We had bought this house in Brattleboro. We'd bought the truck. We bought the sheep. We bought dogs. We did all of this long before COVID hit, but then we were like, okay, this is our pandemic project.—Kimberly Kimberly and Zan Walker-Gonҫalves were both kids exposed to animals but not raised on farms. As parents, they circled back to growing food and raising the maximum number of livestock their town in Massachusetts would legally allow. Five years ago, they packed up everything and moved...

“I'd watch the deer, how they would interact with the cows and turkeys and, you know, other animals. I've always been a keen observer of nature. That started young. That's kind of like the foundation. I didn't realize that's what laid the foundation, except for like, 20 years later.” Currently Cameron is the farm manager of Anchorage Farm - Registered Romneys. For the past 6 years, he’s been farming the Hudson Valley, NY, following 4 years of service in the Navy and then pursuing his bachelor...

"There was a guy in my office for years, who used to refer to people like me as hobby farmers. And it drove me crazy. One day I finally said, “You know what? These hobby farmers, if they are getting up every day, and taking care of animals, it's not a hobby. A hobby is something you do when you feel like doing it.” Karen Hoffman started working for Cornell Cooperative Extension for a few years after grad school, and then began working for USDA-NRCS as an Animal Scientist to help dairy farm...

“I got involved with sheep and farming purely by accident. Aside from a semester Work Study program at UVM dairy, I had no background in farming and no interest in sheep. Then, one cold February while I was farmsitting, 6 out of 8 of the ewes on the farm decided to give birth. I knew nothing about shepherding except for the basics of care while the farmer was gone, and had to dive right into a lambing season completely green. All sorts of lambing issues and farming challenges came up and I had t...

“I can't express enough how just beautiful it is to watch the growth. The growth of a farm year after year where you're putting your inputs in, which may just mean your animals, they’re just fertilizing and grazing for you. I say ‘just’ lightly because that's huge for the field. Those are inputs, and then the next year to see that come back bigger and better--it's just so cool.” Carly grew up in the suburbs of Massachusetts with a passion for animals. She received a degree in animal science and ...

“I really love the sheep. They're not stupid. Nor do I think they desire to die, as I've heard on more than one occasion. I do think they require awareness. They also are so instinct driven--which makes sense, based on what they are--being totally prey-driven. They will do things entirely based on that instinct. If it's fight or flight, I'm flighting first and fighting never.” Jessica Newman of Southview Station moved back to Pennsylvania to combine her nursing career and love of genetics with a...

“I didn't have mechanical background, I didn't grow up fixing tractors. I had never driven a tractor. I wasn't good with equipment. Grazing was very approachable. It just really appealed to me. You're outside, you're working with the environment. It just grabbed me really fast.” Jascha Pick is a sheep farmer based in Northern Vermont, who didn’t set out to be a farmer but caught the farming bug. He fell in love with farming, and especially with grazing. He’s used a lot of creativity to get st...

“I think sometimes the choice to farm also means that folks choose not to have a life. They may not recognize it as that. Sometimes the choice to farm or ranch doesn't necessarily automatically set them up for that. Responsibility weighs really heavily on the shoulders of farmers and ranchers. I think everyone deserves to have a life but I really think that farmers and ranchers deserve to have a life. I just don't know if that always happens. And I don't know if the choice to farm is actually en...

“It feels scary to work with a dangerous animal, but it's within our wheelhouse. To do something that is unknown--to reach out, to ask for help, to admit we don't know--to go into that sort of dark place outside of our circle of control and our circle of knowledge into some nebulous “out there”, so that we can make that circle bigger--THAT’s scary. I gotta tell you, once you open that door, once you open that circle, it's COOL. It's really cool. You sort of see the world in a different way. And ...

“I think that climate change, and the collapse of so many of our ecological systems is the pressure that's going to push human evolution into a new phase. And I think that has to be the story. “ Part 2 of my conversation with Vermont farmer Jesse McDougall ranged a little more widely than just the choice to farm, but that choice shouldn’t be something made within a vacuum. Processing, marketing, aggregation, and broader environmental impacts are all part of the picture in a farm ecosystem. We...

“It was the next generation for the farm…and so it came to [my wife] Cally or nobody. And we thought, well, hell, we might be better than nobody. So we raised our hand and said, “Let us give it a shot.” Jesse McDougall had never farmed. His wife Cally had grown up adjacent to her four-generation-family’s farm, but neither had any idea what might happen when they decided to shift from coding web sites to managing land. Through their painful introduction, they learned firsthand what happens whe...

“So I went around on the farm tour and I went to check out all their barns and I spent like eight weeks almost every day going to visit somebody, talking about their sheep. Going from barn to barn I realized, ‘Oh, everybody does this really differently.’ Kristen Judkins didn’t expect to become a farmer, in fact, she’s not even sure she’s comfortable with the term, but she moved to Vermont and fell in love with fiber arts. Then the Great Goat Giveaway happened…well, she’ll tell that story. ...

“I think for me, my pre-farming life had little experience in farming, but I think the way my parents raised me, it’s just being honest. It’s working hard and trying to build something bigger than you.”—Austin Troyer Austin and Maggie Troyer of Crossroads Land + Livestock in Ohio figured out pretty early in life what they didn’t want to do, which led them to farming right out of high school. Austin started by working on a beef ranch for several years and then out on his own with custom cattle...

“People who don’t farm don’t realize how much it really governs what you can and can not do with the construct of your lives. Unless you’ve got the systems in place to manage that stuff.”—Chris Sargent When I had the idea to start this podcast, my husband Chris Sargent was fully on board and very supportive of my goal to share the stories of first-generation and other farmers making the conscious choice to make livestock farming a serious part of their lives. After a few interviews and a ques...