A 24/7 Goat Farmer with a Full-Time Scientist Job
What? Two full-time jobs? Sounds uncommon doesn't it? Well, it's not. More than 80% of farm families rely on off-farm work for income and benefits. What does that say? We need to pay our farmers more? We need a better farm system? You be the judge.
When you meet Maria, you are going to have a lot of respect for what she does on the farm, how she treats her animals, how studious she and her husband are about learning their trade and trying new things. But what you are going to be most impressed with is the intersection between her farm job and her off-farm job. I sure was.
I am so glad you are here to walk a mile in a farmer's shoes with me. Big shoes. I'm glad I know this now. I think you will be glad to know it too.
xoxo
GUESTS
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart of Gorgeous Goat Creamery in Stockton, NJ
Find her on Instagram @gorgeous_goat
BTW you can find Talk Farm to Me and Farm Girl there too: @talkfarmtome and @xoxofarmgirl
PHOTOS
The photos here were used with permission by the farmer. Thank you, Maria.
MUSIC
The music in this episode was created specifically for Talk Farm to Me by professional musician and songwriter Douglas Haines via Fiverr.
SPECIAL THANKS
Always thank you to the amazing farmers who have been on any episode of Talk Farm to Me. Thank you Maria for joining me for some Straight Talk (and for a live feed from the barn)! Looking forward joining you again live when the kids arrive!
TRANSCRIPT
As always, a transcript of the episode follows. Please forgive any typos.
Straight Talk with Goat Farmer Maria Stewart of Gorgeous Goat Creamery
Season 4, Episode 3
Farm Girl:
Here we are with another Talk Farm to Me: Straight Talk episode, and I'm your host, Farm Girl. Today we meet New Jersey dairy goat farmer, Maria Stewart of Gorgeous Goat Creamery. She and her husband farm goats, harvest their milk and make cheese, yogurt, and even soap. They have their own on-farm creamery and sell their products at farmer's markets seasonally. This is just part of the story, let's jump in. I understand that long ago you rented some goats to clear some brush and then your hobby with goats started and it kind of expanded from there, give me a little background on what happened?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
Yeah, so that's a story, right? We live in West Central New Jersey. This is an area that's actually fairly rural, but most people's ideas of New Jersey are the Jersey shore, the terrible interstate corridors, dense populations, and it is the most densely populated state in the United States, actually. But we have this little pocket of paradise, it's 17 acres. When we moved to this property, we inherited a forest management plan from the previous owners that allowed us to have a tax break. And we said, "Okay, we can do that, we know how to use chainsaws." Well, one of the things was to manage the invasive brambly plants, and these things are huge, they're nasty. So after one season of doing the Roundup application, I said, "No, thank you. I don't really want to wear a backpack sprayer and a Tyvek suit." So we looked at other options, and here's the kicker we didn't ever actually rent the goats from someone else, we just dove in and we got goats.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
Goats are fantastic, they can eat all that brambly foliage, spines included. And they have this appetite that every day they want to go out and eat the forest. So that was a few years ago, fast forward to now, we still use our goats to manage our own property, keep the invasive plants at bay, and we are also looking at expanding to offer that as a for hire service, rent goats from our herd out to other landowners. But really the thing that's driving our business is that we have a goat dairy operation now, and we make cheese with our goat's milk from the farm, as well as bottled pasteurized goat's milk.
Farm Girl:
And tell me about your goat herd. What kind of goats you have? Are you choosing them for dairy or for bramble eating? What's the story with your girls and boys there?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
We have 26 goats, so it's a fairly modest herd. When you think about commercial dairy production, we actually keep all of our male goats because they are the primary forest eaters and they have great appetites. I mean, you can think about like teenage boys, they have great appetites too. So we have mostly Alpine breed, they're a standard sized dairy goat. A very balanced milk profile, decent milk producers, and they come in lots of different colors. So some of our goats are all brown, some are brown and white, brown, black and white, spotted like a cow, and that was one of the attributes that we were interested in. Obviously, there's other breeds that offer better milk production, but they're just fun to look at. So we were a little bit vain in choosing Alpines, but we wanted the standard sized goats because the brambly plants are huge and we needed big goats to eat them.
