In the News

Southbury Woman Gets Their Goat, Sunday, August 13, 2006, By Sydney Schwartz, Copyright © 2006 Republican-American

SOUTHBURY, CT—Science teacher Joy Auclair daydreams of moving from her urban Torrington home to a small farm with a greenhouse, barnyard and a few goats to eat the poison ivy.

Jessica Marshall, who lives in New York City and rents a weekend home in Cornwall, maintains a "fantasy farm," her children say, where she mucks barns, tends to crops and makes goat cheese.

On Saturday, they attended Liz Tapester's Old-Style Life Skills "Get Your Goat" workshop at Mountain Brook Dairy on Flood Bridge Road to see if keeping goats -- for milk, meat, fiber or pleasure -- was right for them.

"I'm just curious about what Liz does here. This is such a treat and I love goats," said Debra Tyler, who runs a small milk dairy in Cornwall and founded Motherhouse, the nonprofit that organizes the monthly Old-Style Life Skills workshops.

Tapester, who grew up in Danbury, had the same dream as her guests about 20 years ago. She worked in administration at Union Carbide, but often made goat cheese with milk from the health food store and always wanted a farm of her own.

In the early 1990s, she and her husband Lee Williams moved to his Southbury home and got about five goats -- two "milkers" and three babies.

Now they keep almost 40 Nubian and Oberhasli goats, along with one Cashmere goat, three dogs, a few sheep and a llama.

They keep the goats in three barns and fenced-in areas around the hillside property, but often let them roam free and munch the weeds in the woods. Some have floppy ears, others bay coats with black markings.

"This is just the most beautiful site in the world, just all my animals hanging out in the yard," said Tapester, "My fence is to keep stuff out. Not to keep my animals in."

Her second job as a part-time paralegal helps to pay the feed bills. She also home schools her two adopted Chinese children Mei-Li and XiuXiu. Her husband, an appliance repairman, bottle feeds the kids up to three times a day and transports the hay.

She milks eight of the goats twice a day, which nets her seven to eight gallons per day. After it is cooled to between 33 and 38 degrees, she bottles it and sells the raw milk to health food stores or local clients.

Her goat's milk is usually purchased by people who have digestive systems that won't accept cow milk, Tapester said. Health stores sell the milk for about $20 per gallon, but Tapester declined to say how much she sells each gallon for.

Each year, Tapester breeds some does with her two bucks, dehorns the kids and sells them, only making enough to cover the veterinary bills that range between $50 to $100, she said. If she can't find good homes, the goats usually stay. She doesn't sell goats for meat or slaughter any of her own. They usually live to be 12 or 13.

She feeds them all hay, but the "milkers" also get grains, organic vegetables and alfalfa. And in wintertime, they sometimes get sweatshirts.

On Saturday, she served her guests goat stew, from purchased meat, and goat cheese from her own pets with whole grain bread and organic crackers.

"She obviously has a passion for this," said Auclair, the Torrington resident who teaches science in Granby. "I would not want to do the farm thing with all of the milking."

Auclair said while she could still see keeping a few goats, she wasn't sure her daydream was as likely.

"It's a gentleman farmer's dream, the one where you're not putting in tons of work," she said. "But to build a life around this kind of thing, I'm too citi-fied."

Reporter Jonathan Shugarts contributed to this story