Guest Essay: Goats Rule

My friend Jeffrey Hannan has had many past lives. An author, playwright and digital user experience manager, he lived on a farm as a child and gravitated to goats as his familiars. Which is why, whenever he visits Portland, it's a requirement that we stop by at least one spot where they gather, even if only through a pasture fence. His most recent appearance in Oregon entailed a road trip to the wilds of Gales Creek for a chat with Lise Bueschen-Monahan and her 100-or-so goats at Fraga Farmstead Creamery.

Goats rule.

At least in my private hierarchy of the animal kingdom. How, then, to resist an invitation to visit Steve Monahan and Lise Bueschen-Monahan’s Fraga Farmstead Creamery? Not possible.

Lise Bueschen-Monahan.

Kathleen Bauer and I bundled up and donned our farm boots one chilly afternoon in January. We climbed into her truck and headed 30 minutes west, to where the fringe of suburbanization meets wide open farmland. A bit further, to the south, before the road wants to rise into the Tillamook forest, lies a farm with a pond, a red barn and dense stand of pines trees.

Here a herd of 100-plus female goats roams a shady evergreen forest, rubbing themselves and their horns against the trunks of trees. They come running as a pack when Lise strides into the large open field and calls out to them: “Goaties!”

Some of Fraga Farm's goats.

Goats are curious looking things. Like most quadrupeds (and some humans), they have a big midsection supported by four slender appendages. Their heads are triangular. Their eyes are equal parts mischief and interrogation. They’re also set a bit too far apart, leaving us mere humanoids struggling to match their gaze.

They think nothing of strolling up and swarming around you, rubbing their thick bodies against your legs or chewing on your shoelaces as you stand in place to learn the story of the farm.

Goats like—they will often insist upon—your affection. They love to be scratched. However, they can be fickle creatures. They’re all too quick to divest you of their attention when they discern that fresh hay has been laid in the barn.

The farm's red barn and oak trees.

Lise is the goatherd of the family. She is aided by Franklin, a tall, amiable intern who, upon completion of his master’s degree, aims to establish a goat dairy when he returns to his native Ghana.

Lise’s husband Steve is the cheese maker. Together they create a small collection of superb goat milk cheeses—traditional chevre, camembert, feta, and an aged raw milk cheese akin to cheddar—as well as some insanely delicious goat milk caramels.

The quality of the product is not by accident. That’s why Kathleen and I were there: to uncover the method behind the magic.

Lise walking with her "goaties."

It was quiet time on the farm when we visited: a period of relatively little activity when milk production has waned and the busy-ness of kidding season has not yet begun. Kidding season lasts roughly from January through May. About 20 kids are born each year. Some of the does are kept as milkers; the rest of the kids are put up for adoption as pets.

In some industrial goat dairies, the moment kids are born they are taken from their mother and killed so that every drop of mother’s milk is reserved for commercial use. Not a drop, so to speak, is wasted. In contrast, when a kid is born at Fraga, both kid and mother are put in their own enclosure after birth to give them a chance to rest. The kids then nurse for about two months, at which point they are weaned and the mother’s remaining milk is used to make cheese.

This nurturing, natural method of raising goats leads to better cheese. Not to mention a healthy quality of life for the animal. It is fairly well documented that the commercial raising and slaughter of animals for meat and dairy is highly unnatural and traumatic. This trauma ultimately finds its way into the end product—be it meat, cheese, milk or butter.

Fraga Farm's chevre with honey.

“Everything is hormonal,” explains Lise. Birthing, feeding, weaning and milking all are driven by hormones, just as hormones drive interactions between human mothers and their children. When animals are dragged into slaughter or robbed of interaction with their parent or offspring from the moment they’re born, the animal’s normal hormonal processes are disrupted. Moreover, the cramped, unhealthy conditions in which many industrial food animals are raised adds a deeper degree of damage.

The natural, normal processes of grazing, birthing and weaning that take place at Fraga are antithetical to industrial methods. Fraga’s methods are emblematic of a larger food movement which strives to farm with the earth and its inhabitants instead of against it or in perceived domination of it.

The farm's camembert-style cheese.

The methods that small farmers like Lise and Stephen apply result in superior products with a higher cost of production. Unfortunately, the demand to keep retail prices as low as possible while maximizing profit means ethical trade-offs that holistic farmers are not willing to make.  As a result, small farmers face relentless competition from industrial farms and large retailers whose sole objective is to increase their own share of the consumer’s wallet.

When it comes to producing food or dairy, there is an uncomfortable symbiosis between man and animal: we are far more dependent upon them than they are on us. That said, a herd of animals—dairy goats, for instance—requires conscientious care if we’re going to right the current imbalance. These workers require and deserve our diligence and decency.