Farm Girl:
That's awesome. Are you expecting any baby goats soon? I've been seeing goats popping out on Instagram everywhere, and I'm just wondering if we're going to have that with you goats?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
Well, absolutely. So as a dairy operation, our does do get bred every fall. That means after five months of gestation, they'll have their babies. This year was amazing, all six of our does that we were breeding went into their cycles within four days of each other, and all of the breeding's stuck. So that means at the end of March, we're going to have baby bonanza, six does kidding. And one of our gals, she's so big. She was showing a month into her pregnancy, I'm going, "Oh lady, what's going on here? You're looking really big and it's only a month in." She's so wide, I'm sure she's got triplets or quads. And I just hope that everyone's happy and healthy, and so is mom.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
But end of March, no sleep for the people, that's for sure. Because we're midwives, when we have kid goats on the way, someone's always out with the goats kind of keeping an eye on them. We have a goat cam, but if something's going wrong, you still got to get suited up with your barn boots and all that. And we don't want to necessarily miss out on being able to help if we need to.
Farm Girl:
Wow. I understand that you were an athlete back in the day and I've seen you having to really use some of your athletic talents to feed your goats. Tell me about your routine with feeding your goats on a regular basis? Before the baby goats come, because I know that's exhausting, but what's your regular routine like with your goats?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
Let's see, just to put it bluntly, they're very demanding in terms of what they eat. Our gentlemen goats get spent grain, so the leftovers for making beer that we get from a local microbrewery mixed with a little bit of molasses. And 13 of them, they probably are getting about 12 to 15 pounds of spent grain twice a day, and that is definitely an athletic endeavor. So you have to have some major defensive moves to make sure they're not putting their face in the five gallon pail of spent grain as you try and distribute it to their different food dishes. It's hilarious to watch.
Farm Girl:
And what was your sport?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
So I was an endurance athlete, so not a soccer player, I could have definitely used soccer skills with feeding the goat. But I was a cross country skier, cross country runner, and then got into cycling and triathlon a little bit later. And now I've kind of set those aside and then I do goats all the time.
Farm Girl:
Well, it certainly pays off. So you were doing a little bit of independent sport, a lot of fitness and a little bit of team sport all thrown in, and now you've got that with your goats.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
Indeed. So the cross training that I might've done when I was a competitive athlete that definitely pays off now with the goats, because you have to be agile and nimble. You got to have your speed, you got to have your endurance, you got to have your strength, so goat farming is a pretty physical activity.
Farm Girl:
Absolutely. And you're milking your goats when they're milking, you're milking them twice a day, is that correct?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
Indeed, so they prefer to be milked at 6:30 AM and 6:30 PM. Now that doesn't always happen because life gets in the way, and then they get kind of grumpy. You can imagine that. And it's really the worst between when they've just kidded and about three months into their lactation. After that, their milk production starts to drop off a little bit for the season so you have a little more wiggle room. But we do milk them twice a day, and our Alpines in peak production will give us each about one and a half gallons per goat per day. So we're still a pretty small dairy operation, when you think, we're milking six goats, and at that volume, it's about nine gallons of milk per day. Nothing astronomical, but we do all of our milk processing on site so that means we are making a fair amount of cheese and bottled milk.
Farm Girl:
And so are you storing the milk and doing bigger batches or do you do a batch every day in terms of processing?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
Yeah, that kind of depends. A lot of times we will process after two days of milk collection, because then that'll give us 15 to 20 gallons of milk for us to work with, and that's a nice batch size. Our equipment can handle up to 30 gallons of milk in both our bulk tank and our pasteurizer, so we can wait till about three days, which is actually the limit for raw milk storage. You have to process within 72 hours, those are the regulations. So we could wait for three days, but if that gets to be unwieldy, it's a lot of milk. And then if you screw up, it's a big screw up.
Farm Girl:
Makes sense. So you are, in addition to being an athlete, you're also a scholar. You have a PhD in nutrition and biochemistry, is that right?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
So my PhD is nutritional biochemistry, essentially. It's a major in nutrition and a minor in biochemistry. So I can't take credit for two PhDs, I wish I could. But it's a combined kind of interdisciplinary PhD.
