I feel so insecure, where you never know what's going to happen next, I love the fact that I can go out in the morning and they're always there, ready to eat. It doesn't matter what else is happening in the world, they need to eat. They want to eat, and I want to feed them." —MMH

The Curse of the Billy Goat, Part Two

In February we visited the famous Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago to research the Curse of the Billy Goat that has plagued the Chicago Cubs since 1945. Some people point to the curse as the reason the Cubs have not been to a World Series for almost 60 years. Others are not so sure. We decided to take the question to the people who have the biggest stake in the curse... the fans. On a beautiful day at Ho Ho Kam Park in Mesa, Arizona, the Cubs' spring training headquarters, we asked the Chicago faithful what they think about the curse, and how they feel about goats.
YOTG: What do you think about the Curse of the Billy Goat?
Mr. Martin: We've been subject to a number of curses, but whether that specific one is valid or not, I don't know.
YOTG: Is it possible for a goat to curse a baseball team?
Mr. Martin: The Cubs? Yes. [laughter]
Mrs. Martin: [Laughing] It is not. We shoot ourselves in the foot very nicely without the help of a goat.
Sarah from Tempe (sitting next to them): My sister keeps goats. Goats are very nice.
YOTG: Are you a Cubs fan?
Sarah: I'm a Capricorn.
YOTG: You're a Cubs fan and you like goats?
Sarah: Absolutely.

YOTG: What do you think about the Curse of the Billy Goat?
Phil: It's a joke.
YOTG: You don't believe it's true?
Phil: No.
YOTG: What do you think about goats?
Phil: They stink. They all smell.

YOTG: What do you think of the Curse of the Billy Goat?
David: Oh, I don't know... it's part of the Cubs lore, but I don't put any belief into it.
Don: There are a lot of teams that haven't won in a long time... they just didn't have an animal in their ballpark. If they had someone who had brought in a snake, there would have been the curse of the snake for that team, but that hasn't happened.
YOTG: Have you ever met a goat?
Paul: I used to own one.
YOTG: What kind of goat was it?
Paul: I guess you call it a billy goat... I don't know. My wife had a horse, and the horse needed a companion, so we bought a goat.
YOTG: Did you feel any conflict of interest being a Cubs fan and owning a goat?
Paul: No, not at all. There's no curse.

YOTG: What do you think of the Curse of the Billy Goat?
Chuck: I don't put a lot of stock into those kinds of curses. It depends on the players themselves, and how much they want to win. I think that's what really determines that.
YOTG: Have you ever met a real goat?
Chuck: Met a real goat? [Laughing] I have.
YOTG: What do you think of goats?
Chuck: They're ok. I have nothing against goats.

YOTG: What do you think about the Curse of the Billy Goat?
Lorraine: [Laughing] It's over. It ended last year. They won the first round of the playoffs so it's over now.
Greg: Especially with the blowing up of the ball. It's gotta be over.
YOTG: Have you ever met a goat?
Dylan: [eats popcorn]
Greg: We're getting tired of hearing about it.
Lorraine: It should just be about the missed play at second and not the Curse of the Billy Goat or some guy in the stands.
Greg: Plus I'm getting tired of seeing that greek guy on TV [Laughing].

YOTG: What do you think about the Curse of the Billy Goat?
Ian: I don't really know much about it.
YOTG: What do you think about goats?
Colin: They're pretty cool.
Ian & Devon: Yeah.
Ian: They're mean.
Colin: They'll eat anything.

YOTG: Are you a Cubs Fan?
John: Big Time... ever since I can remember... my grandfather used to sit on the porch swing when he was blind and we said we don't care who wins as long as it's the Cubs.
YOTG: What do you think about the Curse of the Billy Goat?
John: I don't pay any attention to that. [Laughing] Not at all.
YOTG: Have you ever met a goat in person?
John: Well, sure, we've got lots of goats in Iowa. [Laughing]
YOTG: What do you think about goats?
John: Goats are fine, but I don't drink the milk and I don't eat the meat.
YOTG: But you don't hold any grudges against goats?
John: No. [Laughing] It's not the goat's fault. We'll win it this year. This is the year we break it. Go Cubs!

YOTG: How long have you been Cubs Fans?
Dom, Sr.:It's part of our family tradition so I've been one since I was about 4-5 years old.
YOTG: What do you think of the Curse of the Billy Goat?
[Both laughing]
Dom, Jr.: Arrr, the curse!
Dom, Sr.: I don't believe in it that much. I think the Cubs have had some bad luck over the years, but I don't think it's the Curse of the Billy Goat that does it.
Dom, Jr.: I think it's typical of a Cubs fan to find some other excuse... you need to come up with some reason why your team hasn't won a World Series since 1908. [Laughter]
YOTG: But you don't think it's the goat's fault?
Dom, Sr.: No, it's not the goat's fault, and I think that the original goat is probably dead now anyway so if there was a curse, it probably died with that goat.
YOTG: Have you ever met a goat in person?
Dom, Jr.: I have met a goat... they're very nice. They're good people.
Dom, Sr.: One of the ones I met had a Cubs jersey on. As long as they're Cubs fans then they're ok.

Goats on a Wire

When you spend 8 months on the road researching goats, you begin to notice the capricious creatures everywhere: in movies, in magazines, even in electrical equipment. We first noticed the power lines somewhere in Texas. They looked like the biggest goats we had ever seen: metal girders and wires making the shape of a triangular head, ears, and even little horns on top. Everywhere we went we began to notice the giant metal goats carrying electricity all over the land. I was waiting for a dramatic landscape and beautiful light to photograph them, and driving through Arizona, approaching the Grand Canyon as the sun was setting, I got my chance. I shot for a few minutes, headed back to the car, and then something made me turn around for one more shot. I?m not sure what made me turn around? I think I just wanted to make a few more images. As I was looking through my lens, I noticed something moving under the power lines. Goats! A line of goats and sheep marched across the landscape followed at quite a distance by a Navajo man. I took a few pictures, and then jumped back in the car. We found an access road that went under the power lines and made an intercept course to head off the goats.

We had come to Arizona in part to research the tradition of goats in Navajo culture, so it was exciting to see someone actually herding them. The man?s name was Mac King, and he lived in a small compound on the side of the highway with his family and extended family. The goats and sheep belonged to his brother-in-law, but it was Mac?s job to let them out in the morning, and to go get them in the afternoon. Mac wasn?t too specific about what the goats were used for? they were just there. I, for one, was just glad that we were there to see them. —KS

The Kids are All Right

Like Jim Schott, LaVerne Charles made an early, web-based impression on our notions of the goat world. Vern, as she prefers, is a seasoned rancher of both goats and cattle, and is moderator of Yahoo's Goats 101 list and several other goat discussion groups that we joined when embarking on this project. As moderator, she keeps everyone polite and on-subject, refraining from censorship, but occasionally sending participants gentle, private reminders of the list's purpose. She also dispenses a lot of advice, and has become a mentor to a number of new farmers across the country, talking them through challenging births, disbudding, and all manner of unfamiliar tasks. At times, people have even called her in the middle of the night with emergency questions; as long as they can give her time to fix a cup of coffee and settle herself at the kitchen table, Vern's happy to help. She holds a wealth of goat knowledge, and her efforts on the internet have truly formed a community for goat farmers (and wannabes, like ourselves) in far flung places. We were thrilled that our schedule in Colorado allowed for a stop in Delta. On the phone, Vern had invited us to stay the night at Charles Ranch, but warned that she was a "crotchety old lady" who kept an odd schedule because her husband Ken worked nights. We were surprised, then, when we arrived on St. Patrick's Day and were greeted by a trim, friendly woman in overalls and a kelly green tank top, her eyes shaded against the late afternoon sun by a green visor. On a tour of her property, which sits on a plain at the base of the Rockies with a stunning distant view of snow-capped mountains, Vern introduced us to her goats, greeting them by name and treating them to a snack of miniature marshmallows. (Her goats love marshmallows, a quirk she discovered while cleaning the pantry of a stale bag. The one drawback, she discovered, is that if she forgets to take them from her pockets, the drier becomes coated with marshmallow fluff.)

In her lifetime, Vern has raised every major breed of goats except Kiko, though lately she's been concentrating on her lines of Sable Saanens and Boers. Though the animals are pure bred, the pens, which are picturesquely framed in wood and shaded by a giant globe willow, contain a mixture of breeds; goats are segregated by age and gender. Since the animals are domesticated, Vern doesn't see any reason for retaining their horns, which get caught in fences and can injure other goats, not to mention their caretakers. All goats, including the Boers, are disbudded as kids.

In addition to the goats, Vern and Ken raise Scottish fold ear cats, working dogs, and chickens, though recently their bird population was decimated by foxes. Their loss was terrible, but Vern has taken it in stride. A couple of years ago, she said, she made the decision to stop fretting about the small tragedies of the farm, whether they were deaths among her animals or long term projects that just haven?t gotten finished. She tries instead to focus on the simple joys of her animals — the prancing kid who takes a running slide across an overturned washbasin, the pregnant doe who waddles over for a scratch and a marshmallow.

Vern has consciously bred her goats for friendliness, and though most had been dam-raise, her animals were among the most affectionate we've encountered. They are so gentle, in fact, that many of them have gone on to become pack goats in a summer program for at risk children run by a local friend of Vern's. Just spending time with the goats seems to help. As Vern says, "When you're out with the kids, you just can't be sad." —MMH

Finding a Family in a Haystack

In the spring of 2003, when Karl and I were first beginning to investigate the world of goats, an internet search led us to the web site of Haystack Mountain Dairy, a farm and cheese operation just outside of Boulder, Colorado. Like us, Jim Schott and his family had become interested in goats while leading respectable city lives. Like us, their enthusiasm seemed equally balanced between the animals themselves and the myriad possibilities for the milk they produced. They had even done work volunteering at a small dairy in South Africa, a country Karl and I had just visited. Everything we read seemed like a cosmic sign, a further confirmation that we were on the right track. Discovering Haystack Mountain Dairy was one of the firm nudges that edged us out of New York and onto the road. A year later, much has changed, both in our lives and, we learned when we visited, at Haystack Mountain Dairy. Though Jim began more than a decade ago to create cheeses made from the milk of goats raised on his property, the combination of his cheese's popularity and his entrepreneurial efforts has created a demand that outstrips current production capabilities. In response, the operation has expanded, contracting with another small goat dairy for supplemental milk and building a new facility for the production of their fresh cheeses (aged ones will continue to be made in the existing space).

While this growth is welcome and exciting, it's important to Jim that the dairy remain human scaled, both for quality control and to fulfill their mission of community outreach. Twice weekly, on Tuesday and Saturday mornings, the farm opens its gates and invites visitors to make the brief journey to the base of Haystack Mountain, where a tree-lined drive marks the path to a cluster of barns and outbuildings. Everyone in the Boulder area seems to know about these open houses, and on the Tuesday we visited, there was cheerful chaos as mothers and young children flitted between cheese samples, bottle feedings, and vigilant observation of the doe pen that had, earlier in the morning, produced a set of triplets. One woman we spoke with said that she and her kids had been to the farm several times, while another, who was buying a bar of goat milk soap and two logs of chevre, said it was her first visit, but she'd be back. Amy, the farm's herd manager, alternated between making change and answering questions about the animals.

Before he bought the dairy, Jim was an educator, and the educational component of the farm is a nice link between his past life and his present. His South African volunteer work, as well, has given him the opportunity to share his experiences and teach others about cheese making while continuing to devote himself full time to the dairy, which, in the busy-ness of expansion, increasingly needs his attention.

On the day we visited, Jim made time between the weekly staff meeting and the delivery of some new equipment to sit down with us around his kitchen table and talk about his love of farming. A soft-spoken man, Jim said that no one farms for the money, rather it's the appeal of a lifestyle, an appreciation of the moments of calm while embracing those that are hectic. Above all, it's a love of animals.

Posing for a portrait with Chief, his Saanen buck, Jim's affection for his goats was evident. Despite the expansion and the growing acclaim, maintaining a relationship with the animals, and an intimacy about the entire dairy, is key to Jim's approach. The farm is his home, as well as his business, and he sees the dairy as a kind of family. Leaning into a nuzzle as though the buck were whispering in his ear, Jim looked completely connected with his world, and perfectly content. —MMH

A New Life at Antiquity Oaks

Nestled in the rolling, wooded farmland about forty-five minutes south of Joliet is a small homestead called Antiquity Oaks. Owned by the Boehle family (pronounced bay-lee), the farm is home to heritage breed turkeys, brightly plumed chickens, two small calves, a few sheep, and several Nigerian Dwarf goats. It is also home to the Boehles: Deborah, Mike and their three precocious children, Margaret, Jonathan and Katherine. Deborah, a freelance writer and former journalist, and Mike, a professor of electrical engineering, made the decision to move to the country several years ago, with little agricultural experience under their belts. In the years that have followed, they've read extensively, found mentors across the internet, and experimented with animal husbandry through a system of informed trial and error. Their children, who are home schooled, have participated in every aspect of farm life, from gathering eggs to delivering baby goats. For the whole family, the farm has provided a broad education. Learning, at Antiquity Oaks, is an integral part of each day. Deborah, who began a graduate program in education at Brown before realizing that she didn't want to teach in a classroom setting, calls her method of home schooling "unschooling." The rhythm of each day is determined by her kids and the needs of the farm. Rather than sitting around a table with lesson plans, the day is spent learning fractions by halving a cookie recipe, learning biology by asking questions of the vet, or learning civics by observing a trial at the county courthouse. The kids are encouraged to pursue their curiosity, whether it leads them into a book or into a pasture.

By any measure, the "unschooling" has worked remarkably well. Margaret, who is sixteen, has already completed an associate's degree at a college in Joliet, and will be leaving in the fall to finish her bachelor's (after being accepted into several programs, she's still deciding where to go). Jonathan, who is thirteen, has an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, and seems to be developing a keen interest in politics. Katherine, who is eleven, is fascinated by science, spending entire afternoons combing the property for animal bones, which she cleans, identifies, and displays with labels on a window sill. She has also absorbed some of her siblings' enthusiasms; sitting around the lunch table, Jonathan mentioned Robert Altman and Katherine asked, "Isn't he the one who directed M.A.S.H.?" They are poised around adults, generous and kind to their animals, and, in all, really pleasant company.

As a family, the Boehles seem remarkably close knit and truly respectful of each other. They have plans this summer for an ambitious family project — building a new home from scratch, just the five of them — and though it would seem unlikely for anyone else, I actually believe that they will accomplish their goal and be living in a two-storied, solar-powered home by autumn. They're just that sort of family.

At the time of our visit, their household had just been blessed by the arrival of a new member. Little Carmen, a tiny newborn goat who couldn't compete with her twin brothers for milk, had just been moved to the house, where she snuggled into a box by the door. During the course of our visit, everyone (including us!) took turns holding the kid and bottle feeding her with her mother's milk, which Katherine and Jonathan collected twice a day. Between bleating and prancing around the living room and nuzzling into the arms of whoever happened to be holding her, Carmen delighted everyone. And with the extra attention, she was rapidly putting on weight. In the two days we were there, she actually looked like she'd grown. Like all the creatures at Antiquity Oaks — barnyard and human — she was thriving. —MMH

The Curse of the Billy Goat

In 1945, a Chicago Cubs fan named William "Billy Goat" Sianis bought his pet goat a ticket to the World Series. The Cubs were facing the Detroit Tigers at Wrigley field, and Sianis, an immigrant from the Greek village of Paleopyrgos, had spent $14.40 on tickets for two box seats to the game. He arrived with his goat, presented their tickets, and, after some discussion, was turned away by the management. When Sianis asked why, he was told that the team's owner, Mr. Wrigley, had objected because "the goat smelled." What happened next is unclear. In some versions of the story, Mr. Sianis and his goat left the ballpark and returned, angry, to the Billy Goat Inn, a tavern owned by Sianis which had gotten its name after someone left a baby goat in a box on his doorstep. At the bar, Sianis is said to have told a newspaper man that his goat had been insulted and disappointed, and the Cubs would be hexed until Mr. Wrigley came to the bar to apologize to the animal. In another version, man and goat stood outside Wrigley Field and Sianis raised his fist, shouting "The Cubs no win here no more!" Whatever the duo's actions, the Cubs lost the game. The following day, Sianis sent Mr. Wrigley a telegram: "Who smells now?"

In the years that have followed, the Billy Goat Inn has changed locations and name, moving in 1964 to a building near the Chicago Tribune and becoming the Billy Goat Tavern. Four goats --Billy, Murphy, Sonoria and Socrates-- have split their time between Sianis' backyard and the tavern (though now the only goat around is mounted above the bar). The tavern and its proprietor have ascended to legend, immortalized by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi on Saturday Night Live, and Mike Royko in the Chicago Tribune. The place has become a destination for politicians, journalists, and sportscasters. The Cubs have not returned to the World Series.

The Curse of the Billy Goat came to our attention this fall, when the playoff games were in full swing. Goats were everywhere, in graphics on ESPN, peaking out of newspaper articles, crudely drawn by Marlins fans on homemade posterboard signs. We were thrilled as much by the omnipresent goats as we were by the prospect of the Cubs and the Red Sox breaking their respective curses. Ultimately, though, the curses held and both teams lost. What, we wondered, could lift the Curse of the Billy Goat?

This is something that Cubs fans have been trying to figure out for nearly sixty years. They have tried inviting Sam Sianis, Billy Goat's nephew, who has owned the bar since his death in 1970, to bring a goat onto the field. They have paraded a goat around the bases at Wrigley Field. On the first day of our visit to the Billy Goat Tavern, a few blocks away at Harry Carey's Restaurant, to much media fanfare, they blew up the ball that many believed had been the most recent evidence of the curse. So far, nothing has worked.

