Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

Shopping For Livestock On Craigslist

Coyotes were yipping far too close for any of our comfort. My two infant Goatets, Natalie and Melissa, trembled at all the unacceptable newness. Goats like routines, I had read soon after I bought the Funky Butte Ranch, the first place I have ever “owned.” Pretty much all I read now was Goat Husbandry literature, much of it contradictory. I was keeping the confused Silver City Librarian busy, and leaking alfalfa hay and manure pellets on the reference desk.

I scanned the horizon of my new, soon to be Green-powered spread, but evidently these wild dogs have learned how to hide from former Suburbanites cum Alaskans cum Cowboys. Their party was picking up, with the feral barks from perhaps a quarter mile away sounding like 500 children being tickled.

I sighed. I thought raising dairy goats would be easy – let ‘em eat, let ‘em breed, then milk ‘em and make tons of delicious, healthy, local cheese, yogurt and goat chocolate ice cream (society crumbling or not, I am not giving up my ice cream addiction). But a historic drought had the land so bone dry that predators were getting thirstier and bolder by the day, following prey wherever it could be found. Goats are not generally considered house-trainable, so there was nothing to do but sleep outside with the kids under the full moon. I was attached to the little Pans already, and I could not face coming outside for the morning feeding to find two carcasses and a pile of coyote scat.

I laid out my sleeping bag below the eaves of their dung-filled corral cabana down the hill from my adobe/concrete ranch house in an essentially inaccessible, if National Park-beautiful part of the American Southwest. I tried to let the coyote symphony waltz me to sleep. “Sleep” being a euphemism for “continually wake from restless dreams of finger amputation to find a goat nursing my hand.”

The first bottle I’d fed Natalie (the pure white princess) and Melissa (her brown speckled bodyguard) convinced them I was Dad, or at least Herd Leader, and they didn’t like it when I left their sight. They let me know this loudly.

“Mmbah?” they they’d ask in a heart-melting, vibrato-filled soprano whenever I tried to do something unacceptable like write, attempt to sleep inside, weed the garden or otherwise not hang out with them for ten minutes.

“Mmbah!” I’d confirm in more of a baritone from somewhere on the 41-acre Funky Butte Ranch, thankful that no other neighbors lived in this part of the canyon. My occasional human visitors, I couldn’t help noticing, seemed to be making mental notes for later “you won’t believe this crazy guy” stories back in Silver City.

No matter, I was already practicing a self-righteously serene “you’re welcome” when I was thanked for providing these doubters with organic dairy products. In fact, I derived a lot of my initial momentum for the local food part of this book from the first line of Jim Corbett’s beautiful if obsessive book, Goatwalking, wherein the author declares: Two milk goats can provide all the nutrients a human being needs, with the exception of Vitamin C and a few common trace elements. And it’s true, in the course of journalism I’ve done from Uganda to Tajikistan to Guatemala: everywhere there’s a goat, there’s survival, even wealth. So part of me felt it was nearly Mission Accomplished the moment Natalie and Melissa survived that first coyote onslaught, and all it cost me was sleep and some range of finger motion.

I awoke sore and smelly that dawn, and still somehow with a “thank you” of my own on my lips. It being August, the temperature had mercifully dipped back into the high two digits. Still casting moon shadows at first light I built the Goatlets a jungle gym out of regionally-unnecessary studded car tires, ladders and hay. I had learned from a majority of “experts” that goats like to climb and be as high as possible. Who doesn’t?

I did a couple of sun salutations to shake off the stiffness. My busy Yogic Empty-mind told me I was sort of on-plan. You know, on getting rid of as much fossil fuel from my life as possible during my first year on my ranch.

Understanding where becoming essentially a full-time goat herder fit into these plans involves a key leap that I made thanks to the embarrassing absurdity of eating Wal-Mart roasted chicken after sleeping outside with the Goatlets. I grasped, viscerally, that not all fossil fuels go into your truck’s gas tank or your home’s furnace. To get an organic banana from Honduras to Silver City’s crunchy co-op involves troughs of jet fuel and diesel truck hauling. I think about this when I watch the rufus hummingbirds outside my front window do it on a few sips of sugar water.

So I was trying to eat as locally as possible as a crucial part of my quest to reduce my personal dependence on oil. As Equinox approached, I had chickens running around defecating all over the place, a puppy I was training to protect them instead of chasing them while defecating all over the place herself, and herbs and sprouts growing inside. I had plans to clear a planting area which I would irrigate via an efficient drip system.

As for the Goatlets, they can breed at 9 months (though I’m gonna give them a 15 month childhood) and give super healthy, gasoline-free milk, cheese and yogurt five months later. I’d even gotten a breed, the Nubian, that was known for its fatty milk, so I actually had some legitimate hope keeping the ice cream flowing with local ingredients. Please understand how important this is in my life. Ice cream is a Food Group for me. And thus the Goatlets even more precious. I already had a “Beware of Goats” sign posted at the entrance of the property to scare potential kidnappers away.

They are fundamentally giddily happy, fun-loving and affectionate. They were trying to figure out how to climb their new rickety toy before I was done with it. As soon as I approach their pen, which I do so often I’m thinking of just moving my desk out there, they run up to snuggle and mind meld with me with their nubby horns.

Yeesh, am I really writing this? Do I own GOATS? Do I really have eight stomachs to feed (four in Natalie, four in Melissa)?
When you grew up on Long Island, New York, where there wasn’t even a country music station, let alone the Willie Nelson cult that I’ve discovered is a key component of any healthy demographic, and suddenly your shopping list for the weekly town trek reads:

you know you’re undergoing some kind of lifestyle change. Perhaps a bit of information about my pre-Alaska background might help explain why this effort was so new, strange and difficult for me. Picture the exact inverse of the bushman conked by a Coke bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Growing up in the American suburbs in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s meant that I was raised in the most literally gas-guzzling demographic in the history of human Earth habitation. Gasoline was often cheaper than milk, and in fact was used in the production of milk and almost everything else I ate. So much oil had been pulled from the Earth’s crust during my grandmother’s lifetime that I was amazed the planet didn’t shrivel up, like a sun-dried tomato.
Basically the whole premise of this experiment starts with the belief that local food is better for me and kinder to the Earth than even crunchy Honduran bananas.

I’ll be trying to live locally and power the Ranch with fossil fuel-free power, while documenting the joys, pitfalls and contradictions inherent in the endeavor in these Dispatches, and eventually in a book entitled, Farewell, My Subaru,
Here are my new family members. Natalie (white) and Melissa (brown and white). Their ears are practically half the size of their two-month-old bodies.

In other typically goofy Funky Butte Ranch news, the LOVEsubee ran away down a hill backwards and nearly collided with the lower Dance Studio last week. Luckily an ancient live oak helped stop it…

It all worked out in the end. The lesson: when you have a year to do all the things you want to do, don’t try to do it all in a day. Relax, enjoy living this and writing about it. And also remember to fully engage the parking brake.

I have named the resulting cleared area the From the Carnage Herb Garden. I plant tomorrow. Today I’m tilling and fertilizing (with goat dung!) the area. I also have to figure out how to keep this safe from the goats — they’re incredibly mischievous (you see why Pan has caprine hoofs). They badly wanted inside the house today – after the got in through the cat door twice, I had to carry them away, literally kicking and screaming. My basil and cilantro and lettuce will last about a week unless I fence it somehow.

And I’ve already harvested my first crop on the Ranch – 5 cups of sprouts I grew on the windowsill. My basil and cilantro – key ingredients for the Asian and Mexican food I live on – have just sprouted.

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