Farm Girl:
Right, I understand biochemistry is really, really tough. And you make it through that, you can make it through anything.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
Well, here's the funny thing, when I was an undergrad I bounced around a whole bunch of majors. I mean, who hasn't when they were in college? And I ended up choosing biochemistry in part, because it was really hard. I mean, that's silly, right? But it turned out to be a fascinating field of study. It's essentially understanding what happens in your cells with all the different chemical reactions that occur to convert fat into energy, for example. And that's where the nutrition interest came in that I said, "Oh." The cellular metabolism is really cool, but let's bring this into more of a practical context. And then you zoom out a little bit and you think about, "Okay, well, what I eat is what my cells use for food, so let's understand that a little bit more." So I'm not a dietician, I definitely don't want to tell people what to eat, that's someone else's job. But I really love understanding what happens to food after you eat it.
Farm Girl:
So that practical application means that you have a pretty significant off-farm job. So you're doing goats at 6:30 in the morning and then getting to work. Tell me about what you do off the farm.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
So off the farm, I am a research scientist. I work at a food ingredients company and I manage a team of scientists that are exploring new ways of creating food ingredients that might go into your favorite snacks or breakfast cereal, or maybe a ready meal. And these are kind of the behind the scenes side of the food industry. Most of us think about the food industry as what we buy at the supermarket in the package, but all those packaged foods are made from ingredients, and that's the sector that I work in, the actual making of the food ingredients. So going back to the schedule, it's a little bit of a hustle and some days it's a little bit frantic. Some days I have to pass it off to my husband in terms of the goat chores and say, "This is what I got done, this is what I didn't get done, and I hope you'll pick up the rest, thanks."
Farm Girl:
Tell me a little bit more about your work. Do the people that you work with, are they like scratching their heads that you're also a goat farmer?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
That's a great question. I think it gives us something to talk about when we're chatting before a meeting might start or just wanting to find out how was your weekend. It makes it easy. The team of people I work with can always ask me, "Well, how are your goats?" And it's almost like if you have children or maybe you travel a lot. I mean, pre-COVID, like a, "Where did you go this weekend?" Those are the kind of easy questions you can ask a colleague and usually get a pretty fun answer. I'm sure I have colleagues that think I'm nuts, but the goats bring me a lot of joy so it's a good balance between the pressures of working in science and industry versus being a farmer.
Farm Girl:
I've talked to a lot of farmers where they're like, "Yep, we don't go on vacation. Our job is 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There are no sick days. There are no vacation days." I think I'm actually quoting a farmer that I interviewed or several. And I'm curious what your thoughts are about how common this is with farmers to have a job like yours off the farm?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
So if you look at some of the USDA statistics, between 80 and 90% of farm families have at least one adult employed off the farm, and so I feel that this is actually a really common scenario that we just don't talk about. And it's kind of a shame because it brings a lot of interesting complexity into agriculture. And maybe it's just, maybe it's unjust, and we could talk about that probably in another podcast episode. But I think it is more common than we realize, and not everyone has the same types of jobs. Some might be school teachers, so they might have more seasonal employment off the farm. Others might be more on an hourly basis, and so they have different pressures and constraints that they're balancing with their farming. Yeah, I would say it's something we don't talk about a lot and we probably don't talk about it enough.
Farm Girl:
Why do you think that is?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
That's a good question. I wonder if it is in part because in some ways farming is romanticized. You see photographs of the wheat fields in the sunset and some of the animals and how cute they are and how fun they are, and honestly, if you look at some of the farming Instagram feeds, it looks like it's a ton of fun. But we tend not to talk about how hard the work is, and then I don't know that we always reveal, what is it actually like to try and make ends meet? And financially, that's typically the reason someone's going to be working off the farm. I mean, I'll tell you that's the reason I'm working off the farm, it's not because I like to balance two lifestyles.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
But I think it would behoove us to have these conversations more and think about what is the cost of our food, and how do we make agriculture actually a sustainable profession where if an entire family wanted to work the farm, they could support themselves doing that. And I think there's ways to do it, but it's not that common. And it's a challenge, especially when growing seasons vary from year to year and your production is going to vary.
