Goat farm offers hands-on experience

Media General News Service

In more than 30 years in this business, I've never been able to write, "Yes, it's true, I milked a goat."

Until now.

Mark that one off the bucket list. Actually, I don't have a bucket list, and even if I did, it probably wouldn't have a goat on it.

However, I did indeed milk a goat the other morning when I visited Mary Kroll at her Wild Heaven Farm in Chesterfield County. The goats couldn't have been all that pleased with my fumbling fingers, but they seemed to appreciate the effort.

Kroll seemed to appreciate it, too, as my 13-year-old son and I helped with the goats and then went inside and under her direction made a couple of batches of goat's-milk soap, Kroll's specialty and her livelihood.

Kroll makes and sells her soap at local farmers markets and online, but hand injuries have prevented her from making soap for several weeks, which is a real problem when that's how you make a living. Neither she nor doctors are sure what her diagnosis is, but it's something that affects her thumbs in a way that makes it impossible for her to perform any number of necessary tasks.

She can still milk the goats -- a good thing, because her goats really can't take a day off -- but all of the pot-hauling and stirring and ladling in the soap-making process is just too much. For someone operating a small business that already carries with it long hours, inconsistent income and no health insurance, this scenario could be a death knell. Her husband, Kevin, has his own medical issues and is unable to help much, having endured four spinal surgeries.

So she hit upon a novel idea: Why not tap into the growing interest in farmers markets and locally grown products and give her customers and the general public a taste of what it's like to run a dairy-goat farm and even show folks how to make -- no, actually, let them make -- soap? Nonfarmers get a cool ex-perience, and Kroll keeps her business going.

Is this a great country or what?

A couple of local farmers markets put out the word about what she's calling "A Day in the Life" program, and she has been surprised by the volume of calls and e-mails. She's mostly booked for the rest of June, and she's planning to continue it into July or until her hands are healed.

So Monday morning, my son and I drove to Kroll's farm, a 5-acre, largely wooded plot tucked at the back of a subdivision off Beulah Road where she has been in the dairy-goat and soap-making business for nine years. She grew up on a goat-and-chicken homestead in Indiana, and reading a "back-to-basics" book years later inspired her to leave her life of retail jobs and buy a farm. She and her hus-band cleared the weed-happy property (during which they found old, hidden sheds) and got to work.

At which point, she remembered something: She was a very young child when she'd last lived on a farm, and she hadn't realized how much work is involved.

"How you don't get to sleep in or get sick or go on vacation," Kroll said. She also discovered that the property didn't meet federal regulations for producing and selling goat milk and cheese. "But I'd already quit my real job, so I had to do something."

That something wound up being soap and assorted skin-care products using goat's milk, which she learned is beneficial for healthy skin. She built her business with a little trial-and-error and a lot of hard work, and she's loved it.

"It's the satisfaction of talking to people one-on-one and selling something you made and hearing them come back and say how much they enjoyed it," she said.

Kroll understands there's a component of free labor in her "Day in the Life" program, but she's giving back in terms of a field-trip kind of hands-on experience. She also knows plenty of farms and ranches make handsome amounts of money by selling expensive vacations to people who travel great distances to wake up early on their holidays and work hard. (She will be asking for an honorarium from participants beginning in July.)

After milking the goats, we mixed the milk with oils and lye and lavender essential oil, which is not a scent I usually come in contact with. Then we ladled the batter into molds and set them aside to set and dry. Later, we trimmed and wrapped bars that had been air-drying for more than a month.

I'm sure we didn't do great, but we had a good time, and I suppose we helped a little.

And I can add "goat-milking" to my résumé.

Bill Lohmann is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.