Beneath the many photographs and laminated newspaper articles that paper the walls of the tavern, we asked Sam Sianis why, if he's been invited to take a goat to Wrigley Field, the curse persists. He paused a moment in the din of the bar, which, even in the morning, bustled with people stopping in for coffee and egg and cheese sandwiches. There have been occasions, he told us, when he's taken goats to Wrigley Field and they've been turned away. The first time was in 1973, when he and the goat arrived in a limousine but were refused entrance. The most recent was this past year, when Sam's goat had tickets to games six and seven, but was prevented from entering. It is because of these rejections that the curse has not been broken. Sam truly believes in the Curse of the Billy Goat, and he believes that the only way to lift it is sincerity. The invitations that have been issued so far have been mere publicity stunts. If the Cubs opened the stands to goats because they genuinely liked them and wanted to share the game with them, the hex would be dispelled.

This year, Sports Illustrated has said the Cubs have the best starting pitchers in the major leagues. The team roster includes Sammy Sosa, Greg Maddux, and first baseman Derrek Lee, who was recently signed (after winning the World Series last year with the Marlins). They have been picked by many baseball pundits to win their division. Only one questions remains: When the bases are loaded with two outs in the ninth, will the goat get the call? —MMH

Capriole's Captivating Cheeses

We first heard of Judy Schad and her Capriole cheeses last August when we interviewed Max McCalman in his cheese cave at the restaurant Picholine, in New York. He had included her Mont St. Francis on a cheese plate he'd put together for us, and sang the praises of her Wabash Cannonball, which in 1995 had been voted the American Cheese Society's Best of Show. Over the years, many of her cheeses have been award winners, and since the 1980s, Judy has been one of a core group of women who've shepherded the movement toward American artisanal cheeses. Max put her at the top of his list of American cheesemakers, and said that in the course of our travels, we should be sure to plan a visit to her operation in Southern Indiana. Though it took us six months, in late February we finally made the trip. Judy Schad's farm is located in a region called Kentuckiana. Rather than the cornfields of Northern Indiana, with their slant toward Chicago, the topography here is rolling and hilly, and the closest city is Louisville. There is a sense of the gracious South about the farm; Judy, in her cheesemaking coat and farm slacks, met us wearing a strand of pearls.

A writer and former doctoral candidate in Renaissance literature, Judy approaches cheesemaking with the whimsy of a poet and the rigor of an academic. She began to experiment with cheese in 1982, after discovering that she didn't like to cook with the milk her goats were producing. (The Schads moved to the country in 1976 to get back to the land, and since their property held a barn, they bought livestock to fill it.) Once she'd mastered the techniques of fresh cheeses, Judy became interested in aged ones, fiddling around until she'd found flavors and textures that she liked. She studied various techniques and traveled extensively, learning to work with different bacterias and molds and forming her own preferences for their results.

In the late 1980s, she became friends with a small group of women cheesemakers who were scattered across the country but united by their common love of goats and cheese. These women included Mary Keehn, Jennifer Bice, Ann Topham, and Mary Doerr; they traded experiences and offered each other advice, meeting at conferences and organizing cheese-related trips. In an interview for Laura Schenone's book, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, Judy likened their relationship to the early history of cheesemaking, "We had to talk to each other. There was no place in the United States to go and learn. You had to figure it out by trial and error. We just threw out a lot of cheese."

In the process, they honed their skills and created a vast array of distinctly American cheeses. Judy's cheeses alone include more than a dozen varieties, spanning the palate from mild to pungent. Their rinds vary from softly wrinkled to washed; their textures range from creamy to firm. While the fresh chevre is made from pasteurized milk, the aged cheeses are often made from raw. Two cheeses incorporate bourbon: the Bourbon/Chocolate Torta and the Banon, which is aged in bourbon-soaked chestnut leaves.

Like many cheesemakers we've met, Judy is eager to share both her cheese and her knowledge. When we visited, she greeted us with a cheese plate that included wedges of Banon, Piper's Pyramide, Sofia (a ripened chevre marbled with ash), Old Kentucky Tomme and Mont St. Francis, complemented by the delicious tang of pear mostarda and strawberry balsamic compote. As she's learned about cheeses, Judy's also learned about pairings, and Capriole offers a smattering of her favorite accompaniments, with recommendations for serving them with cheese.

In fact, everything at Capriole is in service of the cheese. And rightly so. More than anything else on our visit--more than Judy's amazing hospitality, more than her husband's wine cellar, more than the woods or the goats or the Bulgarian interns--it's the cheese that stands out in memory. The slightly grainy paste of the Sofia, wrapped in its soft, gray speckled coat. The white round revealed beneath a flower of chestnut leaves and the liberal splash of bourbon across the palate with each firm bite of Banon. The strange alchemy of the mouth that shifts the Mont St. Francis from nose-curling pungency to a mellow memory on the tongue. These are the fruits of Judy Schad's labor, and they are worthy of her efforts. —MMH

Clay Henry III, Goat Mayor of Lajitas

We heard the strange plight of Clay Henry III, mayor of the border town Lajitas, Texas, when we were still living in Brooklyn. It seemed Clay Henry came from a political dynasty, and was the second or third in his line to be elected to office. It also seemed that Clay Henry was a goat, and had come to national prominence after an unfortunate beer-soaked incident during which he was castrated. We had resolved, nearly a year ago, to further investigate the matter, and if possible, make a trip to Lajitas. On the afternoon of Super Bowl Sunday, we finally arrived. Though Lajitas was on the border with Mexico, it was not at all the dusty gateway that we'd expected. In 1999, the entire town had been bought by an Austin developer named Steve Smith, and had been transformed into a resort: Lajitas, The Ultimate Hideout. The resort maintains its own airport, equestrian center, hotel and spa. Its many attractions include a terraced restaurant overlooking the distant mountains, a candle lit lounge called the Thirsty Goat Saloon, and a golf course with an "international" hole on the other side of the Rio Grande. Everything was tidy, trim, and marked with tasteful, though poorly punctuated, signs. After a day's drive through the empty desert, we had landed in Disneyworld.

This turn made the story we'd heard seem even stranger. As a sign on Clay Henry's pen plainly states, the goat likes to drink beer, Lone Star long necks to be precise. Apparently, a couple of years ago, he drank the beer of a man who had been unwilling to relinquish it, and the man exacted his revenge by returning in the dead of night and brutally castrating Clay Henry. The goat nearly bled to death, and the culprit was arrested on charges of animal cruelty after a hotel maid found Clay Henry's testicles in the fridge of his mini-bar.

We asked about the truth of the story at the Trading Post, a general store built at the turn of the century, which, though much gentrified, is still in operation. Charlie Jenkins, the Trading Post's manager, confirmed the substance of the story and cleared up a few details that had remained obscure. According to Charlie, the man whose beer had been drunk was a patron of the hotel, while the man who had given the beer to Clay Henry was the resort's owner, Steve Smith, who had a friend with him and wanted to show off the mayor's talent. Though the attacker was charged with animal cruelty, a judge ruled that the resort was acting with equal cruelty by giving the goat beer, and the man was acquitted.

Charlie encouraged us to buy Clay Henry a Lone Star, and I'm ashamed to say that we did. He sucked it down, beer dripping from the tip of his beard, a greedy look in the slits of his eyes. His father, Clay Henry II, had also been mayor, and when he died, intact, of old age, he was stuffed and mounted with an upturned bottle of Lone Star between his lips.

Clay Henry IV shares his father's pen, though he hasn't yet developed a taste for drink. Clay Henry III's beer-loving, Boer-cross wife Rosita also lives there with her infant kids, Paco and Lupita. Though he's made a (nearly) full recovery, and remains the patriarch of his family, it's uncertain what Clay Henry III's future holds. In an election year, with the rumor of Clyde the Dog's interest in office, there's the possibility of another brutal battle, though this time Clay Henry III has a little less to lose. —MMH

A Day with the President

Long before we made it to Texas, we began hearing the name Marvin Shurley. When we had questions about meat goats, agricultural legislation, or changes in the goat industry, at least part of the answer was a suggestion to "ask Marvin Shurley." As current president of the American Meat Goat Association (AMGA), Marvin has worked actively for the recognition of the goat industry as a commercial entity. He has gone to Washington and spoken with members of Congress; he has given testimony to the World Trade Organization. Most importantly, he has made connections, and built relationships of mutual respect, with fellow goat producers around the planet. Marvin's ranch is outside of Sonora, with an entrance just past Shurley Draw, a dry creek bed that runs beneath the highway. The Shurley family has been ranching this land since 1893, and has been in the goat industry for more than a century. Though in the past, the land supported a tri-mix of animals including cattle, goats and sheep, in 1994, Marvin shifted exclusively to Boer and Boer-cross goats. At the time, it made financial sense, and he's not regretted the move. He now has about 900 goats (1800 if you count the kids) on 3956.4 acres, and is pleased with the results.

Currently, he's using one fenced area of his property to conduct the AMGA's first Buck Performance Test, which was open to any goat breed and any goat breeder, whether they were members of AMGA or not. In this preliminary test, Marvin hopes to determine more about the natural tendencies of each goat. The bucks have been released onto the land, and are left to forage. Every day or two, Marvin comes by with a bag of feed to keep the goats friendly, and over the course of the study, the bucks' weight gain and general health will be carefully monitored.

Though Marvin has a few bucks in the test, most of his animals are in other pastures. Marvin staggers his breeding, and right now is working on some programs for color. He's been focusing lately on the red Boers because of their high value, and on the black headed Boers because he simply likes the way they look. His first batch of kids were arriving when we did, in early February, and a number of does were confined in large pens near his office. Their shelters were equipped with heat lamps and warmed floors, and little red and black kids snuggled together in the corners. Though he's a seasoned rancher, Marvin's delight at the kids was still evident. One, whose mother had belonged to a friend of Marvin's but had died, followed him around as he inspected the pen; finally, Marvin excused himself for a moment and came back with a bottle of warm milk replacement.

In addition to his goats, Marvin is involved in the burgeoning deer hunting market, and has timed feeders placed strategically around his property. Though he prefers to hunt with a bow and arrow, or even occasionally with his hands (he told Karl a wild story that involved scuba gear, a swamp and a giant catfish), Marvin saw the demands of weekend hunters, and has made changes on his ranch to accommodate them. A cabin on his property, in which we stayed when we visited, is lined with mounted deer and a couple of taxidermied champion Boers, and serves as a hunting lodge.

Marvin has also leased the rights to natural gas found under his pastures, and that deal has brought him not only the warmest office we visited, with a roaring gas blaze in the fireplace, but also a few hidden perks that he's been savvy enough to maximize.

Upon arrival at his ranch, we had found Marvin in a pasture with two ranch hands, his stepson Kevin and a young man named Daniel. The three men were using a sledge hammer, heavy chains, and the simple force of gravity to bend a porch into the side of a goat shelter. This shelter had been made from a discarded salt water tank that the gas company had left on Marvin's property. Though he could have had them haul it away, Marvin saw potential. On the dashboard of his truck, he showed us a soda can that he'd used as a scale model of the tank; he'd sliced it in half the long way, then bent a rectangle out of one side. This was exactly what he'd done, with welding equipment, to the tank.

This ingenuity is what has made Marvin a successful rancher. It is also what's made him a successful, though unpaid, lobbyist on behalf of the goat industry. Confronted with a problem, Marvin finds a solution, be it in the form of water tanks or diplomatic emails. His approach is the same: study the predicament, thoroughly research the alternatives, experiment a little, and then proceed.
—MMH

Shear Excitement in Sonora

We had heard that Sonora was the heart of Texas goat culture, with meat and mohair goats ranched by the thousands, and as we approached the city, the vast rocky fields became more and more concentrated with goats, while the ranch emblems shifted from cattle references to caprine. Several people had told us that the mohair warehouse was enormous and worth a visit, so when we pulled into town, Karl asked for directions and we wound our way past the tax assessor and some deer processors to a large white building bearing a wrought iron sign that read Sonora Wool and Mohair. Since 1929 or '30, when it was founded by local goat and sheep ranchers, Sonora Wool and Mohair has been the area's warehouse and sorting facility. Though it is privately owned and operates for profit, it serves as a kind of cooperative, representing the interests of area producers. Since its inception, Sonora Wool and Mohair has grown to be the largest mohair warehouse in the country, and has become synonymous worldwide with high quality fibers. This is in part because of good management and the establishment of relationships with processing companies around the world. But it is also because natural conditions in the area are nearly perfect for mohair production, resulting in an abundance of high quality fiber.

Inside a series of linked buildings, huge burlap sacks of white wool and mohair, and the rainbow hues of alpaca fiber, are delivered by area producers, weighed, and stacked in rows that nearly touch the thirty foot ceiling. In the heyday of mohair production, before the subsidy was phased out by the Clinton Administration, the bags would be stacked so thickly that a person couldn't walk easily through the warehouse. Despite the reduced production, there are still thousands of sacks in storage, but the volume is a fraction of what it once was.

As we spoke with Seco Mayfield, the warehouse manager, several men reorganized the sacks, filling in the darker corners of the room as they opened up the center. Seco gestured to a wooden cutout on the wall of two foxes holding cocktails while leaning rakishly against a crest that read "Fling Ding," and explained that they were getting ready for the annual Fling Ding dance that has taken place in the warehouse since the Second World War. The event is huge, with thousands of attendees, and the previous years' bands have included Glen Miller and Hank Williams. It was to take place next week, and in the following days, the mohair would be hidden and the warehouse transformed with dropped ceilings and paneled walls.

As the men continued their work, Seco led us over a raised walkway to another building (soon to be the Fling Ding's bar) to show us the sorting areas and give us a brief lesson in fiber quality. Like any fiber, mohair is graded before sale, and the hair he showed us had been sorted into rolling bins. Seco let us feel the fiber in each, explaining the grade. Some, which was coarse or stained, was good only for making carpets. Another batch was softer, but still not fine enough to be worn directly against the skin. The final bin, containing the first shearings of fall kids, was as soft as a cloud. Interestingly, several different grades of fiber can come from the same animal, which complicates the sorting process, but makes it especially important, since it ensures that both the producer and the processor know exactly what each bag contains.

From the warehouse, mohair is sold to processors who turn it into roving, or top, as it's called industrially. It is sold by the individual producers, whose names appear on the bags. Individual ranchers maintain their identity, and become known for the thoroughness of their sorting and the fineness of their mohair. Though the warehouse facilitates all sales, it doesn't buy or sell fiber in its own name, but rather stores it and connects the producers with the market. Some choose not to sell, and their bags remain in the warehouse for years; others do a brisk business with regular buyers.

Seco's job is not so much to aggressively court buyers and sell the fiber as to maintain the warehouse's high standards and make certain that everyone is treated fairly. As a producer himself, Seco tries to treat the three hundred ranchers he represents with respect and trust, and to get them the best deals that he can. On his own ranch, he tries to exemplify good, efficient mohair production, and before we left the warehouse, he invited us to come out the next day, when he had scheduled the shearing of his own goats.

Seco said before we left that they were planning to do about 800 animals, a third of his angora herd, and when we arrived the following afternoon, the shearing was underway. After Chris, Seco's herd manager, had rounded them up on horseback, the goats were led in batches of about fifty animals into the shearing pen, where eight men knelt with clippers. It took each man about five minutes to complete a goat, shaving the hair so quickly that it seemed to come off the animals in fluffy, wide stripes. Because of the cold, the shearers left a long cape down the goats' spines for warmth.

The shearers spoke Spanish to one another, shouting over the din of clippers, and helping each other corral the goats. They were paid by the animal, and in their haste some became aggressive and careless in their speed, nicking the animals, leaving shallow but bloody gashes on their skin, and on one occasion breaking a horn, at which point the boss, a man Seco refered to as El Capitan, would come over and reprimand them. Because of the volume of goats, ranchers rarely do their own shearing, relying instead upon companies like El Capitan's, who travel the area with their equipment, working for several days at various ranches. Seco was planning to hire them again in the next few weeks to shear another seven hundred goats, but then to wait a month before finishing the last thousand.