Farm Girl:
Right. And the work that you're doing is very interesting to me, that you're working in the food space developing new kinds of ingredients, like you said, for maybe some snacks that I have had. And at the same time you're creating on your farm this very super natural whole food that comes from animals that are healthy and eating forage and beer grains, they're recycling. So are there, how do I say this, conflicts between those two things, the creating ingredients in your job and the creating the goat, this sort of pure natural food?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
So I would say there are as many conflicts as there are aspects that are complimentary. So I mean working in the food industry and working in a sector that is very large sale, there's aspects about it that don't align with my personal values of know your farmer, know your food. But at the same time, I recognize that not everybody has access to the products that I make on the farm nor could they afford them, because small farmstead dairy products are pretty expensive, they're not going to be the same as your supermarket cheddar cheese.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
So I recognize there's a place for both scales of food production. I think sometimes I'm challenged when I'm thinking about sustainability aspects, and knowing more about industrial food supply, I say, "Wow, there's a lot of work we need to do on the industrial food side to really be a better custodian of the planet." But I think that is complimentary to what I'm working with on the small scale farm, thinking about regenerative farming practices, and then trying to figure out, how do I leverage what I know about small-scale farming and bring ideas into the large food industry? And I mean, it is possible, you just have to start those conversations and be persistent with those conversations.
Farm Girl:
And how is that going?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
I would say it's going fairly well. In the food industry where I work our customers are other companies. And one of the nice things that I'm seeing in so many conversations with customers is that environmental impact and sustainability are actually something that large food manufacturers are rating their suppliers on. So at my organization, we can't be idle and not be adapting to things that are happening with climate and crop production and sustainable means of creating the raw materials that then are going into the packaged goods you might buy at the supermarket.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
So I think we're moving in the right direction, but it's a big food system so it's going to take time to really start being able to see these changes, because it's all incremental at first. But I think the positive thing is these conversations are happening, and in the food industry, sustainability is now an aspect that is part of a conversation. It's essentially part of a sales pitch, "You want to buy my ingredients, well you might also want to know what we're doing to improve our sustainable sourcing. And I'll tell you about that too, as well as how great this protein ingredient is."
Farm Girl:
It sounds like you're really necessary there. I mean, I can't think of anyone better than someone who's on the front lines of farming in a regenerative environment to be able to infuse a sort of bigger corporate environment with some really good firsthand knowledge and experience. I'm curious about your team, so you work with a team of scientists, and maybe you'll find this funny but I'm serious, are you learning from your goats for example? And managing this herd and all of their needs elements that might be helpful managing a team of really smart people?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
I think the most important thing that transcends all the different work I do is listening. And when I'm with the goats, I'm listening to them. Listening to what they're saying, "..." Like that. Or listening to their body language, how are they holding their ears? Are they walking with a funny gait? I'm listening, I'm taking all that in to try and assess, is there anything that I need to be doing differently to ensure that everyone is happy, healthy, productive? That translates perfectly to working with a team.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
And if you're listening and taking in feedback from your team on project progress, or how are they doing with this crazy environment we are living in with all of the restrictions to our daily life that have now been in place for over a year, checking in with people and just getting a sense of, are you managing okay? How's your extended family? I know you haven't seen your folks in over a year, are they doing okay? That kind of listening, whether it's the goats or people I think is so valuable when you're in any kind of environment to be able to make the best choices and decisions as you're moving forward.
Farm Girl:
Listening is super important, you're right. We got to listen to the animals and those people as well. So you obviously have really studied your trade and you're very tuned in to your goats. I know that you've also been quite studious about just the whole idea of getting goats, learning to make cheese, earning certifications, I wanted to hear a little bit about sort of how you've approached this whole industry of having your own goat farm.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
So when we decided that we wanted to pursue getting goats for the invasive plant management, I had to convince my husband who was from a suburban upbringing, never had livestock. I'm partly rural raised, my folks had a vegetable farm. So we never had livestock, but the neighbors did, so it was easy to go hang out with the hogs or the sheep. So I had a glimpse into animal agriculture through my childhood. In advocating for getting goats, I knew that I needed this to be successful, and I felt very committed to making sure that if we took on goats I didn't have to give them up in three months because they were too much work. So that started a journey of learning through online certification at Langston University in Oklahoma, they have an online certificate program for dairy goat production. They also have one for meat goats if you're interested.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
And then I spent a long weekend up in Maine at a small goat farm doing hands on goat work, which was amazing learning how to trim hooves and give vaccines and all sorts of things that I read about in my online training, but there's a lot of nuances to working with animals in real time with the animal in front of you, that was really critical. And when I got back from, I called it goat camp, it was actually called Goat School up in Maine. But came back home from that and said, "We can do this. We can totally do this." And maybe three or four months later, we had four of our first Alpines at the farm, and that number has just continued to grow.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
And then when, when we started pursuing cheese making, we... With my food background and nutrition science background, I knew that cheese was a very tricky thing to do right, that you can make a lot of bad cheese. And we had been playing around making cheese for ourselves the first year or two that we had goats, and when we wanted to take that leap to commercial dairy production we recognized that, okay, there's a lot more to making good cheese reproducibly than just in the kitchen and adding some cultures and straining the curd and pressing it and hoping it turns out, if we want to do this commercially, we have to know what we're up to. Penn State University, which is about four hours away from us, offers a one week course on cheesemaking. So my husband actually took that course, and it was a great experience, he learned so much. And that was offered through their extension education offerings. So between online education, hands-on goats, cheese making, we've done a lot to learn, and I think that's helping us be able to get started up with our dairy business and be successful even in the first year.
