MPR: Behold, the Mighty Goat

Behold, the Mighty Goat
by Dan Olson
December 23, 1999

This is a tough time of year for goats. Sheep dominate nativity scenes everywhere. And here in Minnesota cows have a lock on the dairy market. But goats are making a stand. Their milk, cheese and meat are gaining in popularity. And in the wider world of dairy consumption, goats rule.

Doerr says it's true goats make wonderful pets. They are smart and trainable, but they develop a roaring co-dependency.

MILK FROM goats, not cows, Terry Gibson says, is the world's dairy beverage of choice.

Gibson: There are more people that consume goats' milk than there are that consume cows' milk.

Gibson is a professor and goat specialist at one of the country's centers of goat research, Langston University in Langston Oklahoma. He says there are two reasons for the global popularity of goats: they're relatively cheap farm animals to keep, and more of the world's people can digest their milk.

Gibson: And it has to do with the short-chain fatty acids in goat milk. Cow milk has long-chain fatty acids.

Gibson says humans need more than an hour to digest a glass of cows' milk. Goats' milk? Twenty minutes, tops. Goats' milk poses no threat to the massive moo juice market, but it is finding a niche in Minnesota; gallons of goats' milk sold in the past 10 years have more than doubled.

Rising goats' milk sales numbers are music to the ears of Mary Doerr. She operates Dancing Winds Farm, a goat dairy, cheese and meat business near Kenyon in southern Minnesota. Every day, twice a day, Doerr shoos her 11 milkers into the parlor, doles out their corn and oats mix.

Doerr: And, actually, it's mixed in with molasses because goats have such a sweet tooth; well, actually you mix in a lot of molasses.

Goat milking parlor helpers are always welcome at Dancing Winds Farm and they frequently show up because Doerr also runs a farm retreat, sort of like a bed and breakfast. City slickers can just lay about and watch everyone work, or they can pitch in. They'll be directed to Miss May Sarton, the herd member most amenable to unfamiliar hands.

After morning milking, the goats head for a romp in the pasture. And this means Suzie the farm dog's moment has arrived. She quivers with anticipation, and then transforms her tubby black form into a sleek torpedo as she races along the fence line. Suzie's job is to make a racket and get the goats aimed in the right direction.

The goats play along with the little barnyard melodrama, giving Suzie the impression she's indispensible. For the goats, it's a minor interruption in their daily search for adventure. Mary Doerr says farmers with easily bruised ego's don't do well with goats.

Doerr: You have to be OK with being outsmarted by your livestock.

Goats, Doerr says, see life as an opportunity. Fences, for example, are less a barrier than a puzzle to be solved, a lock to be picked; a vehicle including, let's say, your neighbor's new car becomes a climbing adventure; clothing or a piece of paper such as the deed to the farm is a possible snack. Doerr says it's true goats make wonderful pets. They are smart and trainable, but they develop a roaring co-dependency.

Doerr: They will do anything to be with that person because they are lonely, so don't get one goat, get 'em in two's.

Doerr's goat pyscology insights come from over a decade of raising them. She got her start with the late, great Ida, a dairy goat given to her by neighbor Macc McCutcheon. When Macc, a retired school teacher, and his Missus started farming, they didn't want big animals, or dumb, woolly ones.

McCutcheon: And we didn't think sheep had enough personality, so we decided to have goats.

So, what exactly, is this goat personality that humans find so captivating?

McCutcheon: They'll leap in the air and twist like a ballet dancer, and will run up a vertical stone wall and twist and come down again, and they are just so, so, so alive.

Dancing Winds Farm owner Mary Doerr has taken her goat expertise on the road. She's visited Latvia, Macedonia, Bolivia and other exotic locales showing subsistence farmers how they can make a go of goat farming. Doerr's goats live in relative luxury, munching their molasses-laced lunches. But goat specialist Terry Gibson say's in less hospitable surroundings they gravitate toward pesky plants most farmers are trying to get rid of.

Gibson: The weeds, as you would have, and will go in and clean those out of an area, a pasture and they then will improve the land.

A farm animal with an environmental ethic. And if the words of the,"Prayer of the Goat," posted on the wall of Mary Doerr's milking parlor mean anything, the creature is a populist, maybe even a libertarian at heart.

Doerr: Lord, let me live as I will. I need a little wild freedom, a little giddiness of heart, the strange taste of unknown flowers. For whom else are your mountains, your snow, wind, these springs? The sheep do not understand, they graze and graze, and always in the same direction, and they eternally chew the cud of their insipid routine. But I, I love to bow into the heart of all your marbles, leap your chasms, and my mouth stuffed with intoxicating grasses, quiver with an adventurer's delight on the summit of the world. Amen.

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