Driving down the dusty farm road as we left Seco's ranch, Karl and I talked about the shear numbers of goats we'd seen, and the incredible volume of their hair. Seco ranches twelve thousand acres, on which he runs three thousand goats (he has five hundred which are not angoras). The human population of Sonora is smaller than the size of his herd. Again we were struck by the industrial scale of Texas' goat culture; more goats were shorn in one batch of Seco's angoras than the entire herds of some farmers we'd visited in other states. There's no judgment to this statement, it's neither good nor bad. It's just true that everything is bigger in Texas. —MMH

Homesteader's Hero

At the Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine last fall, a goatherd named Charles Hopkins told us that he thought goats were the true heroes of agriculture. He explained that the animals' versatility had saved many a homesteader from cold and hunger, and that their value could not be overstated. Andy Oliver, publisher of Homesteader's Connection, whose offices are in San Angelo, Texas, is inclined to agree. Though he does not have his own herd, he is a great goat enthusiast, and his publication is devoted to the virtues and care of the animal. Since he is based in Texas, and includes the official publication of the U.S. Boer Goat Association in each issue of Homesteader's Connection, quite a bit of the journal's attention is devoted to meat goats, but Andy is a fan of all breeds. In fact, he has gone a step further than Hopkins in his praise of goats, casting them not just as heroes, but as actual superheroes, which will appear in a comic strip now in development for Homesteader's Connection. Not only will they provide us with their natural resources, but these goats will take on all the evils of the world. The adventures of the Farmtastic Meat Goat Four — El Cabrito, Kaptain Kiko, Mighty Myotonic, and Brawny Boer — will be appearing soon in print. If these caprines have even a fraction of their creator's energy, they will be quite a force. —MMH

Turkish Trials & Tribulations in Texas

We met Levent Demirgil and Yuksol Pece, of the Al Marwa Halal Meat and Meat Product Company, at the weekly Sheep and Goat Auction in Junction, Texas. The town of Junction, about 140 miles west of Austin, is small (population 2, 618), rural, and ringed by scrubby bluffs of crumbly yellow dirt. We didn't get the history of the town, but as far as we could tell, by now it was a junction in name only. Every Monday, however, it holds one of the larger goat and sheep auctions in the state; this morning about fifteen hundred animals would pass through its ring. Levent and Yuksol, two Turkish Muslims from the New York area (Levent lives in New Jersey, Yuksol in Brooklyn), had come to the auction to buy 800 animals. The first of February is the Id al Adha, the Muslim holiday of sacrifice, commemorating the near sacrifice of his son by Abraham. It is the duty of each family to buy a live sheep or goat and, depending upon their inclination, either slaughter it themselves or hire a proxy to perform the sacrifice. Because their business is in an urban area, Levent and Yuksol expected to do most of the slaughtering, but they still needed to buy zabiha, or unblemished, animals, since the customers would choose their sheep or goat while it was still alive.

There were three or four Muslim men at the auction, distinguishable from the other bidders by their pressed slacks and shirts, loafers, and bare heads. They were scattered in the armchairs of the auction ring's first rows among flannel clad cowboys and heavily made-up women; everyone, including the Muslims, was chain smoking. (Everyone, that is, except Levent, who explained that he quit smoking when he got married so that he wouldn't annoy his wife.)

Two hours into the auction, the prices were consistently too high for Al Marwa. On the phone with an associate at the New Holland auctions in Pennsylvania, Levent learned that there, sheep and goats were going for nearly ten cents less per pound, and the transportation costs would be a fraction of what they would pay from Texas. He instructed the man to buy in Pennsylvania, and he and Yuksol gathered their things to leave Junction.

They had a tip from someone at the auction that there was a man in Uvalde, about one hundred miles to the south, who had 30,000 head of goats, and might be willing to deal directly with Al Marwa, instead of sending the animals through auction. In the coffee shop, where the waitress offered a horrified Levent a pork chop, they called the man from a cell phone and made an appointment to meet him later in the afternoon. We asked if we could tag along, and they agreed, recommending that Karl drive the lead car so that they wouldn't speed and inadvertently lose us. We reached Uvalde in about an hour and a half, calling from a service station to get directions to the ranch. Driving the county road, we passed several fields of goats: Spanish, Boer, Angora, and obvious crosses. This was definitely goat country.

When we got to the ranch, it turned out Levent had been misinformed. Dink Turner, a weathered rancher with decades of experience in the goat industry, had sold most of his herd, and at present kept only about three hundred goats. Of those, less than one hundred would satisfy the criteria that Al Marwa needed to fill; either the animals were too small, too large, too bred, or too castrated for the Id al Adha market. After calling some other Uvalde ranchers recommended by Dink, none of whom had the goats to fill their needs, Levent and Yuksol thanked him and got back on the road, discouraged.

Before they left the Turner Ranch, we had arranged to see them again the following day at Producers Livestock Auction in San Angelo, where they hoped to have better luck. Producers holds the largest sheep and goat auction in the country, with close to half a million animals passing through their ring each year. In the past eight years, goats have jumped from comprising sixteen percent of these sales to now making up half of them. On this Tuesday morning, 9,500 goats and sheep were slated for auction.

The auction house was by far the most sophisticated we'd visited; the building itself looks more like a high school or community center, with couches and wood-partitioned phone booths in the main hall, an upstairs level with conference rooms and offices, and to the left, Stockman's Cafe, a reasonably priced restaurant with fresh, hearty food and cheerful service. The auction ring, which is situated to the right of the hall, is spacious, with comfortable seats, plenty of leg room, and, next to each chair, a tin can for cigarette butts and spit. There are closed phone booths lining one wall, and through a door, the stockyards--which stretch as far as the eye can see, spanned with an extensive network of catwalks, and efficiently organized so that each group of animals is herded from the farthest corner into the ring--can be reached.

By the time we arrived, around ten in the morning, the auction had been underway for a couple of hours. Levent and Yuksol had yet to bid, but animals were passing quickly through the ring, led by "Judas" goats, which are trained like working dogs to lead livestock into the ring, and at times, to the slaughter. As the auctioneer called out the bids, a Judas goat was released from its ringside pen and made its way through the wide door to a pen behind the building, where it gathered the animals and led them onto the sawdust.

The buyers were much the same as the day before, though there were two or three times as many. As at Junction, there were a couple who seemed to buy as many animals as they could, while others were careful, asking the handlers (who were wearing chaps!) to pull out various animals so that they could get a better look. There were several other Muslims at the auction, some bidding vigorously, and some waiting, as Al Marwa was, until the animals were gathered in larger lots, which seemed to lower the price.

After a smoky hour watching the bids, Karl and I went out the back door to look at the stockyards. It was incredible: pen after pen after pen, each filled with animals of a certain characteristic, who munched on hay and tried to nose through the ice that had covered their troughs. Every so often, a pen would be empty, or would hold an incongruous animal like a bull or horse. Two pens held the gnarled stumps of bleached trees, on which black birds perched by the hundreds.

Standing on the catwalk, we were able to look down on the proceedings, as handlers moved goats and sheep down the chutes between pens, waving a Walmart bag on the end of a long stick to get their attention. Some goats hopped over each other and tried to climb onto each other's backs; the sheep, for the most part, scurried nervously and then huddled into a corner of their pen.

In such an organized format, and in such great numbers, goats for the first time became livestock to us, distinguishable from cattle merely by size. The goat industry, which before had seemed a somewhat nebulous idea, was before us, mapped on the grid of the stockyards. It was incredible, and somewhat overwhelming.

Inside, Levent and Yuksol had begun bidding, and by the end of the afternoon, they bought about three hundred animals. Though they had only bought half of their projected number, they seemed happy with the purchase, and, when we left them that evening, had begun searching for a truck to bring them to their plant in Pennsylvania.

Transportation is one of the troubles with buying animals from a great distance. Had Al Marwa arranged for a truck before they got to Texas, they would have been locked into buying a certain number of livestock. Having not made prior arrangements, though, they were now forced to scramble. Because the weather had been treacherous, dumping ice and snow across the North, they had terrible trouble finding someone to transport the animals.

Wednesday morning we had an appointment to speak with Benny Cox, the goat and sheep manager at Producers. When we arrived at eight, Levent and Yuksol were in the Stockman's Cafe, drinking coffee and eating cookies, since the griddle had been used to fry the morning's ham and bacon. Benny had postponed our appointment because he was trying to arrange a trailer for Al Marwa, so we joined Levent and Yuksol for coffee.

Since they left Producers on Tuesday evening, Levent said, they had been constantly on the phone, trying to find a truck, and at one point even going to a motel where truckers are known to stay, leaving notes on the windshields of empty trailer cabs. Levent and Yuksol were flying out of San Antonio at five, and they were getting anxious because if no one could be found to transport the animals, they would be stuck trying to resell them from a distance at the next auction.

It took four hours, but by noon Benny Cox had connected them with Jerry Hinds, whose friend in San Antonio had a cattle truck and was willing to bring the goats to Pennsylvania. At the eleventh hour, the Al Marwa goats and sheep were inspected, certified, and moved to the pens nearest the trailers. Levent and Yuksol looked drained, but relieved. Though their trip had been tense and at times frustrating, Levent managed to keep it in perspective. The Id al Adha, for which these goats and sheep had been bought, commemorates sacrifice. "Compared to Abraham," Levent said, "our trials in Texas were easy." —MMH

Goats at a Junction

Read about our experience at the Junction Auction in the story, "Turkish Trials & Tribulations in Texas"

Dripping Wet in Dripping Springs

We left for Texas the day before Karl's birthday, excited to visit the land of cowboys, ranchers, and meat goats. We'd been told that Texas was the heart of the meat goat industry, headquarters to the country's three Boer goat associations, and home of such champion bucks as Tarzan and (our favorite name) Texas T. This is not to say that Texas is America's only region of meat goat industry, but, when we thought of the state, it conjured images of herders on horseback and vast lands teeming with beefy Boers. Imagine our surprise, then, when our first stop in Texas, just outside of Austin in the town of Dripping Springs, turned out to be an organic farm and goat dairy which produces some incredibly sophisticated and widely acclaimed cheeses. We had arranged to meet Sara and Denny Bolton, owners of the Pure Luck Farm and Dairy, at the Westlake Farmer's Market, the largest producer's farm market in Texas. Though the day had started misty, the parking lot was full of people with canvas bags, wandering the stalls for emu oil, organic pecans, salad greens, and, of course, goat cheese. A folk singer was playing under one of the tents, and Denny broke away for a moment from the clutch of customers to request a song: one line was about goats eating anything, and even though Denny protested that it wasn't true, he clapped and shouted every time the word goat was sung.

When the Boltons met in the early eighties, Sara already had a few goats. Over the years, they've become more serious about their dairy and their cheeses, but it wasn't until five years ago that Pure Luck cheeses broke onto the national scene. In competition, they began receiving top awards, and with them the kind of recognition that led to a profile in Laura Werlin's book The New American Cheese. Now, their cheeses appear in stores across the country. Sara's cheesemaking techniques, which she teaches in workshops both at the dairy and in other venues, such as Langston University's Goat Field Day, have taken her as far as Armenia, where she spent a month visiting with cheesemakers as part of a USAID program.

With all of Pure Luck's successes, however, they continue to sell cheese from a cooler on the farm, strictly by the honor system; there's a metal box full of loose bills to make change. Though their cheeses are sold at Artisanal Cheese Center, in New York, they still see the Westlake Farmer's Market as one of their most important markets. I suspect that this is in part simple modesty, and in part their natural, down-to-earth approach to life.

On the day we visited with them, we followed from the market out to their farm, driving past countless ranches and live oaks through the hills of Texas as the weather gradually became wetter. By the time we reached the farm, it had gotten so muddy that Sara hopped out of their van to advise that we park on the road to avoid getting stuck. In their house, after leaving our shoes on the porch, we padded around and shared a delicious organic salad, whole grain bread, and some cookies that their daughter Hope had made that morning with a friend who spent the night. During lunch, a car full of people pulled into the farmstand and then got stuck in the mud, so Denny put on some shoes and a rain jacket and went into the field to help pull them out. Their daughter Amelia, who lives on the property and, with Sara, makes all the Pure Luck cheeses, came by to meet us and have some lunch. A neighbor dropped by for a visit, and helped to come up with a list of area goat farmers for us to contact. Everyone wished Karl a happy birthday and joy in the coming year.

Around five o'clock, we clomped through the sticky Texas muck to meet their herd and tour the dairy. Though it was still pouring with rain, the light had turned a beautiful pale orange. It was as though, through the thundering clouds, the hills were glowing. Surrounded by goats and flourishing fields of vegetables, we felt, not only in the heart of Texas, but in its bosom. By the time we left the farm, warmed with tea but still a little damp in filthy shoes, night had fallen and the sky had cleared. The stars were big and bright, as promised. —MMH

Wichita Zoobilation

We scheduled our visit to the goats of the Sedgwick County Zoo during one of those improbably temperate weeks that sometimes drift across the Plains in midwinter. By the time our appointment arrived, the weather had shifted to cold winter rain. We postponed once, then rescheduled for a day that came with temperatures in the teens, biting winds, and a flat leaden sky that periodically spit on us. Bundled up in the parking lot, we braced ourselves to get out of the car, and went into the zoo fully expecting the animals to be hidden away in their stalls. Amazingly, all of them —even the African and Asian species— were outside. Callene Rapp, the senior zookeeper who spoke with us in the petting zoo, said that most of the animals have adapted to Kansas weather, and at night, when we would have thought they were tucked warmly in the barns, all of the animals from the petting zoo sleep together in one pasture. It's not quite the lion laying down with the lamb, since these are all domesticated animals and none of them are carnivorous. But the zebus, the pigs, the camels, the yaks and the goats, animals that outside of a zoo setting wouldn't be found in the same hemisphere, huddle together through the night in one pasture.

During the day, the petting zoo is divided into three exhibits: those of Asian livestock, African livestock, and American livestock. For each exhibit, Callene tries to acquire endangered livestock and what we had heard termed "heritage breeds": animals that are less commonly bred today but at one time were inhabitants of the average farm. Her acquisitions include Hereford Pigs, Scottish Highland Cattle, and three varieties of goats: Nigerian Dwarf, San Clemente, and Arapawa Island.

It hadn't occurred to us that with the decline of family farms in America, there would be a loss of habitat for certain livestock, and that these breeds would become endangered. When we think of endangered species, we think of tigers and rhinos, not shaggy haired cows or oversized pigs. Callene explained to us that with commercial farming, animals are bred for short, productive (meaning quick weight gain), and confined lives. Animals that don't fit into that plan are not profitable, and their numbers have gradually dwindled. Though there are some farmers who've taken an interest in the heritage breeds, their numbers, and their farms' profits, are not large enough to successfully combat the problem; of some breeds, there are fewer than one hundred animals left. While some of these animals' numbers have declined due to aggressive action, the populations of most endangered livestock breeds have dwindled in a passive way. When their product —generally meat— fails to turn a profit, they are phased out of their farmer's breeding program.

In 1977, when the plight of the heritage breeds first became apparent, a group of ecologically minded farmers, zoo keepers and scientist formed the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC), of which Callene is now a board member. The group, which has steadily grown since its inception, tracks population size and genetic health of endangered breeds, sponsors research on measures that could combat their endangerment, maintains a genetic bank of rare livestock, rescues and finds new homes for animals facing extinction (such as the San Clemente goat, of which there are now several in the Sedgwick County Zoo), and gives a variety of educational programs about both individual breeds and sustainable agriculture. Through the dedication of its members, the ALBC's efforts are meeting with real success, and as we wandered around the farm, Callene showed us which breeds had been gaining in numbers.

One of our most beloved animals at the zoo —not, alas, a goat— is among the breeds that are showing improvement. Lucille, a red Hereford Pig who stands nearly five feet tall and has pointy, erect ears, had long been on our list of personal favorites. Even when she's just rooting around in her stall, she gives off, like a goat, an air of intelligence. As it turns out, she's also an artist. Before we left, Callene gave us one of Lucille's works, a painting on canvas in reds and purples and a little corn, that she made with her snout. It's now proudly displayed in the dining room. If for no other reason than Lucille's artistic career, the ALBC and the livestock program at the Sedgwick County Zoo seem to us endeavors that deserve support. —MMH

These Goats are OK!

The E (Kika) de la Garza American Institute for Goat Research is housed, until construction of its new building is complete, in a former dormitory on the campus of Langston University. In this unassuming brick building, down long corridors lined with framed pictures of goats and walled with cracking plaster, doors open onto laboratories filled with sophisticated equipment, dozens of computers, and trolleys packed with labeled samples ready for analysis. Here, using data gathered from the school's herd of 1000 goats of various breeds, some of the most comprehensive and wide-reaching goat research in the country is conducted. Begun in 1984, the program began as the American Institute for Goat Research, and initially was centered on dairy goats and angoras. The institute was later renamed in tribute to Representative de la Garza, a former legislator from Texas, who served on an agriculture committee in the House, and for the duration of his tenure made sure to include goat research in bills on resource allocation. In the twenty years since its foundation, as the goat industry has grown, the institute has expanded its scope to include cashmere, meat goats, and Tennessee Stiff-leg, or Fainting, goats. Research is performed on many projects, including nutrient requirements for goats, enhanced goat productions systems, composition of tissue gain and loss, sustainable dairy goat milk production from forages, and most recently, the use of goats for sustainable vegetation management. As part of Oklahoma's Extension program, the institute holds an annual goat field day, and throughout the year conducts classes around the region on a variety of goat topics.

On the day we visited, we spoke with Dr. Steve Hart and Dr. Terry Gipson, who gave us a wonderful overview of the program, and told us about its surprisingly international reach. Though Drs. Hart and Gipson are both American, other faculty members come from all over the world; in addition, many foreign scholars have visited, from countries as disparate as Bulgaria, China, and Ethiopia. The faculty travels frequently, as well, to observe and consult on projects. When we were introduced to the institute's director, Dr. Tilahun Salhu, he said that he had just returned from a trip to Ethiopia, where the institute is conducting a long term project that, as quoted from their literature, "aims to enhance family food security and income generating potential through the establishment of women's groups for goat production." The institute has also worked on projects in Armenia, Mexico, China, and Egypt. Before they came to Langston, three faculty members served in the Peace Corps, and though much of the practical application of their research occurs close to home, the research done at the institute is globally minded.

This was especially interesting to us because the university is in such a small, rural town. Langston, Oklahoma, current population 1,670, has historically been an all black town, and the university was founded in the 1890s as a land grant school to serve the African-American community. While visiting, we learned that there are three universities with top flight goat programs that were founded under these same circumstances: Langston in Oklahoma, Fort Valley in Georgia, and Prairie View in Texas. We're curious to see if, at these other schools, the goat programs have developed in such an international direction.