Farm Girl:
Incredible. I have to confess, I have a couple of goats and I started without knowing a darn thing, so I did all of that. I should've gone to goat school or goat camp, it would have been a good idea. Let me reach back just a little ways into the past, you said that you grew up on a farm. Well, then you went to school and pursued this other path, and now you're back on the farm. What's different or maybe even similar about being on a farm now that maybe you didn't see when you were a kid?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
So much. When I was working on my parents' vegetable farm I was actually fairly involved in my college years, working out there, the full summer between the fall and spring semesters. It was, I think, eye opening to realize how much of the business aspect I didn't capture. I was more of the pick the tomatoes, weed the lettuce sort of labor on the vegetable farm. And at one point when I was in undergrad, I just said, "I'm too smart for this. I don't need to be digging in the dirt. I have higher aspirations for myself." Well, anyway, what happened 20 years later? I'm back to, not really digging in the dirt, but I'm hauling animals around and doing that. So I think if someone had helped me understand the business side of agriculture, I might've been intrigued by it and gone more of a career route in agriculture to start with. But I think not knowing that and just thinking of the manual labor side of farming, that didn't appeal to me, I didn't want to do that day in and day out.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
But you step away and you realize what you're missing and some of it is that connection with the land and the connection with being outside. I mean, with animals even I'm outside every day at least twice a day, snow, sleet, blazing hot, humid, no matter what the temperature is, what the bugs are doing. And as much as it might be miserable, it helps bring balance to the day to day because otherwise I would just be sitting at a desk and maybe milling around my research lab and doing inside things. And I'm an outside person, I mentioned the sports I did were all outside. So that, I think, as I am now well into adulthood, the farming brings me the outside activity that I was kind of missing, but also there's a purpose to it and it's a passion driven purpose for bringing local food to the community.
Farm Girl:
Great. And what do you think if you didn't have your day job or your off the farm job? I guess they're both day jobs, one's just earlier than the other. What would you be missing if you weren't in your off-farm job that... What would you miss?
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
Ah, I think it would be connecting with the different types of people I connect with in the professional setting. So I work with people who are engineers, who are food scientists, who are marketers, who are salespeople, it's very diverse. And I think if I were farming a hundred percent full time, I wouldn't have that same diversity of interaction with my colleagues. And I could maybe seek that out through other venues, but it wouldn't be as easy and accessible. What I experienced in the off-farm job, a lot of times it gets my brain thinking about, "Well, wait a minute, maybe I could be doing something like this with the goat dairy marketing." And so we're obviously in very different sectors, my off-farm job and the dairy farm, but some of the same concepts I can start kind of noodling on that. And then after I'm done feeding goats, I can say, "Aha, this is how I can position this type of product for my customer and be able to make that link back to something that was talked about during the day."