Our visit to Langston reinforced a recurring idea that we've been having about the project. One of the most fascinating aspects of the goat world to us is how interest in one animal — the goat — brings together people from incredibly disparate backgrounds. On a smaller scale, this is true on farms across the country, where goat breeders are brought into contact with members of many ethnic groups, from Middle Eastern to Caribbean, who seek out goat meat from their local suppliers. At Langston, this happens on a large scale, with goat research facilitating a range of cultural exchanges. —MMH

Unique Partnership Creates Creole Cheese

In a remote corner of Louisiana, about half an hour's drive from Baton Rouge, famed Chef John Folse has teamed up with experienced dairy goat farmer Cindi McDonald to form a partnership between her goat dairy and his cheese making operation. The milk produced on McDonald's farm will exclusively supply Chef Folse's Bittersweet Plantation Dairy. Chef Folse, author of seven cookbooks and host of a PBS show on Cajun cooking, got interested in the Louisiana cheese tradition while researching his forthcoming Encyclopedia of Cajun and Creole Cuisine. After discovering that Cindi McDonald had owned and operated a commercial goat dairy in Louisiana in the mid-1980s, he called her and persuaded her to resurrect the dairy, agreeing contractually to buy all the milk she could produce. Two years later, after growing the herd to 200 head and building a new milking parlor, they are ready to start making cheese. On the day we visited, both Chef Folse and Ms. McDonald made time to talk with us about partnership, patience, and the Pope.
Due to Chef Folse's great enthusiasm for the subject of Louisiana cheese making, we barely needed to ask questions and at times just listened, enraptured. What follows is the entire transcript of our interview.

John Folse: This started up about two years ago. The funny thing is to hear you say that we're at the beginning--we're way away from the beginning. This is like we've just landed on the Moon. When I came out here the first time, there was nothing except a little house and a bunch of goats running around. And I said, gee, where is your milking parlor? Where is your shed? And she said, "We're going to get all of that, and I really need to build the herd. I need about 200 head." And I said, Okay, well we're a ways off then. But we started the talking process, and I said great, maybe six months? And then six months went by and a slab was starting to get strung out, not even poured. But I came to the realization that if I'm going to get really good quality goat milk, I'm going to have to wait. Because this isn't a fast project, this is going to be a project of a lot of love, a lot of care, and it's going to take its time. It's going to come at its own pace. I'm an entrepreneur. I have food manufacturing, I have restaurants, I have catering, and I have bakeries and cheese companies. In everything, we think in terms of entrepreneurship, you know, get it done, get it done. But you come to realize that it's not that way on the farm. Goats get sick and everything stops. And then she's got to spend the night with the goat to make sure it's okay. And then you start to see that and to experience it, and you realize that gee, I'm going to get some great milk here, and this is going to be a great project. So a year went by, and then a year and a half, going on two. And things started to evolve and the milking parlor was put in, and things are really coming along well. Now I know that we're not that far away. Now, that six months that we talked about when we started is in sight. JF: It's been nice to watch, since I'm not from the dairy business. I grew up on a sugar plantation and my family's been in sugar production for years and years. I'm the only one in my family in the restaurant business. I have a huge passion for food and Louisiana, especially Creole and Cajun cuisine. Coming to know that cheese was such a big part of that cuisine, and being able to be a part of resurrecting that, as well as being a source of revenue for a place like this has been great. I've probably been the one who's had to learn the most. You're fooling with Mother Nature here. It's a different thing, it's not like going to buy a piece of stainless steel machinery, hooking it up, and you're in business. It's absolutely, totally different. I mean, you're fooling with the mind of the dairy owner, and the passion of the dairy owner with goats (laughter). And it's a relationship, really, a relationship that you don't find with metal. That's what's nice out here. I don't come out here that often, but every time I come I say, wow! That's new since I was here last!

JF: I called one day and said, you know, why didn't I think about this? I have refrigeration people on staff, air conditioning and carpenters and electricians on staff, and maybe I can send them over and let them do some work. Maybe we'll trade it out in milk or something like that, but we're going to be a partnership anyway, so why not? My refrigeration man came out and kind of tinkered around and he came to know how to work on milk baths, which is a good thing. It's strange to think that I'm sending my refrigeration man out of New Orleans, who works in my manufacturing plant, to come over here. His first question was, "What in the hell is John getting involved in?"

Cindi McDonald: I think he was inundated. On that fence there, a latch had loosened and it had let about forty goats out into the yard when he arrived, and he was like, "There are goats everywhere!" We were trying to get them out of the way so they wouldn't jump on his truck. (Laughter)

JF: Hopefully in mid-Spring, we'll start getting our milk, and the good news is that we already have three or four really nice triple creams that we've R and D'ed... because we were able to get some milk from here last year.

CM: The local Grade A inspector knew that John had to have milk to work with, and that he wasn't marketing it, and so we were able to do that, which was really nice. We've got some people down here who are willing to work with us.

JF: While we were researching the new book, we were thinking about cheese and what was its place in Creole cuisine in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, we discovered Creole Cream Cheese, which is one of the first cheeses out of my plant. It's a cow's milk cheese, created in France, and then brought here with the French when they settled. It was huge here until the 1980s, when the FDA came in and said that dairies cannot produce cheese in the same plant they process fluid milk. You either have to do cheese, or you have to do milk, and it ended up cutting out the cheese making. Here was this real icon cheese, Creole Cream Cheese, that had been here for a couple hundred years, that all of a sudden just disappeared over night. Historically we saw the significance of it, so when we built the plant, I said let's just move out right away with the Creole Cream Cheese. So we did, and it went into all the stores, and it gave us time to start here. As much as I wanted the goat milk, I didn't realize at the time that the greatest blessing was not having it. Because it allowed us to move out into the national marketplace and establish ourselves as a quality cheese maker. We've developed a market for our product, in a marketplace that is now seeking new cheese. Then, when we come out with our goat cheese, the day we come out with it, every bit of it is sold and they're just clamoring for it. They want the triple creams, and they want the aged, and some of the fresh, but they don't want the same old thing. They want some exciting things. And they say, "New Orleans, that's got to be exciting!" So that two years, what originally looked like "Oh my God, when are we going to get our cheese?" Now, in retrospect, allowed us to develop not only a market, but we came to understand cheese better, to understand cheese making technique better. We were able to take courses, and we were able to build our facility a little bit better. And in the last year I hired two Bulgarian cheese makers who immigrated here. JF: Just tenacity.

CM: He's a vigorous man in pursuit of cheese! (Laughter)

JF: I think that's what it is. If you're really passionate--I keep using that word because I think that's all that matters, passion is all that matters--I think if you're really really serious about what you're doing, you're going to totally engulf yourself in it. And in the process, you instill the passion in other people. When I started asking cheese connoisseurs what they were looking for, they said they were looking for a great American feta. And where does feta come from? I'd gone to LSU and discovered there was a guy working on his PhD from Bulgaria, and his parents were trying to immigrate here. And I thought, ahh, great. So his parents move over and we get them a house. They speak no English, but this father and mother have been in the cheese industry in Bulgaria, and the father has personally run the largest cheese plant in the Soviet block. The largest one. So they come over, we give them a house, and they decide to stay here and get their citizenship through a lottery, and all they want to do is make cheese. The father has learned one sentence, he says, "America big country--cheese much money." And I say, in time, in time. I've come to learn everything in time. So here he is, he's an expert at feta, he's an expert at some of the hard cheeses, all goat and sheep, he's got great knowledge of all these different cheeses, and as bad as he wants to get into making the cheese, I say no, you've got to practice your English. I told him when you and I can have one good conversation: cheese.

CM: And in the meantime, he's biding time for my girls to have their babies.

JF: That's true, the time has worked out absolutely perfect. And now we're building a new food plant, which allows us to triple the size of the dairy and be able to do butters and ice creams. We're already into ice creams. Just cow right now, but we're going to do goat, and we're going to do goat butter, which is fabulous. I love goat butter. So we're looking for great things from under these pretty trees. I think our partnership will evolve, and come up with some new and exciting things because I need milk. I think here's a match made in heaven: you have a great goat dairy, and you have someone with a lot of passion for quality cheese making, and the two of them come together. Normally it's not like that because, as you know, when you go to a typical goat dairy they're trying to manage the animals and the system and the accounting and making the cheese, and there are a lot of things going on and they're doing a great job at little pieces of a lot of things. But here might be a new look at American cheese making, where we don't all have to do everything. She doesn't necessarily have to make cheese, and I don't need to get into the dairy business. As long as we have quality operators, who bring great milk, and they're our only source, and we're their guarantee for all their production. That's a great feeling, to know you get up in the morning and you don't have to worry about bottling it, you don't have to worry about any of it. We come along, pick it up, and off we go. JF: Well I guess everybody approaches that equation differently. I approach it very simply from a success quotient. I go in saying, if we do it, we're going to be successful at it, so what's the biggest vat I can get? And that's what I did. I went in and bought a five hundred gallon vat, and as they were installing it, I said, that's not big enough. And I said I need another vat, so I bought a fifteen hundred gallon vat. So I had two thousand gallons. Somebody said, "What the hell are you going to do with all these vats?" I said, this isn't enough. And they said, "Who are you selling to?" And I said, nobody, yet. But it's true, now those vats are full, and I haven't brought in my goat milk yet. I'm too small, and I've only been doing cheese for two years. I met this fantastic nun, and maybe you all know who I'm talking about? JF: Well she became a great friend of mine. When I brought my cheese to her, I was standing in line behind about twenty people, waiting to have my cheese evaluated. And you can imagine just the fear of that because here I am, I don't know a damn thing about making cheese. I'm new at it. And I'm taking this triple cream up there like the Holy Grail, and I'm bringing it up to the table, and she's got her microscopes and there are all these cheese makers around. And she's asking how long they've been in the business, and they say, "Sixteen years" or "Twenty years," or "Oh, my grandfather started the business," and I'm thinking, man do I really want to show this cheese? So we get up to the table and I give it to her and she looks at it, and she cuts into it, and she says "Do you mind if I taste?" And then she says, "Oh my God! How long has your family been in cheese making?" And I said, well, we got in about a year ago. And she says, "You've just started?" And she looks around like this (peers around, conspiratorially) and says, "I think this is just about the best cheese here. This is incredible cheese." And she starts dissecting it and then we sat down and we had this real great kinship, and she said this is really magnificent, magnificent cheese. So when you ask that question, how much do you need? I know that this dairy is about half the size that I need, but I also know that if I get enough milk to make just one triple cream, or if I make one aged cheese, that's going to be fine. That's going to be enough, because you can't push, otherwise you'll get disaster. I learned that early on. People who do this every day have such a love for these animals. These animals come first. It's not about the milk. The milk is a byproduct of what they're doing here. You have to bring your ambition into their sphere, and then you're going to have a good relationship. I'm not a patient man. I move a lot of things quickly. But I've been super patient here, because I know that this is my success. I'm not her success, she's mine. And together we're going to be good partners. JF: Well, unfortunately, I didn't serve him cheese. The Pope dinner in Rome was interesting because when the Pope was coming to New Orleans in the late eighties to do an event in the city, I was asked to do a special dinner for him, and I decided to create a dinner with foods of the seven Creole nations, since he represents all of those people. I had it all well planned, but for whatever reason, our dinner kind of got pushed off to the side. But the Bishop of Baton Rouge said, "We'll redo that dinner at some point." So about two years later I got a call from the Diocese of Baton Rouge. Bishop Stanley Ott called and said, "Remember we were talking about that dinner with the Pope? How would you like to do it?" I said I'd love to do it, when is he coming? And he said, "He's not, you're going to Rome." So I went to Rome. Every five years all of the bishops of the world have to go to the Vatican for a meeting with the Holy Father to get all of their instructions for the next five years, and it was on this occasion that they asked that I come over and do the dinner. So I did the dinner for the Conclave of Bishops there, and the day after had a private audience at the home of the Pope, not in Rome, but at Castel Gondolfo, which is his castle in the town of Gondolfo, about an hour out of Rome, overlooking the city. When you're sitting in Gondolfo, you're looking down the mountain into St. Peter's. You can see the dome. It's an hour away, but you can see it. They built that place for the Pope in the beginning of the Renaissance, and they chose that area because it was in a vineyard and the Pope could always have his eyes on St. Peters. So that's where they brought me, and I had a private Mass in the morning, and then did a breakfast with him, and then had an audience with him for a couple of hours. JF: You know, that was the question I asked when I got there. But the Cardinal who was his secretary, Cardinal Stanislaus from Poland, said that's one thing you don't have to worry about, he'll carry it. And he did, he talked to me about cooking, and he talked about sausage making, and he talked about him being a great hunter, he talked about fishing being one of his first loves. He said that in the past he loved to cook, but of course he didn't get to cook much now. I did a seven, eight course meal the night before, but the greatest thing was to be able to spend three hours at Gondolfo, which is very rare. I mean, it is very rare. I would have never dreamed that in my lifetime. But it just happened. To be sitting in his home, on top of the mountain at Gondolfo, and to be looking at him saying Mass, and there's only a few people there... and then to sit down and have breakfast with him, was just unbelievable. It was a very interesting part of my life.

Another Day at the Auction

Dr. Pugh had suggested that before we leave the state we visit the Saturday goat auction at the Circle H Auction House in Brundidge, Alabama. Though we'd been to a goat auction in Maine, that had been a one-time event, organized in part by the state's Department of Agriculture as an experiment to unite producers with a new market. The auction in Brundidge, however, had happened weekly for decades, at a house that auctioned off everything from random household items to poultry to (on the day that we visited) a pair of miniature donkeys. The town wasn't far out of our way, so we decided to make the detour. After a brief stop in Montgomery to tour the sites of the Civil Rights movement and Goat Hill, the local name for the capital (so called because the land it was built on was once over run by goats), we headed to Brundidge. The local state park was cold and desolate, so we slept in the car and left early for the auction. As it happened, goats weren't on the block until one in the afternoon, so we watched the miscellany (read: attic junk) sale, and then the poultry auction.

While waiting, we chatted with the locals. Jerry Smith, the former owner of the Circle H Auction House who's had goats since he was twelve, said that in the last fifteen years, Alabama's meat goat business has noticeably grown. A man called Jumper, who has been selling goats to buyers in Miami for the past forty years, agreed with him, but said that the largest goat auctions are still the ones that supply the New York area. The New Holland, Pennsylvania auctions, he said, are where the real money is.

Cindy Simmons, who keeps two pet Pygmy goats, Cupcake and Spock, wasn't interested in the business angle. She'd bought Spock at this auction three weeks ago, when he was ten days old, and has been bottle feeding him every two hours since she brought him home. An enthusiast for all types of animals, Cindy wasn't looking for another goat today; between cradling him in her arms, and chasing after Spock as he capered about, she thought that one kid was enough. Cindy, like many people there, seemed to have come to the auction not to bid, but just to visit. We got the feeling that as much as anything else, the Saturday morning auctions were a Brundidge social event.

The auction itself was not unlike the one we'd previously attended. Goats were led individually into a stuffy arena, where, for the most part, three main livestock dealers bid on them. There were a few families there, looking for Christmas pets, but the majority of bidders would be reselling the animals for meat. The animals looked thin and a little gooey around the nose, and it both amazed me that dealers would pay anything for them, and made me sad that they bid so little. Outside, a light drizzle had turned to rain, and after about an hour, we decided to get back on the road. —MMH

Auburn's 3 "R"s: Ruminant Reproduction Research

The Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine is one of the oldest and most respected in the country. Their teaching hospital, now housed in a building that was completed earlier this year, is airy and orderly, and in it the veterinary students learn to perform many of the same sophisticated procedures that their counterparts in medical school practice. Auburn is known especially for its work with large animal reproduction — notably, surgeries to correct penile dysfunctions in bulls — and animals are brought from as far away as Texas for semen collection, analysis, and sometimes surgery. Race horses, champion bulls and, especially in the last few years, Boer goats, find their way to Auburn for a variety of procedures to examine and, when necessary, enhance their fertility. As the Boer industry has grown, and semen from champion bucks has become prized, research in goat reproduction has kept pace. While bulls are still Auburn's specialty, their goat program is by all accounts superb, largely due to the efforts of Dr. David Pugh, editor of the textbook Sheep and Goat Medicine, and one of the country's leading researchers in the field of small ruminant reproduction. We had come to Auburn to talk both with Dr. Pugh and with Dr. Leslie Lawhorn, a veterinarian and researcher who is also working on goat reproduction. When we arrived, Dr. Pugh had been unexpectedly called to a meeting, so Dr. Lawhorn, fresh from performing a goat sonogram, gave us a tour of the hospital.

The facility has the same feel as a human hospital, but since the animals who come there are so massive, the rooms are built on a much larger and easier-to-clean scale. The ceilings are high, the doors are wide and latch securely, and the concrete floors slope gently to a drain. Dr. Lawhorn showed us the progression of rooms an animal would be taken to if it were brought in for treatment: outside, there are barns for boarding the animals and a "lameness assessment arena," in which the animals would first be examined. Inside, there were more examining rooms, with stanchions to keep the animals still during more thorough and, for those with reproductive issues, more personal inspections. If surgery were warranted, the animal would then be led to a padded room, where anesthesia would be administered. Once the animal was tranquilized, it would be hooked into a track in the ceiling that suspends the animal and swing it to the operating room. In the operating room, there are lights and equipment, much as there would be in a human hospital, but there is no bed for the patient to lie on; surgery is conducted with the animal in a standing position, supported by a sling from the track in the ceiling. Following surgery, the animal is moved to an indoor stall for recovery. If a foal or calf is involved, it's usually placed on a gurney rimmed with padded bumpers until it's well enough to stand in a stall. At a central station, doctors and students can keep a constant monitor on the patient's recovery.