Farm Girl:
It sounds like a really rich life. I mean, the animals in the morning, the science and the scientists and marketers and all of these interesting customers who've got demands and needs and trends. And then you come back to the ground yourself at the farm again at night, and soon with babies on the way. I'm curious what you think about? And I mean, it sounds like you've studied all aspects of the different kinds of things that you've done, and I imagine you've thought about what your future might look like and what your hopes and dreams are, and maybe your husband's included in those as well.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
I think longer term, I'd love to be able to farm more full-time than I am now. Whether that means I'm looking at a different day job or I don't have a day job at all, I mean, that's hard to know, there's a lot of uncertainty in the world. But I think one of the challenges in wanting to spend more time on the farm is, if I don't have outside employment, how do we take care of some of the basic necessities, like health insurance? And what about planning for retirement? So those are some of the unfortunate things that are likely going to keep me in an off-farm job for quite a while, which I mean there's pluses and minuses.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
But what we'd really love to do with the farm is to offer the goats for hire, for brush clearing to other landowners. And that's hopefully on a maybe two year timeline. We just opened our creamery in July, 2020, great timing, right? But that took a lot to get off the ground and get going last year, and I think this year we just want to make that really smooth and streamlined. We had a couple of ups last year where we were like, "Oh, let's pasteurize milk really early in the morning, and then we'll start our batch of cheese." And then we started looking at the clock and counting down when we would strain the curd, and it was like, "Okay, who's getting up at one in the morning to strain the curd? This was not the right time to start this cheese." So we're hoping not to have those kind of hiccups for this season, but maybe next season then look at branching out for brush clearing.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
We've also started some farm tours, which surprisingly have been quite popular even in the winter months. As we'd like to continue to connect people with the land, with animal agriculture, because there's a lot of media out there that portrays animal agriculture as a really bad thing for the earth, for society. And I think when we bring people to the goat farm and they see 26 happy goats and the little tiny spaces that we make the cheese in and they say, "Oh, well, it's not all factory farming and it's not all factory food production." So that's something I'd like to continue to build, that connection, the community connection to their food.
Farm Girl:
Fantastic. Maria, it's been really great connecting with you on this. I hope that you're able to continue to enlighten people at work with your goats and your listening management styles on both sides, and that you guys get to realize your goat dreams there. I'm going to be keeping a close eye on your farm, watching out for the babies and all of the fun that you're having there. As well as, I know it's hard work, I certainly do, but you make it look like a lot of fun. And I really appreciate you sharing your off-farm job. And I hope that we can all continue to talk about that and to encourage farmers of all kinds to talk about those jobs, because it is tough making ends meet as a farmer. And especially for small farmers, that's getting a lot tougher, there are a lot of expenses. And like you said, there's uncertainty. So I think the off-farm jobs should be celebrated and talked about, so hopefully we'll be able to continue that. But I do appreciate starting that conversation with you here today.
Goat Farmer Maria Stewart:
Yeah, thanks so much. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.
Farm Girl:
Well folks, that's a wrap on another episode of Talk Farm to Me: Straight Talk Series. Goat farmer Maria Stewart brought us all closer to the inner workings of the goat farm, from goat camp, to cheese making school, from brush clearing to breeding goats. Just as enlightening was our discussion about off-farm jobs. Off-farm jobs are often essential to keep the farm afloat. Actually more than 80% of farms have at least one person working in an off-farm job, and we should all be sensitive to that.
Farm Girl:
I'm your host Farm Girl, thanks for joining me today. Let's support our farmers, especially smaller farmers by shopping local and by being super respectful of all of the hard work that goes into a farm. If you'd like to connect with Maria and her gorgeous goat farm in New Jersey or go on a farm tour, you can find her on Instagram @gorgeous_goat. You can also meet Maria and another woman goat farmer from Wisconsin, Leslie Svacina of Cylon Rolling Acres and their goats on my Instagram @xoxofarmgirl. We will be seeing them again live once their babies are born later this month. Talk Farm to Me has additional content on Instagram as well @talkfarmtome.
Farm Girl:
I am personally really inspired by goat farmer, Maria Stewart, her dairy operation, and her willingness to break the ice about her off-farm job. If you like what you heard today as much as I did, please write a review so others will come along on this amazing Talk Farm to Me journey. For ratings, I'm trying something new so it's easier for iPhone and Android users alike to submit a review, just go to, ratethispodcast.com/talkfarmtome, and it will direct you to the appropriate review spot. For show notes and a transcript of today's episode and for more information about the podcast or some pretty awesome swag head over to talkfarmtome.com, and stay tuned for some new episodes coming soon at least every week now in one form or another. Thanks for listening, talk farm to you soon.