Many of the veterinarians have offices on the second floor of the hospital, but the goat research facility is located a short distance away in another building. Following Dr. Lawhorn, we drove to their offices, passing a very tall man loping along to drop off his camel, and then driving through cow pastures to a small building and a set of barns. Dr. Lawhorn explained that they keep a small herd of dairy cows, which the students learn to milk during their first year of vet school. Many aspiring veterinarians have never spent time on a farm, she said, so at Auburn they introduce them to the daily care of livestock, as well as medical treatments.

In the research facility, Dr. Lawhorn showed us her laboratory, which was filled with microscopes, glass tubes, and various machines that looked complicated and very scientific. She also showed us her equipment for semen collection: an artificial vagina and an electric ejaculator. Not being a scientist, it's easy to forget that analysis always begins with the clean collection of a sample. In the case of goat reproduction, that means gathering semen. In all the talk we'd heard of artificial insemination and "buck collection," I hadn't really considered what it entailed. Looking at the rubber sheath and the sort of rounded-off rocket, I understood a little better why farmers often hire professionals to collect their bucks.

As we were poking around the lab, Dr. Pugh came in to introduce himself. A voluble, bald man in a wrestling sweatshirt, he spoke quickly and in a thick accent, suggesting that we all go to the barns to look at the goats. As we looked at the Boer goats in his care, he told us a little about his background and his beliefs. The son of a West Georgia farmer, who once kept a herd of his own goats, Dr. Pugh has watched the changing tides of goat keeping in the region, and has strong opinions about farming and animal management. Though he instructs students and owners on preventative measures, he believes that the ideal scenario would be one in which animals have been bred for natural resistance to parasites and disease. If a serious illness, like CAE or scrapies, occurs in a herd, Dr. Pugh believes in a "scorched earth" policy to ensure eradication. His favorite text for disease management, he said, is Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince.

Because he is such a charismatic person, and because he backs everything up with science, Dr. Pugh can say things like this without sounding crazy. His enthusiasm for the animals, too, is contagious, and it seems entirely likely that support for Auburn's goat program has grown through the sheer force of Dr. Pugh's energy. Though he'll work on other livestock, his favorite animal is the meat goat, and you could see in his interaction with the Boers how much genuine affection he had for the animals.

Before we left, he and Dr. Lawhorn performed another sonogram on a Boer doe, explaining the procedure and giving us a printout of the tiny goat fetus. Dr. Pugh pointed out the heart beats on the monitor, and showed us which little blobs were goats, and which were simply amniotic fluid. This was what all the research is about; the semen collection, the penile surgery, the embryo transfers are simply means to this end. As he pointed to the screen, Dr. Pugh smiled and said, "Look, there's an angel, and there's an angel." —MMH

How Devonshire Deals with CAE

The first thing you notice at Devonshire Farm is a sense of order. Set on a five-acre rectangle of land outside of Gainesville, Florida, the farm is neatly divided into several pastures. They sit at right angles to each other, marked by tautly strung wire — in some cases in double rows spaced widely apart to prevent contact between animals — each with its own shelter for the animals. In an addition off the house, the goat rooms are full of pasteurizing equipment, stacks of towels to clean newborn kids, and charts tracking each goat's health and breeding schedules. The farm feels as tidy and organized as a laboratory, which may be because its owner, Elizabeth Kennelley, is also a scientist. The manager of the University of Florida Extension School's Soil Lab, Elizabeth is also finishing a doctorate in chemistry at the university. Her interest in goats stems from a childhood dream, but her approach is purely scientific. Elizabeth is interested in improving the herd's genetics, and though she milks her dairy goats after they freshen, it isn't to sell the milk, but rather to gauge their production levels. Her herd is comprised of about thirty Oberhaslis and LaManchas, with a few residual Pygmies from an earlier venture (and one sweet Boer named Guppy, who was born weighing about two pounds and has been raised entirely by hand). Oberhaslis are relatively new to the region, and Elizabeth has been instrumental in improving the breed and its visibility in Florida.

In fact, we met Elizabeth in the Spotlight Sale Tent at the ADGA convention, where she was spending her last few days with an Oberhasli doe, Jolie, who had been chosen for the sale. Jolie was the first goat from Florida to be featured in a Spotlight Sale, and that honor is just one among many that the Devonshire herd have achieved. An active member in the Florida Dairy Goat Association, Elizabeth shows her goats frequently, and in the past has worked with 4-H, teaching children about goat husbandry and inspiring one young woman so much that she and her goats now board with the Kennelley family.

Elizabeth is a well informed and incredibly active goat farmer, which is why it surprised us to learn that she keeps CAE-positive goats in her herd. Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis, commonly called CAE, is a retrovirus that is spread through white blood cells and, at least for now, is incurable. Considered the HIV of the goat world, CAE causes chronic progressive arthritis, chronic pneumonia, hard udders, and, finally, ascending paralysis. Only 10-20 percent of CAE-positive animals show signs of the disease, which is why rigorous testing is recommended to identify positive animals. Washington State University has a widely respected system for testing (the chemically measured cELISA blood antibody test), and most blood samples around the country are sent to the their lab. It's generally acknowledged that the only way to truly manage CAE is to keep positive animals out of one's herd, or, if the animals aren't showing symptoms and the farmer doesn't want to cull, to segregate and stop breeding them.

Elizabeth follows a comprehensive testing program, sends her blood samples to Washington State, and segregates those goats who test positive, separating their pastures from the rest of the herd to prevent contact between positive and negative animals. But unless the goats begin to show symptoms of CAE — swollen, calcified knees, for instance, or hard udders — she doesn't cull them, and if their genetics are good, she continues to breed them through artificial insemination.

Unless there's a breech of the placenta, or the baby receives unpasteurized colostrum (the antibody-rich secretion that precedes milk during lactation) straight from its mother, most kids born of CAE-positive does test negative. As a scientist, Elizabeth judged this risk and decided that the genetic benefits outweigh the chance of CAE infection. Having worked for a decade on the composition of her herd, it is important to her to be able to pass along and continue working on the traits that she's been refining. She even continues to show CAE-positive animals; she just makes sure to be upfront about the animal's status, to keep it segregated from the other pens, and if the judge is touching the animals, to provide cleansing wipes. Several of her best animals, she says, have continued placing even after they've tested positive.

When Elizabeth began working with goats in earnest, about ten years ago, a veteran of the goat world told her that it would take about a decade for her herd to reach the level of excellence that she was working toward. In exactly that amount of time, the Devonshire herd has achieved the goals — in the show ring and on the farm — that Elizabeth set for them. Though some of her animals have ultimately tested positive for CAE, Elizabeth has chosen not to cull them in order to continue the progress that she's made on the genes of the entire herd. The management method she's adopted is much more labor-intensive than it would be to simply clear disease from the herd, but it's allowed her to continue the genetic lines on which she's worked so hard. —MMH

The Lord Giveth, The Lord Taketh Away

I cannot think of a less hospitable place to raise animals than South-Central Florida. The natural predators are vast and varied: from above there are hawks and turkey vultures, from below there are rattle- and coral snakes, and just creeping along the earth there are alligators, coyotes, black widows, and brown recluse spiders with which to contend. Brambles grow thick and spread quickly; where land is clear, rain often turns it to swamp. Six months of the year, the climate is unbearably hot and humid and the rest of the time, for most of Florida's farmers, it's citrus season.

As we drove through the back roads, lined with moss-dripping trees and billboards that read things like "Do you have a chronic wound that won't heal? Call The Wound Center," we didn't expect to see viable farmland, much less an organized Boer goat ranch. The brackish canals on either side of the county road to Kevuda Haven seemed unlikely to give way to dry land, much less to the kinds of open pastures necessary to maintain meat goats. Yet there, past their sign and a mezuzah, it lay. The word Kevuda means precious in Hebrew, and Larry Krech, a former grocer and the owner of Kevuda Haven, has worked hard to make his land worthy of the name. When he bought the property, twelve years ago, it was thickly forested and waist deep in blackberry cane. He began to clear the land, and during the process someone suggested to him that a few goats might help to keep the brush at bay. As with so many people we've spoken with, the rest is history.

When we pulled in front of his house, Larry came out to meet us, apologizing in advance that he might be moving a little slowly because prostate cancer that had been in remission had come back, and just this week he'd finished a round of radiation therapy. For the last year, as he's been focusing on his health, he's turned over much of the herd management for his three hundred goats to Ronald Cordero, a young Venezuelan man who lives with his wife and baby in one of the out buildings. Though Ronald was a graphic designer in Venezuela, he's quickly getting a feel for goats, and when Larry took us out to find him, Ronald was methodically trimming hooves in the buck pasture.

Though Ronald is a relatively inexperienced goatherd, Larry trusts him with the care of his animals. One reason for this is that the men share a religious faith, and actually became acquainted through their congregation, Beit Yisrael. Their belief is in the totality of the Bible, and the congregation follows the Old Testament as closely as the New (though, since they take it as a whole, they reject the terms "Old" and "New"). Thus, Larry and Ronald keep kosher, post the mezuzah on their door frames, observe the Sabbath on Saturday, pray in Hebrew, and celebrate the Jewish holidays as prescribed in Leviticus, such as Passover and Sukkot. Yet they also believe that Christ is the Messiah.

As Larry showed us his farm and we spoke about the land and his religious beliefs, he and Ronald continued to perform the day's work. Several does were due to kid, and while Ronald got feed ready for most of the animals, Larry went into the pasture to check on one goat who had isolated herself from the hungry herd. We were waiting by the fence when Larry began shouting for us to come into the pasture.

When we arrived, we found one kid lying on the ground under its mother, and another poking out of her, its hooves and head hanging below her tail. With one final push, the kid slid out in a gush of afterbirth and immediately the mother, a red Spanish doe with one curled horn, began to lick her baby and nibble the sandy placenta from its head. Gradually she cleaned them up, and the two Boer-cross kids--one black and white, the other red and white--began to wobble and squawk, tumbling over each other and craning their necks to find their mama's teats.

Karl and I had never been present at a birth. It was overwhelming, truly a miracle that these little animals came out, their translucent hooves and downy fur perfect from the very beginning. In the same pasture, two kids that had been born earlier in the morning were snuggled by themselves in some tall grass while their mother stood a ways off, expelling the last bloody strings of afterbirth. Larry explained that some mothers immediately took to their kids, cleaning and hovering protectively over them, while others were distracted by feed or shade. One Nubian doe named Gingerbread, who had been with the herd for nearly a decade and was due in the next few days, had last year killed both of her kids when she accidentally rolled on top of them.

As he told us about Gingerbread, Larry began to look around for her. Ronald had fed the herd and was putting tags in the ears of the new kids when Larry asked if he'd seen Gingerbread. They agreed that it wasn't like her to miss a meal, and the two men began to call her name. Ronald went to look for her, following the tree line around the perimeter of the pasture, his blue "Osmosis Jones" cap bobbing as he began to run. The hat dipped out of sight and a second later Larry's cell phone started to ring; Gingerbread was dead, attacked in a corner of the pasture where the goats have lately been sleeping.

We rushed over to the goat and found Ronald supporting her head as he looked at the injuries. Gingerbread's organs were hanging out of a hole in her belly. At first, Larry suspected that Hami, a new Anatolian shepherd, was the culprit; apparently, Hami had been chasing goats and nipping at their legs the last few days. When Hami came over to the body, though, it was clear that he hadn't done it. He nosed at her organs, licked them a little, and then curled up next to the body, as though he were trying to protect it even when he knew he'd failed. It was heartbreaking to watch.

Larry walked around the field, staring at the ground and poking parts of the fence. Based on paw prints in the sand near a loose flap of the wire fencing, and on a limp that he'd noticed this morning in Hami's back leg, he decided that Gingerbread's attacker must have been a coyote. Hami fought it, but the predator had escaped.

This was not the first time that a goat had been lost. Earlier in the day, Larry had told us a story about an eleven foot alligator that came onto the property and grabbed a goat while it drank from a pond. It had looked almost like the goat was swimming as she flailed around back and forth, screaming until the alligator finally dragged her under water. Birds of prey, too, had begun to hover around kidding season, waiting on fence posts for an animal small enough to carry.

What was especially sad about Gingerbread's loss was that within her, there were two more little lives that were also taken. Having just watched a birth, it was terrible to see that potential being destroyed; I kept wanting them to say that the babies could be salvaged, but, of course, they could not.

The Book of Job reads: "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." Throughout the afternoon we spent with Larry Krech, I kept casting him in my mind as a Job. Afflicted by a cancer, a pregnant animal killed, he kept reminding us of the miracle of existence, of the newborn kids, and of the land. Through the day's joys and trials, he returned to his faith, to praise the wonders of the world even while grieving for a loss. While I don't share all of his beliefs, I admire their strength. And I hope that he, as Job, is ultimately blessed with prosperity, longevity, and peace. —MMH


Post Script: Karl & Margaret Reunite Old Air Force Buddies

After we left Kevuda we followed Larry's directions and drove about 20 miles northeast to Lake Griffin State Park to camp for the night. When we arrived, there were police cars in parking lot (we later found out they were assisting a child welfare officer in a truancy matter). Braving the police presence, we made it in by the skin of our teeth; another 10 minutes and the ranger would be closing the park. We found the campsite, pitched our tent, and went in search of the bathrooms. Outside the bathroom a little old man in baggy clothes sat waiting in the dark for his laundry to dry. While I was in the bathroom, Margaret, waiting with Godfrey, struck up a conversation. His name was Charlie Hancock, and he was from Indiana. Margaret told him we were down from Maine, and he said that he once had served in Japan in the Air Force with a buddy from Maine. I was coming out of the bathroom, and asked where in Maine his buddy was from. He couldn't remember where, just that the guy's name was Kip Fletcher. That's strange, I said. My dad's business partner of 30 years happened to be named Cliff Fletcher, and he has a son named Kip. "Oh, that's right," said Charlie Hancock, "We called him Kip, but I believe his name was Clifton M. Fletcher."

I was pretty sure we were talking about the same Cliff Fletcher, but just to be sure I grabbed my cell phone and called my Dad. Sure enough, Cliff's full name was Clifton M. Fletcher and he had been in the Air Force in Japan. I got Cliff's phone number in Maine, dialed, and went back to find Charlie Hancock near the dryers. I told Cliff that we were calling from a state park in Florida, and it seemed we had found an old Air Force buddy of his. I handed the phone to Charlie Hancock and they talked for a good 10 or 15 minutes, filling each other in on where their lives had taken them in the past 50 years: work, children, grandchildren, retirement, travels. They reminisced about their old buddy Smitty down in Texas, and then brought up the names of the other boys they had served with all those years ago. When Charlie Hancock finally handed me back the phone there were tears streaming down his cheeks. The last time he had seen or talked to Cliff was when Cliff had thrown him a going away party. That was in 1957.

It was an amazing feeling to be responsible for reuniting Charlie Hancock and Kip Fletcher after all those years. It was like living one of those awful Hallmark Christmas specials or episodes of Touched by an Angel, that still brings a tear to your eye. Of course, almost as amazing as the small world encounter was how many things had to fall into place to put us in that state park at that time. If we had gotten to the park 10 minutes later, if we'd turned away from the park at the sight of the police, if we'd told Charlie Hancock we were from New York instead of Maine, or if we hadn't had to go to the bathroom, their reunion would have been prevented.

We found Charlie Hancock the next day, said good-bye, he thanked us again, and we wished him well. I know it's cheesy, but I really hope that sometime soon Charlie will take his motor home and make the trip from Indiana to Maine and see Cliff again. I think that'd be nice. —KGS

A Day at the Circus

Fenced off from the native wildlife of Florida — the alligators basking along their canals, armadillos trundling through the spiny brush, myriad varieties of birds dipping their beaks into the muck — exotic animals of another sort spend their winters hard at work. From Thanksgiving until New Year's, they fill their days practicing timing and choreography, attending costume fittings, and most of all learning to work together and tune out the potentially disastrous distractions that loom around the edges of each rehearsal. They are, of course, the animals of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which spends six weeks each year in winter quarters at the Tampa State Fairgrounds. And, among their performing ranks, there are five very talented goats. As "The Greatest Show on Earth," Ringling Bros. satisfies the world's demand for circus entertainment by keeping two different shows touring simultaneously. Within the company, these are known as the Blue Unit and the Red Unit, and each year, on a rotating basis, one of the units comes to Florida to be revamped. It's at this point that casting changes are made, new acts are added, and ever more spectacular spectacles are incorporated into the show. This year it was the Blue Unit's turn in Tampa, and among the changes made was the addition of the Barnyard Act.

The act, which was still in the early phases of rehearsal when we visited, is made up of three goats, three large pigs, two cows, two donkeys, one miniature pot-bellied pig, and a dog. During the course of their routine, the goats hopped over the pigs, twirled in circles on their hind legs, stood on a rolling barrel (with the pot-bellied pig inside), and ran in circles around the elevated rim of the ring. Their trainer, Patricia Zerbini, actually specializes in elephants and tigers, but explained to us that it wasn't difficult to train a different type of animal once she understood its motivations and limitations. Of the three goats, two of which are Pygoras, and one of which is a Nubian, she said the Pygoras are the smartest, while the Nubian is a little spacy and forgets her queues, "like a cow." When we asked her if a goat really could stand on a ball, as it does in our logo, she thought for a moment and said yes, but only if the ball were on some sort of track. While it could manage rolling in two directions, a goat wouldn't be able to control the ball if it could roll any which way.

On the day we visited, both Patricia and her sister, Christine Winn, who will be in the ring with the animals and will work with them on the road, were in rehearsal. Wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt in the center ring, Christine moved theatrically, waving a crop and directing the animals through a series of tricks. Just outside the perimeter, Patricia shouted commands to her sister and the animals in what she said was the universal language of circus training: a combination of English, French and a few guttural bursts of German. As we watched, the ringmaster and head clown, both in street clothes, passed the Barnyard Act; in the background, about fifty feet away, three Chinese girls stood on their hands and warmed up with calisthenics, stretching their legs around in circles like the hands of a clock.

After the sisters had finished with the Barnyard Act's rehearsal, the animals were driven away and the director held her morning meeting with the performers. For this unit, four translators are used, though Patricia said that she's been in shows where as many as seven were needed. While they met, we were introduced to several members of the unit's 320 person staff, including Sister Dorothy, one of two Catholic nuns who travel with the circus, and The Gator Guy, the circus' reptile specialist, who showed us where his thumb had been bitten off by an alligator.

Outside, we were shown the rest of the circus grounds, including the elephant tent, where a five ton animal shuffled back and forth and practiced curling up the trainer in its trunk. Fenced in a separate area, the exercise pens for the exotic animals held much smaller creatures. Next to the baby camels and "zedonks" — a black and gray striped cross of zebras and donkeys — were Omega and Jedi, the cleanest white angora goats we've ever encountered. Thanks to salon-style grooming, these goats sport the softest, curliest, most blindingly snowy coats to be seen in the pre-show and animal parade. When pressed, their handler Jamie revealed her trick: weekly shampooing, moisturizing, and (the key) blow drying.

It was very strange to be backstage at the circus, in part because the priorities for the goats were so different from those in other circumstances. We had never before met handlers who appraised their goat's intelligence. Nor, even among those who show their goats, had we met anyone who regularly conditioned their animal's hair. Yet despite the different emphases, in some ways the circus was very much like some farms we've visited in that there was a real spirit of camaraderie, and the sense of cooperation in a united pursuit. Behind the scenes at Ringling Brothers, there was a feeling that, temporary as it might be, as the performers and trainers work together, they create a kind of family. —MMH

Goats Galore

About twenty minutes inland from downtown West Palm Beach, on a three-acre plot of land in Loxahatchee, Florida, twenty-five Boer and Nubian goats munch happily on the fibrous leaves of palmetto trees. Their owner, Debi Greenberg, a former labor and delivery nurse, expects several of them to kid any day now, and as she talks with us, she draws attention to their udders, which are filling out, and the ligaments beneath their tails, which she says relax before they give birth. Debi pays attention to these details, not only because she is a careful farmer, but also because when she left nursing in 1994, she joined her husband's private investigation firm, the Miami-based Bill Greenberg Special Investigation Services, Inc., of which she is currently vice president. Three years ago, the Greenbergs moved to the country, hoping for a little more space. When lawn maintenance became overwhelming, someone suggested to Debi that she buy a goat or two to keep the lawn and brush clear. The Goats Galore herd has grown from there. In addition to improving the herd's genetics, Debi's goal for her goats is to meet the needs of the immediate community for meat and, in the heart of horse country, equine companions. She's only been raising goats for about a year, but she's done a great amount of research and seems to be off to a running start. Needless to say, her investigation has been thorough. —MMH

Split Creek Farm: Time For Milking

We pulled into the winding drive of Split Creek Farm on a clear, blustery afternoon, and were met, in progression, by a wandering group of chickens, a pair of pot bellied pigs named Caroline and Reggie, and, resting comfortably on top of the picnic table, a sweet beige Toggenburg doe. It was only after a couple minutes of nosing around the barn and outbuildings and various pens of goats that we found the human proprietors of the farm, Pat Bell and Evin Evans, whom we'd last seen at the American Dairy Goat Association's convention in Nashville. There, Pat, a nationally known folk artist, had staffed the Split Creek Booth, and had been one of the artists to paint goat silhouettes for Wednesday's auction. Evin, a commercial farmer and renowned cheese maker, had seemed to be everywhere, chatting with people and leading a different goat or discussion group every time we saw her. At the farm, they were less harried but equally busy, preparing simultaneously for an afternoon tour group and, later in the week, a museum show of Pat's work, while managing the herd, the milking, and the commercial dairy. One of the many things that had intrigued us about Split Creek Farm was its dairy. Because South Carolina is one of the few states in which raw milk can be sold from a grade A dairy, Split Creek is in the unique position of selling to two distinct markets: locally, they sell fresh unpasteurized goat's milk at their farm shop and at farmers' markets, while nationally they are known for their award winning cheeses, made with pasteurized milk and available in stores and by mail. Their cheeses (especially the famed feta in olive oil) have been written about in newspapers and national magazines, and they are well known among chefs and connoisseurs in the Southeast. Except for the feta, all the cheeses are soft, and none have been aged. We've sampled quite a few of them, and can say with authority that they're all good, but a certain peach fromage blanc has carved a special place in our palates.

This visit, we didn't get a chance to see the cheese making process, but we did have the opportunity to witness our first commercial milking. We arrived early on Monday morning to watch the does being led in groups into the milking parlor, where a system of vacuum pumps sucks milk from their teats through a glass tube, a filtration system, and finally into a cooling tank. From there, the milk is either bottled and sold or pasteurized and made into cheese.

We had only seen animals being milked by hand, never by machine, and it was fascinating not only to watch the system in action, with foamy white milk shooting through its transparent tubes, but also to see how much human contact is still involved in the milking. When the does are led onto the milking platform, their udders are still "stripped" by hand, meaning that the first squirt of milk is squeezed by someone's fingers rather than the pump. The suction pumps are attached and removed manually, and when they are finished, the teats are all sterilized by hand. Over the noise of the pump, Evin and Maggie, the assistant farm manager, talk to the goats, while scratching their ears and shoulders. Each doe has her own habits and personality, and the women know them all, their rhythms and their tricks. Though we were expecting the machine to take all of the intimacy out of milking, it actually still seemed like a very personal time with the goats. Maybe it was the hour, or the breaking light, but in spite of the noise and the bustle and all of the work, milking felt to us like an attractive way to open the day.

In fact, many of the things we've found appealing about farming — like the sense of a day's orderly beginning — were in evidence at Split Creek. There was a distinct structure to the farm: the animals' welfare was the top priority, and everything was well kept and seemed to be on the right scale for the land. It is clearly a farm into which a lot of hard work and a lot of careful decision making have gone.

In addition to its other virtues, Split Creek is the first farm we've visited that supports itself; while Pat also has her career as an artist, Evin is a full time farmer. Having met so many people who struggle to balance the demands of their farms with other full time occupations, we found this really impressive.

An irony is that when Evin first wanted to farm, she was told, as she puts it, that she would need "to marry it or bury it." When she studied animal science at Clemson University, she was the only woman in the program, and became the first female graduate in that field. Since then, she has excelled as a farmer, and has become widely respected for the quality of her animals, her feed program, and her herd management. Moreover, she and Pat are involved with Rancho Ebenezer, an international group that helps teach techniques of sustainable agriculture in Latin America, so they're working to spread their knowledge of farming to those for whom it truly could make a world of difference. —MMH

Split Creek Farm: The Tour

For our written report from Split Creek Farm, please visit our entry: Split Creek Farm: Time For Milking

Mrs. Sandburg's Goats

About an hour south of Asheville, in the little town of Flat Rock, North Carolina, sits Connemara Farm. The former home of Carl and Lillian (Paula) Sandburg, the farm is now run by the National Park Service, and is the only home of an American writer to enjoy the distinction of being named a National Historic Site.

While we greatly respect Carl Sandburg's work, it was actually his wife who drew us to Flat Rock. Between 1935 and 1966, Paula Sandburg (who, incidentally, was the sister of photographer Edward Steichen) raised champion dairy goats. Beginning her herd for practical reasons when Carl was a struggling poet in Michigan, Paula became fascinated by the possibilities of genetic manipulation. As her husband became successful as a writer, she grew to national prominence as a dairy goat breeder. By the time they moved to North Carolina in 1945, Mrs. Sandburg was famous in her own right for her goats. She called her animals the Chikaming herd, and it included Nubians, Saanens, and Toggenburgs. What interested Mrs. Sandburg most was breeding for production; in addition to raising the goats, she ran a commercial dairy on the farm. At its peak, the Chikaming herd had about 200 goats, though now the National Park Service keeps it to about fifteen. Sue Hewlett, the volunteer we spoke with, said that they do make sure to keep Mrs. Sandburg's bloodlines in the current herd, though the management is not quite so rigorous. Since the farm is staffed primarily with volunteers, the kind of copious record taking for which Mrs. Sandburg was famed is no longer possible. They are also no longer milked, so the production level isn't gauged. Even so, they were beautiful animals.

When we visited, we were curious to know whether Carl Sandburg had written any poetry about goats. Though the couple was mutually supportive, each Sandburg seemed to be occupied independently. In the published correspondence of Carl Sandburg, there are myriad mentions of the goats, but in his poetry we could only find one, and the goat depicted seems to have a life antithetical to those lived by Mrs. Sandburg's animals. Maybe it was that contrast that struck him; we certainly found the juxtaposition interesting. —MMH

The sober-faced goat crops grass next to the sidewalk.
A clinking chain connects the collar of the goat with a steel pin
      driven in the ground.
Next to the sidewalk the goat crops November grass,
Pauses seldom, halts not at all, incessantly goes after the grass.

—Carl Sandburg
from "Suburban Sicilian Sketches"

Get Your Mountain Vittles Here

Until we talked to Ruble Conatser, Karl and I had never heard of the Kiko goat. Our meat goat experience was limited to Boers and to dairy and fiber culls, and though we knew that much of the goat meat consumed in America was imported from New Zealand, we had no idea what sort of animal those goats were. As it turns out, they are Kiko goats, a majestic-looking breed, with a shaggy coat and expansive horns. The Kiko, like the Boer, has recently been introduced to the American goat farmer. Unlike the Boer, however, Kikos are not show animals. They are bred solely for production, and the American Kiko Goat Association (AKGA), of which Ruble is the current President, has no sanctioned shows. While Kikos are very attractive animals, they are raised for one purpose: meat.

The more we read about Kikos, the more interesting we found them. We're not sure why, but a good Kiko buck is significantly cheaper than a top of the line animal from any other breed. Also, since they were bred in the relatively damp climate of New Zealand, their genetics have evolved to ward off parasites and fungus, which makes them ideal for a wide range of climates, including Eastern Tennessee, where Ruble's Mountain Goat Ranch is located.

We were a little early to our meeting with Ruble, but when he pulled up in his truck — license plate: EATGOAT — he immediately hopped down with presents for us. A true promoter of goat meat, he handed us red baseball hats with the Mountain Goat Ranch logo on them, bumper stickers which read "Eat More Goat," and later gave us samples of his Horny Goat Jerky. The jerky, which is still in its early stages of development, should be on the market next year, but in the meantime Ruble has teamed up with a Grade A meat processing plant, which packages goat meat under his label. He only slaughters wethers and does, since bucks have a distinctive goaty flavor, and he has the meat butchered into the same cuts that are most popular in beef. Though there's not much market yet for goat meat in his area (the one Jamestown restaurant that carried goat burgers is under new management), since the meat is Grade A, it can be shipped throughout the United States.

After a tour of the ranch and introductions to his many dogs and goats, Ruble took us over to the nearly complete Mountain Vittles building, which will house the jerky business. There, he loaded us up with frozen goat steaks and patties, and then, knowing that we were camping in the Big South Fork National Recreation Area and would be cooking over a camp stove, invited us to stay for a tasty chicken-fried-goat supper with his family.

The incredible Southern hospitality aside, what impressed us most about Ruble were his marketing efforts. Though a lot of meat goat farmers are reaching out to ethnic markets, we've only met a few who are trying to introduce goat meat to a mainstream audience. Ruble, with both his meat and his jerky, is working tirelessly to advance goat as simply an alternative red meat. Without a powerful goat council to launch an ad campaign, this may be tricky to accomplish, but we think it's well worth it. —MMH

Goats Take Nashville: Spotlight Sale

The lobby of the special events entrance to the Nashville Airport Marriott was dominated by tables of goat paraphernalia, from horn disbudders to portable animal containment systems to t-shirts reading "Goat Milk?" When we approached the registration window, we passed tables raffling everything from hand-made quilts to udder balm, and just past that, there was a dry-erase board dotted with messages arranging semen exchange. A room to our right was filled with vendors selling wares as disparate as Purina Goat Chow and goat-shaped cookie cutters. You might wonder what on earth was going on in Tennessee, but for some, the answer is obvious: Karl and I were attending the American Dairy Goat Association's National Convention. For the past ninety-nine years, the American Dairy Goat Association (ADGA) has been the organization that sets the standards for all dairy goats. Their registry includes the major dairy breeds — Alpine, Lamancha, Nubian, Oberhasli, Saanen, and Toggenburg — and in addition to sponsoring sanctioned shows, the group is a resource for all manner of dairy goat concerns, such as appraisals and production testing. More than five hundred members were expected to visit Nashville during the week of the meeting, and the workshops ranged across the board, encompassing every topic a modern farmer would need to consider, from the health of the herd to the design of the farm's web site.

Having never been to this sort of convention before, Karl and I had no idea what to expect. We weren't sure if it would fall into the general pattern for professional meetings — such as you would find within any occupational group, from English professors to bank managers — or if the week's entire structure and activities would be specific to small livestock farmers. (As it turned out, it was a little of both.) Mostly, we were just excited about the possibility of talking to goat farmers from across the country, and seeing if our first impressions about the raising of goats held true on a large scale.

Since the first half of the week was focused on the youth members, Karl and I only registered for the final few days of the convention. We arrived late on Wednesday morning, and unfortunately missed a couple of workshops that sounded really interesting, including "Starting a Successful Goat Business." Once we'd settled in, however, we tried to attend at least three workshops a day, and by the end of the convention, we'd been to lectures on goat diseases, foraging, goat judging, goat reproduction (during which the leader had us act out the process of hormone release by doing a carefully choreographed wave), starting a commercial dairy, marketing goat products, basic welding, cheese making, and organic goat farming in Costa Rica.

The workshops were fascinating, even when we lacked much of the basic knowledge to truly understand what was going on (having never delivered a kid, for example, we were quite a few steps behind the majority of the group). What was amazing to us was the passion that people invest in their herds. The majority of people who raise goats, we learned, hold down a day job, as well. The "goat habit," as I overheard someone call it, seems to be motivated purely by a love of the animals. A t-shirt for sale read "I'm an experimental: 50% human, 50% goat crazy," and, to be honest, that seemed pretty close to the truth. Everyone at the convention was just wild for goats, spending a great deal of their time and money to "promote the goat," as a bumper sticker read.

At Wednesday night's auction, the proceeds of which went to benefit the hosts of this year's meeting, the enthusiasm for goats led to some high peaks of excitement. After an hour of wine and cheese tasting, an auction of painted goat profiles was held. To everyone's amazement, some particularly nice paintings brought in as much as six hundred dollars each.

Saturday morning's Spotlight Sale, too, broke records with it's proceeds. The Spotlight Sale, in which a small number of exemplary animals are auctioned, was held after a champagne brunch on the final day of the convention. Goats with exceptional pedigrees were actually brought into the Marriott ballroom, their coats covered in Aqua Net and glitter, and led down a runway for the bidding. In the excitement, several of the goats relieved themselves beneath the spotlight. We got caught up in it, too, and momentarily entertained thoughts of bidding, but with one buck, Willow Run Chevalier Ruffian, commanding a whopping $16,000, the auction was too rich for our blood.

Though we didn't leave with a goat, painted or live, Karl and I had a wonderful time at the convention. One of the great things for us, which we imagine is also the case for quite a few of the people who attended, was simply being with so many people who share our love of goats. We feel like we made a lot of new friends in Nashville, and we look forward to visiting as many as we can in the upcoming year. —MMH

More photographs from the ADGA National Convention:

Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Friday, October 31, 2003
Video: ADGA'ers kick up their heels at the Costume Ball
Saturday, November 1, 2003

Goats Take Nashville: Day 3

For our complete report on the ADGA convention read our entry, "Goats Take Nashville: Spotlight Sale" on November 1, 2003.

Goats Take Nashville: Day 2

For our complete report on the ADGA convention read our entry, "Goats Take Nashville: Spotlight Sale" on November 1, 2003.

Goats Take Nashville: Day 1

For our complete report on the ADGA convention read our entry, "Goats Take Nashville: Spotlight Sale" on November 1, 2003.

Happy Halloween!

A Day At The Auction

Early on Saturday morning, we drove two hours up to East Corinth, a small town in the direction of Bangor, for what had been billed as a pre-Ramadan auction. The intention of the auction was to unite the large population of Muslim Somalis from Lewiston, near Portland, with goat producers around the state. Unfortunately, due to a variety of reasons, the Somalis didn't come. Talib Islam, the spokesperson for the Somali sacred community, explained that there were several critical factors that influenced their decision, one of which being the sheer distance of the auction from their community. A small group of Muslim men from various Middle Eastern and North African countries did show up, however. We didn't get a chance to speak with all of them, but of those we talked to several were graduate students from the University of Maine who were buying goats to slaughter for family gatherings in the weeks leading up to Ramadan. After the auction, those who bought animals could take them to a nearby farm, where there was an area for the goats to be slaughtered in accordance with the rules of Islam. We went with them to the farm, where a chemistry student from Morocco named Aziz explained to us the prayers and rituals surrounding a Halal slaughter.

One of the things we found most interesting about the slaughter was the change in our attitudes toward the animals as they went from livestock to meat. Once they had been bought and segregated by their destiny into one pen, we had a tremendous amount of sympathy for them. I imagined myself in their position, with only a prescribed number of minutes left in my life, and wondered if they had any idea what was coming. One of the wonderful things about Halal slaughter is that it requires other animals to be shielded from the sight of one that has been killed, but I couldn't help thinking that, as intelligent as goats are, they had figured out at least part of it; they all seemed reluctant to leave the trailer.

For Karl, the moment they'd been led to the mat on which they would killed, he felt that their fate was inevitable, and began to see them, even as they lived, as meat. It became an event for him to document, and he saw it journalistically through the lens of his camera. For me, it was the moment at which they were actually killed that brought about that change. But for both of us, though we are animal lovers, our sympathy ceased once they had been slaughtered. By the time the carcass was butchered, we saw it as meat rather than as the goat that we'd been petting less than an hour earlier.

We talked about this a lot on the drive home, and had a couple of theories about why our attitude changed. The first was that we didn't know the goats personally, so their death wasn't the same kind of loss it would have been if we'd known them better. Another was that the ritual of Halal killing, with its inclusion of a prayer of gratitude, brought a closure to the animal's life that made it somehow easier for us to watch. In either case, our reaction to the slaughter was much different than we'd expected it to be.

It was a fascinating experience, though we were disappointed that so few of the intended audience were present at the auction. There was one bright spot, however, in their absence: The Year of the Goat made the front page of the local section of the Monday edition of the Bangor Daily News. The reporter who'd come to cover the auction, similarly disappointed by the turnout, settled for us, instead. — MMH

Springtide Farm

Sitting around a long wooden table in an open, slate-tiled kitchen, drinking a beer and eating popcorn as we warm up after four hours outdoors in the autumn evening, is about the best way I can think of to end a day. It's even better when the hours you've spent outside have been scrambling around pastures and riding in a horse cart. And then, when visiting indoors with new friends, you're treated to wonderful, thought-provoking conversation. Though it's the hope of every farm visit, it's much more than we would expect from anyone. And yet, it was exactly the way we ended our visit to Springtide Farm, the home of Wendy Pieh and Peter Goth. Over the past fifteen years, Wendy, a former State legislator, and Peter, an emergency room physician, have bought about 200 acres of land around Bremen, Maine. When they bought it, the coastal land was, for the most part, rocky and wooded. As Peter explains it, they've been "farming by erasure," using the goats to clear out undergrowth, and then clearing trees to create pastures. They keep a herd of 68 cashmere goats, several Great Pyrenees, three donkeys, and by our count nine horses (they're currently working on a horse program).

Over the years, they have enlisted the help of Peter's teenaged nieces and nephews. At first, the kids were invited to come out for a few weeks in the summer, but in the last few years, both of Peter's siblings and his parents have moved to Maine, and now the kids are around full time after school and on weekends. We had scheduled our appointment so that they could be there, and on the day we visited, Andrea, a junior in high school who just moved from California, and Andrew, a sophomore from Texas, had come over to help show us around. The two amazed us with their knowledge, not only about goats, but also about the farm and its philosophy.

It was the philosophy of Wendy and Peter, and by extension of Springtide Farm, that we found compelling. The land was beautiful, and from the top of one clearing you could see the Atlantic. The horse cart was thrilling, especially for the few seconds when no one was at the reins and they just took off. The goats were a whole new breed to learn about and observe. But what really stuck with us, and kept us talking the whole ride home, was how fully formed and moral were their ideas about their animals.

We didn't really talk to them about their farming ethos until relatively late in our visit. After watching the four of them do a round of morning chores, which had been postponed until our arrival, Wendy suggested that we visit the bucks. The six of us piled into the cab of one of their pickups, and drove from the main farm, where the does and horses are kept, to a sort of satellite farm for the bucks, which is also their original piece of property and is now where Peter's parents live. Standing in the dusky field, big bucks rubbing their horns against our pants-legs, the conversation turned to slaughter.

After giving these goats a full life in a setting that even humans would envy, it is important to Wendy and Peter that their deaths are swift, tranquil, and humane. They don't sell live animals to be turned to meat. The two of them accompany each animal to the slaughter and hold the goat while it is killed. It's wrenching for them, but as Peter put it, every tear that he and Wendy shed is one that the goat doesn't. Even when it's not raised on their farm, Wendy and Peter eat only free range meats, and this sensitivity is one that they've passed along to the next generation of Peter's family. Andrea, otherwise a vegetarian, said the only time she doesn't feel uncomfortable eating meat is when she knows it comes from Springtide Farm. It's a preoccupation with the quality of life, from birth to comfortable life to as painless a death as possible, that informs the care giving to animals at Springtide Farm. And this, to us, seemed an incredibly moral approach.

An almost full moon had risen over the water, and to our right, it beat a platinum path to the shore. As we made our way back to the main farm, we continued to talk about the meat industry, and our own mortality; Peter said he wants to go quickly and then be stuffed, which brought groans from the back. To us, however, it was exactly that attitude that made this visit extraordinary. Even in levity, a profound respect for both life and death was evident in all that we saw of Springtide Farm. — MMH

Friends' Folly Farm

In addition to the general woes of the farmer, one of the difficulties that small farmers of fiber-producing animals often encounter is finding a facility that will process small amounts of fleece. Frequently, the minimum amount that can be sent for processing is far greater than a farm's entire output. Not only does this mean that farmers are forced to store the hair for several years' worth of shearings, but it also means that separating the fiber of animals with naturally interesting coloring from the more standard white becomes impossible.

Happily for the fiber farmers of Maine, there is Friends' Folly Farm. Owned by Pogo (just one name, she said, like Madonna or Cher) and her partner Marsha, Friends' Folly has both its own herd of angora goats, and in a small building to the side of the house, a cottage-industry sized carding and spinning machinery. Because the machines are small, they can be run with a fraction of the fiber needed to operate commercial mills. This allows Pogo, Marsha and their customers to keep the fibers from certain animals distinct, and even to design their own blends. On the day we visited, the mill was filled with bags of fiber in all stages of processing, and it was fascinating to see the changes that occur in the texture of fleece as it goes, in the more extreme cases, from matted hair to fuzzy yarn. Pogo said that she's seen antique carders and spinners, and the technology by which filament is turned to yarn has changed very little in the past 150 years. Pogo pressed several buttons and as machines began to whir, she showed us the path that the fibers took through various rollers and combs: The shorn fibers are washed, dried, and fed through a picker. This machine combs the fleece into a pile of gossamer, which shoots into a collection room the size of a large closet. In small batches, the picked fibers are fed through a carder, which has a series of teeth that turn the fluff into long ropes of roving. The roving can then be spun by hand, felted, or spun by machine into yarn.

Though I'd seen demonstrations of spinning before, I'd never really considered how time consuming it must have been, before the industrial age and the advent of textile mills, to make such simple things as socks or sheets. Not only would a person have needed to keep and shear a flock of sheep or goats, but they would also have had to wash, pick, card and spin the fibers before even thinking of knitting or weaving a piece of cloth. It's amazing to me that people didn't wander around naked until the nineteenth century. Even at Friends' Folly, it's not a speedy process, so I can't imagine how long and tedious it would be by hand. Perhaps, though, there's the same therapeutic value in the repetition that Paul Hopkins finds in milking. When the machinery was turned off, there was something almost primally calming about being surrounded by piles of fleece. — MMH

The Goat Superintendent

On a blustery Thursday afternoon, Karl and I made the long and winding trip to Fryeburg, a small town on the New Hampshire border which hosts the largest of Maine's agricultural fairs. When we searched the fair's web site for directions from Manchester, it said, simply, "You can't get here from there." We looked on the road atlas, however, and found a circuitous route that led, indirectly, to the fair. It was actually a treat to ride along the back roads, since autumn has arrived and the foliage is spectacular. We got a little turned around, and arrived at the fair half an hour after our scheduled interview, but we caught up with Paul Hopkins, Fryeburg's Goat Superintendent, in the goat barn, and he made the time to talk with us.

What follows is the complete transcript of our interview....

Paul Hopkins: As far as goats at the Fryeburg Fair go, we've been here since 1983. The first year that goats were here at the fairgrounds, we had just an exhibit, in half of this barn; since then we've had a sanctioned show and an exhibit. So this was our twentieth annual sanctioned show. As far as my own association with goats, we, my wife and I, were house parents at a home for boys in Limerick in the early seventies. On a farm situation, they had cattle and pigs and chickens and so forth and so on. I'd done a little bit of reading about goats, and I looked around to try to find some of them in the area. We visited a lady down in Scarborough who had a Grade A dairy for many years, her name was Lois Concannon, and we went to visit her and look at her situation. She sold milk at the health food store in the Maine mall, so she was one of the big names in the goat world in Southern Maine at that time. She didn't have any kids for sale, so she said, well you should go over and see the Allens in West Goram, so we went over there and they had just had a set of quadruplets, Nubian quadruplets. Nubian kids are all ears and legs, basically, on springs, (laughs) and we were hooked. We opened the barn door and they just kind of came tumbling out. We wound up buying two of the quadruplets and that was our start.


That was about 1975, I'd say. And we went back to them later for one milking doe, and then we just kind of had them at the farm and were milking the one and raising the other two to an age where they could be bred and so forth and so on. We found out that the national dairy goat show was at the Ohio State Fair. We'd never been to a goat show, and so we...went to the Ohio State Fair and watched a day of the judging of the national show and got even more hooked (laughs). We met some people from Virginia by the name of Sandy and Helen Muir, and they had a farm called Muir Hill, and they had some does who were in the aged doe class, that's everything over 5. And I think a five or six year old won the class, but they had like the next two or three does in line, at the national show, and those does were ten or twelve years old. That was what I was really interested in, because my theory, and I think it's borne out over time, is that if you have a goat that produces a respectable amount of milk over a long life span, that's a more economical animal than an animal that milks like a house o' fire for two or three years and then burns itself out. So longevity was one of the things that we looked for, and for longevity you need just really strong feet and legs, for one thing, because if the underpinnings don't hold up, then nothing else will. And then all the rest of the things that are on the hundred point score card. We wound up buying one doe from them, and that was the end of our goat buying, ever, while we were at it. And we bred from that and we used their bloodlines. There were about a half a dozen of their bucks available in New England at the time, and so we went to those, we took does to those bucks to be bred here and there. We traveled everywhere from Vermont to Connecticut to a couple that were here in Maine.

Not anymore, no, we did it for thirteen years, and then there was a point in time when we ended up selling the farm. We were in Waterborough at the time and moved over to Baldwin. When we sold the farm, we also sold the herd.

I work for the Spurwink School now. I work with adults with autism and other developmental challenges, and I've been with them for about eighteen years.

Well, it just means you take care of running a show. You hire a judge and take in the entries from the farms that enter, and also make sure that we have a good looking display and a barn full of healthy animals. Fortunately we also have a group of people that work really well together and it's a team effort, so it's my job to keep the team happy (laughter), so that's pretty much it. During the first three years that we've had goats on these fairgrounds, I had my herd here and we did milking demonstrations and kind of helped to manage the barn, and then after we sold the herd, I continued to come back every year to do the announcing at the goat show and also the announcing at the hog show, which I've done every year since '83, and that's one of the ways I've kept my hand in. I've been superintendent here since '98.


We had sixteen farms entered in the show this year. Last year maybe twenty-two, but we had too many goats last year, so we had to do some things to limit the size of the show this year.

Well, I think we had 289 in the show last year, and 202 in the show this year, which is still a very full day, but it's much more manageable.

The quality of the livestock has really improved enormously. Just, that's taken a quantum leap. There are not too many folks who make a living off of goat farming in Maine. We don't have, for instance, a strong cheese industry around which there's a strong network of co-ops or anything like what they do over in Vermont. So people have to fend for themselves. Fortunately Maine's good for that. There's a lot of really independent people who've got some pluck and entrepreneurship. Helen Ramsdell, who has the stalls of animals just on the other side of this wall here, makes soft cheeses and sells them all over the local area here. She's just in Denmark, so that goes to farmer's markets, farm stands, gourmet restaurants, and so forth and so on.


I know that she's licensed to sell the cheese, so there's some inspection involved. Because of the process, there's not the sort of heavy regulation that there would be for selling grade A milk, for instance. Then you're talking about a lot of concrete and stainless steel, and that starts to get expensive. So, we have a number of people making soaps to sell, Helen's daughter Vicki does that and there's some folks up on Verona Island who do that. And there are a few other folks here and there, some of them I just kind of stumble across now and then. So you have a number of little pockets. They don't all bump into each other because you have some people who really enjoy showing in fairs and so forth, and you've got some people who really don't want to leave their farm with their animals at all, and just do their thing there, which is just fine, too. I kind of enjoy the mix and mingle. It's fun to see some of the same people each year, and see how they're doing with their breeding program, and what else is going on in their lives.


I don't know really anything about that. I haven't run into them, but I think that any sorts of things like that where people can cooperate and share education, share promotion, are positive steps to take. A number of the folks here have raised goats for a good long time, and in turn have sold breeding stock to people getting their start, the Cassette family in Saco, Maine for example.[They were] some of the first people that we met. Wonderful folks, and they sell a little milk at the farm, but they don't produce milk products, they raise breeding stock. That's their thing. But, in turn, their breeding stock has provided the basis for a number of other farms to get their start. The way I look at it is that all those little bits and pieces fit together in some way, but not all of the bits and pieces know about each other (laughter). That's life, I guess.

There are more and more. For the last three years, we've had at least one pen of meat goats in the barn. And I specifically asked for that. One of my dairy goat exhibitors also raises Boers, and since she did, I asked if rather than leaving one of her other breeds here, she'd just bring a pen of Boers for the week so we'd have the variety in the barn. It's gaining some popularity, and there's more and more of an ethnic market. Certainly in Maine it's not developing in quite the same ways that it always has around major cities: Boston, New York, Washington. There's an enormous demand for goat meat in the Washington area; we've talked with people who have big farms down there and they've converted everything to meat because that's where the money is. Unfortunately at this point in Maine, much of the demand is among a group of people who don't have an awful lot of money to spend on it. And so the economies haven't come together in such a way that they make for the best, mutually advantaged fit yet. That will probably happen over time, but it's not there yet.

Well I'm really interested to hear how it goes. What I hear through the grapevine is that dairy goat people have mixed feelings about that because they don't see the money there yet to make it worthwhile and they already have some established markets for cull kids in the spring that are based around Greek Easter and so forth and so on. And that's something that has been in place for at least decades and maybe longer, a pretty standard set of buyers, some in state and some out of state, and some markets organized around that. Some of the best situations, I think, are places where you can set up individual arrangements with people who live in your area. We raised Nubians, but we sold meat kids to a family in Sanford at one time that ran a local restaurant. They always wanted a goat at Easter time and whenever they had a big group of family and friends; that was part of their culture. That was kind of my own individual niche market at the time and those sorts of things I think are the best things to rely on, the individual things if you can find them.


Well, I think I have to answer that in two different ways. I think that my favorite thing about goats, as far as raising them, is just the personality of goats. It's in a class by itself. They're very very bright, they're a little too bright for their own good at times. And they become family members, especially in a small dairy herd situation where you're handling them at least twice a day. That and the aspect of having a regular set of things to do, twice, there's a certain amount of therapy in that, if you're willing to look at it that way, if it's not all drudgery for you. Why would you do it if it was? So there's that aspect, and then the other aspect is just the people. There's some terrific goat people in the state of Maine, all over the state. They're almost uniformly a really intelligent, creative crowd, and funny. We have a very good time, even show days. Our judge the other days was here from Minnesota, Doug Thompson from Clearbrook, Minnesota, and he commented a couple of times during the day on just how friendly the exhibitors were with each other. They're in competition with each other, and you know how competition is, sometimes people can be really kind of uptight, but I've rarely found that to be the case around Maine folks who do the fair circuit, anyway. It's a pretty loose bunch, and a lot of good natured banter in the ring, and so forth and so on, and just some really great people.

Oh Lord. I have friends and people I know in all of the different commodity groups around the fairgrounds like this. But this is the group that I've spent more time with and so I don't even know if I want to get into the business of making comparisons about one group with another. (laughter) I think I'll just leave it that my own personal experience has been very very positive in that regard. And of course the other thing that the judge said was that the spirit of the exhibitors was really good, but also this context, this fair, is kind of in a class by itself. And he said, as far as the fair goes, whatever you've got going here, figure out what it is and keep it going, because he's all over the country judging, and he hasn't seen anything quite like this. Which is true. It's a neat mix here, you'll see more working steers and oxen here than you'll see maybe anywhere else in the world. It's unique in that aspect, and it's really homey, traditional. Everything's still on kind of a human scale, the little one and two story buildings everywhere, you don't have a lot of bricks and concrete. I've been to some fairs out in the midwest, in Indiana and Ohio, and they're terrific, there's a lot to see there, but it doesn't have this kind of country feel to it.

Yeah, the ambiance is a little better here. I like it.

The Common Ground Fair

Since our arrival in Maine, Karl and I have been making the rounds of the local fairs. Maine has twenty-four licensed agricultural fairs, held nearly every weekend from mid-summer to early autumn. Combined, the fairs attract close to one million visitors, and are seen by their organizers as one of the most effective ways to promote Maine's diverse agriculture. At the three fairs we've visited--the Windsor Fair, the Litchfield Fair, and the Common Ground Fair — we've seen an incredibly wide variety of locally farmed animals and plants. In the vegetable realm, Maine farmers produce everything from blueberries to potatoes to maple syrup. They breed honey bees, exotic chickens, dairy cows, and myriad other beasts. They train horse teams to compete pulling sledges that weigh up to 8,500 pounds. And, of course, they raise goats. At the Windsor and Litchfield fairs, which are a blend of traditional country fair and carnival midway, our experience with goats was limited to the petting farm. It was very exciting to hold baby goats for the first time and to feed them from ice cream cones full of alfalfa pellets, but we didn't get a chance to talk to any goat farmers, which was a disappointment.

The Common Ground Fair was a different story. The fair itself is a more political festival, organized by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association to encourage organic farming and "green solutions" in the state. There were composting and worm farming booths, exhibits on solar and wind power, and several parked electric cars. Improvised bands of folk musicians played in a field; the food vendors sold grilled eggplant sandwiches and fruit smoothies.

Wandering around the fairgrounds, we met several goat farmers, two of whom raise goats for fibers. We hadn't yet spoken with the owners of any angora or cashmere goats, so meeting the women of Friends' Folly Farm (angora) and Springtide Farm (cashmere) offered a great opportunity to expand our goat horizons. The third farmer we spoke with, Charles Hopkins of Tramp's Rest, keeps a herd of Swiss dairy goats and is also a Certified Maine Guide. He had originally planned to use part of his herd as pack goats for hikers, but the idea never gained momentum, so now he concentrates on the dairy. We had never considered goats as pack animals, but Charles said that there were actually several farms in Maine that were experimenting with it.

What thrilled us about our experience at the Common Ground Fair was that, though we've been immersing ourselves in goat culture for a month, we were able to find three farms that were using goats in ways we hadn't encountered. The versatility of the goat is truly astonishing. Over the next few weeks we'll be visiting these farms, and we're really looking forward to learning more about their various goat industries--and picking up some more yarn for the puppets. — MMH

International Goat Days Festival: Day Three

Sunday morning at the fairground was pretty quiet. The majority of events had taken place on Saturday, and with the threat of more stormy weather, many of the booths had packed up early. Every few spaces, the tents gave way to a patch of grass, marked in orange spray paint with the name of a missing vendor. The only events scheduled before noon were Cowboy Church, an antique tractor display, another anvil shoot, and the meat show, which meant more Boer judging. In truth, by this point we were a little goated out. We still laughed when we passed an open trailer whose doors appeared to read "Caution: Show Goats on Oats." We still marveled at the immensity of the Boer bucks, their massive chests and gnarled horns lined up for judging. But, as we rolled up our tent and scrounged for a breakfast funnel cake, we were about ready to go. The amazing thing about Goat Days was the incredible breadth of events. Goats were incorporated into every aspect of the festival, and for the people involved, there were goats in every corner of their lives. Goats were food, both meat and dairy. Goats were entertainment, in races, costumes and parades. They were judged on their adherence to their breed's ideals, in the meat and dairy goat shows, and on their deviance from it, in the largest goat contest. They were both serious and frivolous, spanning the spectrum from champion to clown.

We spent, ultimately, 58 hours on the road, traveling 3230.8 miles from Maine to Millington and back again. And in the middle, we found what we sought: goat culture. — MMH

International Goat Days Festival: Day Two

Clad proudly in our Year of the Goat t-shirts, we started the day at the Lion's Club pancake breakfast. After grazing on some pancakes and (pork, not goat) sausage, Karl tried his hand at the Boy Scout's "pill" flipping contest. For a dollar donation, he was given three tries to flick dried goat droppings off his thumb and down a sandy stretch, where their distance was measured. To help the Scouts find the "pills," they had been painted orange, and we didn't realize until afterwards that they were using real poop. Karl's best flip was an impressive 37 feet, but he was four feet shy of the winner, a teenager whose pill dropped at 41 feet. At the other end of the fairground, the "under eight" 4-H children were doing some final grooming to their goats and preparing to begin the showmanship portion of the Boer goat judging. We had heard that the Honorable Judge Anton Ward was one of the best in the American Boer Goat Association, and there was excitement in the air as we approached the green and white striped judging tent. The mother of several 4-H "Goat Getters" gave Karl some tips on showmanship: always have the goat between you and the judge, maintain eye contact, only walk around the front of your goat, always adjust the outside leg's position first, leave enough space between the goats so that the judge can look from all angles.

If there is anything more adorable than small animals and children in costumes, it is a group of small animals being arranged by small, serious children in Wranglers, hand-tooled leather belts and 4-H t-shirts. The looks of intense concentration on their faces as they tried to remember everything and keep their unruly goats under control were so sweet and earnest that they were nearly heartbreaking. The judge seemed to think this as well, and before announcing his placements he said that of all the categories he judged, this was one of the most difficult.

Having never seen a goat show before, it was fascinating for us to watch Anton Ward evaluate the animals and their handlers. He is South African, and judges goats in the South African style, which means that in categories other than showmanship he allows the animals to run freely around the pen, letting them "show themselves" (or, as Karl put it, "they turn them loose and poke them with sticks"). Before the actual goat showing, however, there was adult showmanship, for which Judge Ward asked the help of the 4-H winners. Inviting the children into the ring, Judge Ward explained what qualities he looked for in each handler, and then had the children consider each entry. It was a great way to teach showmanship and, as the commentator kept saying, "the opportunity of a lifetime."

By this point in the day, the contestants in the goat barbecue cookoff had been at it for several hours. We took a break from the judging to have a look at the barbecue teams. Each crew had a grill set up on a platform, with a tent and tables spread out in front. The grills looked like giant steel drums that had been turned on their sides and hinged to open, with a door in the back into which hot coals were periodically shoveled. We had stopped in front of one, the Tennessee Trash Cookers, to look at their vast collection of trophies from years past, many of them topped with golden goats, when the clouds that had become increasingly threatening opened into torrential rains.

John Abel, one of the founding Trash Cookers, invited us to take refuge in his tent, and while we waited for the weather to clear, he explained a little about goat meat preparation (most important: clear the skin of all hair!), and regaled us with stories of previous Goat Days. John, his wife, and another couple had been competing in the festival's cookoff for years, and had won in various categories and under various, often soggy, conditions. As he passed through the rain between the tent and the barbecue, John said that this was nothing compared to a few years ago, when they'd been nearly a foot deep in water. Apparently, it always rains on Goat Days.

We sloshed our way from the barbecue back to the Boer judging, where the pen was full of water and recalcitrant goats. Goats hate to be wet, and though Judge Ward was splashing through the ankle-deep muck and hay to observe them, the goats were mostly trying to find dry ground at the edges of the pen. A few minutes after we arrived, volunteers began moving the pen to an area that was higher and a little sloped, about twenty yards away.

The pen was reassembled and the judging had been underway for about fifteen minutes when there was a loud boom, which set off dozens of goats and car alarms. Karl and I, less than a month out of New York City, jumped, but no one else seemed to be nervous. A few minutes later, there was another boom and we turned toward the source in time to see a huge anvil flying through the air like something from Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner. It was noon. It was the National Championship Anvil Shoot. It was one hundred pounds of pointy metal shooting from a cannon into the sky.

The anvils kept flying, and soon, as the afternoon's events picked up, we were shuttling back and forth across the fairgrounds, from the children's milking contest to the largest goat judging, back to the adult's milking contest (which we only caught a few minutes of), and finally to the barbecue pit.

At three o'clock, courtesy of the Tennessee Trash Cookers, who sadly didn't win the cookoff this year, we had our first taste of goat. We had been a little anxious about trying it--what if we didn't like it?--but it was tasty, especially slathered in their secret sauce. The meat was brown and a little fibrous, crispy on the sauce end and moist in the center. It had the consistency of pulled pork, with a little hint of goatiness to its flavor. I'll confess it was pretty strange to be eating an animal that we had been petting all day, that we'd seen dressed up in costumes and that the whole festival was celebrating. But we had little time for philosophical musings, since the goat chariot races were being announced and John Abel was shooing us over to the course, an elliptical track marked with bales of hay.

During the race, each goat pulls a chariot in which the driver kneels while holding the reins. (Chariot blueprints and the official dimensions of the race track can be found on the Goat Days web site.) The goat races were serious business, and brought competitors from farther away than we'd imagined. A man named Jose was rumored to be the favorite, having won the last few years with goats he brought up from Texas.

The purse was a thousand dollars to the winner, and several hundred to second and third places, but the racing, because of the goats themselves, was unpredictable. Some goats who are fast and focused in practice get distracted during the race, or simply stop half way. Others begin munching the hay that marks the course. One kept rearing and nearly overturning its chariot. Two became tangled in each other's horns. The races were mayhem and the results were surprising. Neither of Jose's goats even got off the line. In the final race, one of the goats sped three quarters of the course and then just stopped. Touching the goats with anything but the reins is illegal, so the driver simply shouted encouragement and curses, and kept slapping the reins as the other goats caught up and passed.

The ultimate winner this year was Kenneth Thompson, of Sommerville, Tenn., driving a goat named Power Stroke. With this win, Kenneth, a four time champion in the 1990s, broke out of a four year slump. He'd only been training with Power Stroke for nine days, he said, and he claimed they'd barely practiced, but somehow the team emerged victorious.

Our team was again exhausted by seven. We'd been on our feet since the early morning pill flip, and by sunset, after some more goat barbecue and inadvertent participation in a Boy Scout flag retirement ceremony, we were ready to call it a day.

On the way back to our tent, we found that another couple had set up camp not far from ours. They were sitting outside as we walked by, and tethered to their van was a little goat who began, as we came nearer, to retreat shyly between the wheels. They hadn't meant to buy a goat, the woman said, but everything had fallen into place and now they were just trying to think of a good name. Zipped into our tent, we fell to sleep a little bit envious, dreaming of goats and wishing we had a kid of our own.

International Goat Days Festival: Day One

At three-thirty on Friday afternoon, two and a half days and 1584.2 miles from Maine, we arrived at the fourteenth annual International Goat Days Family Festival in Millington, Tennessee. The previous week, I had spoken with a woman in the Goat Days office who advised us to arrive before four o'clock to get a camping spot, so we'd sped from Asheville to secure our space. As it turned out, our efforts were unnecessary since we were the only campers the first night, with an area roughly the size of a football field in which to pitch our tent. After twenty-nine hours of driving, we were finally there. The International Goat Days Festival was founded by Millington native Babe Howard, the owner of the local phone company, the stadium where the festival is held, and a herd of fainting goats. When we talked to Jerry Moore, the festival's director, he explained that Mr. Howard had at first just wanted to hold goat races, and the idea for a festival had grown from there. It became international because there was a Mexican team entered in the first race and barbecue cook off. Drawing between six and seven thousand visitors annually, Goat Days now includes costume contests for goats, goat barbecue and the "cabrito challenge" (where contestants are given a few pounds of goat meat and free reign to prepare it as they choose), a Boy Scout sponsored goat "pill" flipping contest, milking contests, dairy and meat goat shows, and of course the goat chariot races. It's also become the sister festival of Puck Fair, an 800 year old celebration of goats, in Killorglin, Ireland, which the organizers of Millington's festival have visited.

Goat Days has the feel of a county fair, which, aside from the caprine focus, is pretty much what it is. There were Boy Scouts and local charity fund raisers, and a tent of Baptists giving out cold bottles of "Living Water" inscribed with Bible verses. After setting up our tent, we wandered around the booths and pens, getting our bearings and talking to some families from the Tennessee Dairy Goat Association (TDGA). One of the women was struggling to get her kid, a goat that must have been just a few months old, into a child's cow costume. While we talked to her, she put the costume on three goats in succession, embarrassing one little Nubian so much that she lay down and hung her cow-covered head. Finally, she strapped the costume to a larger Nubian, securing it with string rather than squeezing the goat into the body of the costume. She'd just finished tying the last hoof when the kickoff parade was announced. The parade was casual, and included goats and children in costume, Shriners dressed as hillbilly clowns, and the trolley that brought people in from the parking lot. It lasted about five minutes, after which the festivities officially commenced.

At seven, a crowd gathered around a pen near the stage and the Best Dressed Goat contest was held. One by one, goats were led into the ring, each dressed in a costume, though with varying degrees of elaboration. There was an angel, a clown, a horse, a purple dinosaur, a World War II fighter pilot, and the cow, complete with a sign that said Got Milk! I'm not sure if there's anything cuter than small animals in costumes being led by small children in costumes; Karl must have used an entire role of film during the fifteen minute contest. After much deliberation, the judges announced Li'l Bit, in the dinosaur costume, as third place winner, Emmett, the horse, as second, and Charlie Brown, the fighter pilot, as first. The women who showed Li'l Bit and Charlie Brown scooped them up like babies and went off to find some dinner, while Emmett, who was scheduled to pull a chariot the next day, had his picture taken with toddlers sitting in his saddle.

Karl and I went in search of barbecue and ended up at the "Bad Pigs" barbecue pit, run by the Millington Police Department. Their booth was marked by a cutout of a pig wearing sunglasses, and was crowned by three flashing blue lights. They were competing in the barbecue and the cabrito challenge the following day (and would go on to win with their Goat Wellington), but on Friday night they were simply raising funds for the department and enjoying the festival. For a minimal donation, we gorged ourselves on police ribs, pulled pork, and delicious spicy beans, and listened to them discuss the evening's barbecue shortcomings. One officer, in a resigned and serious voice, kept shrugging his shoulders and repeating, "I put 'em on too late, and I'm cookin' 'em slow."

After our pigout, we poked around the booths a little, but were really too tired to do much more than buy our souvenir t-shirts and tote bags. As exhausted as we were, on the way back to our tent we were sidetracked by the Boer goat pens, where farmers and 4-H kids were washing their goats for the morning competitions. It was a flurry of shampooing and hoof trimming, udder clipping and horn oiling, all punctuated by plaintive bleating. Even while they were tidying their goats, nearly everyone we spoke with was more than happy to answer our questions, often in more detail than we even understood. It was really encouraging to talk with goat farmers, but it also cast our ignorance into sharp relief. We have a lot to learn about goats, specifically, but also livestock farming in general. Becky Sweet, the owner, with her husband Roger, of Sweetheart Farms in Arkansas, told us that she still studies up on goats for two or three hours a night. This night, however, there was no studying for us. We were lucky to stagger, yawning, back to our tent, where we unstuffed our sleeping bags and passed out at eight-thirty. — MMH

The Litchfield Fair

The Windsor Fair

Skyland Farms

We spent our first few days of unemployment upstate, visiting Karl's friend Ames, who built a cabin, by hand, north of the Catskills. Ames told us when we arrived that we were just up the road from Skyland Farms, a Boer goat farm with a herd of around 250 head of goats. On the last day of our visit, a perfectly clear blue late summer afternoon, we left Godfrey with Ames and drove over to the farm to poke around a little and take a look at the goats. Though we had already quit our jobs and given up our apartment to investigate the world of goats, this was actually our first visit to a goat farm. Skyland Farms is owned by Dave Bernier, a former Army Ranger who also has a business in roofing and waterproofing. The farm just about breaks even, he says, and without another occupation, he wouldn't make enough to survive. He got into goats about five years ago, after fifteen years farming pigs in the Berkshires. Originally, he'd thought to have dairy goats, so he bought a few Nubians. His wife had begun making cheese with their milk, but when they learned the cost and heavy regulation of dairy equipment, they switched over to meat goats. Now Dave's wife makes sausages and stews that she sells at local farmers' markets (along with amazing cookies that she brought out to us while we were talking--chocolate chip with fresh mint leaves in them!), and they sell the meat of their goats, which they have butchered locally.

Dave does everything as naturally as possible, including insemination, weening, and feed. What surprised me the most about his farm was how humane it seemed. Karl and I had both just read a book about the dairy industry upstate, Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf, by Peter Lovenheim, which was interesting and in many ways infuriating. The contrast between that world of semen straws, udder pumps, cauterized horns and all-corn diets, and Skyland's wandering families of horned, alfalfa-chewing goats was incredible. Dave's laissez-faire attitude toward his animals even includes leaving his first Nubians mixed in the herd, and as we walked around with him, we saw various kids nurse from the dairy goats' teats. The goats, along with five llamas and two Maremma herd dogs, pretty much had the run of the barn and the field; the only ones who were segregated were the bucks, who take turns in pairs living in the herd for a month at a time (this is how Dave keeps track of his goats' parentage). He says he takes out a few goats at a time for slaughter, but usually waits until they're at least a year old, and never culls the herd of undesirables. As he talked, Dave seemed genuinely respectful of the animals he breeds, and the atmosphere, especially on this warm afternoon that smelled of hay, was utterly tranquil.

We were very lucky in that the morning we visited, Dave had a scheduled appointment with Tim and Colleen Avazian, a pig-farming couple, also from upstate New York, who are interested in starting a herd of Boer goats. They had come to ask questions, get advice, and look at Dave's herd, from which they were considering buying their first goats. It was amazing for us to follow them around and hear, up close, the concerns of people who are starting out as goat farmers. The Avazians seemed pretty excited about the goats so we exchanged email addresses with them, and hope to stay in touch as they make their decisions.

As it turns out, when we got back to Brooklyn we discovered that we'd actually visited Dave's web site, and even bookmarked it on the computer. It was just an incredible coincidence that we ended up there, and a really lucky one, since our first experience with goats turned out to be such a pleasant one. —MMH