The same can be said of a bed of vegetables: by nurturing their growth through natural methods such as soil regeneration, which ensures a healthy mix of microbial magic, instead of creating land that’s been fertilized literally to death, the negative trends in industrial farming can be countered.

Farm intern Franklin intends to start a goat dairy in Ghana.

Whether those trends can be reversed is an entirely different argument. Even at a friendly sit-down at a wooden table in a farmhouse. After a tour of the farm and a lengthy visit with the herd in the barn, the three of us retreated to the farmhouse. Warmed by fresh coffee, farm-made cheese and bread, our degrees of optimism varied. What was agreed upon, though, is that many of us, when we buy food, have a choice: we can choose the cheaper industrial product or we can seek out humane and healthier alternatives.

This is the hard mission of Lise and countless other farmers in the bountiful Northwest: to create those options and stave off the inevitable demise wrought by big ag. It is also the work of Kathleen to provide exposure to these alternatives, to get people to understand where food comes from: to remember that we exist in a web of natural inter-relationships. If we are to eat well, and live well, we have to re-engage with the realities of our food supply.

With Lise and her goats, it's all about the love.

Food labeling, though, is an issue. (And a lengthy, head-spinning side topic.) What, after all, I wonder, is truly organic? What is “free-range”? These neat government labels, written by and for the benefit of commercial producers, do little to truly inform the public. They are guideposts that reveal nothing of the real methods of production behind them, but instead point us in directions we feel obliged to follow.

Are we being misled? This intentional ambiguity is a not just a crisis of conscience but a crisis of health: If the food we put in our mouths is grown in soil denuded of nutrients and nature’s complex, life-giving secrets, and if the animals we eat are abused in their service to us, what are we really putting into our bodies?

* * *

Sam (black), Marilyn (tan), and Jeff. La Mesa, CA, ca 1989.

Author's note: Sam and Marilyn hung out in the chicken enclosure, where they had a homemade house of wood where they slept at night, and a wooden picnic bench and table that they could hop around on. When I’d get home from work or school I’d let them out to run around the yard and climb the giant boulders on the property. Marilyn loved corn chips and a sip of white zinfandel, which perhaps, alas, contributed to her early demise.

A Vacation from the Rain

I was between the third and fourth grades in Redmond, Oregon, the summer the local library had a reading contest. All that was required was to record the number of books checked out of the library and read in a defined period of a few weeks. It seemed reasonable to enter, since I spent most of my time curled up with a book anyway, the other half divided between riding my bike and drawing horses from a book of breeds I'd checked out of that same library.

These decades later I can't remember how many I read for the contest, but I do remember I got a book as the prize and the satisfaction of winning my age group. But, as I said, I would have read those books anyway, if perhaps with a bit less diligence. (I was fiercely competitive even then.)

Books have always been a gateway into different worlds for me, not so much an escape as a dive into a different time or place, the good ones populated by people I wanted to get to know. Even now, if I'm reading and Dave says something to me, I only hear a garbled burble of sounds and have to look up and apologize: "I'm sorry, what did you say?"

So needless to say, when my friend Jeffrey Hannan, a writer and author, sent a message saying he was experimenting with a serialized online novel set in Hawai'i, I was all in. Not only do I love his writing, but during the rainy, cold winter months in PDX there's nothing better than taking a vacation in a tropical paradise, if only for a few minutes.

The fact that, though he lives in San Francisco, he spends several weeks a year near Puna, on the big island of Hawai'i, which is where the story is set, is only the icing on the cake. With a knowledge of the local landscape and culture, he tells the story of Pru, who'd arrived in Puna from Rhode Island a decade before on a trip with a boyfriend whom she abandoned at the same time as she found her true place in the small town.

You can escape from the rain and read his story, The Punatics, and get on the list for the new chapters as they're released every week or so. I can't wait, not just to find out what Pru and her friends in Puna are up to, but to feel the warm ocean breeze and hear the hissing of the steam vents from the volcano, if only for moments at a time.

Photos courtesy Jeffrey Hannan from The Punatics.

Summer Book Report: Two for Two!

A recent week at the beach gave me the opportunity to get off the computer and away from the "to-do's" at home and actually sit down with a book. Not an electronic device with a glowing screen, but an actual, real live book. Pages and everything!

My first task was to finish a book I'd barely started on my last out-of-town trip, a nonfiction travelogue by Portland journalist, photographer and Fulbright grant recipient Judy Blankenship, about a year that she and her husband Michael spent in the highlands of Ecuador.

Part memoir, part cultural study, Cañar: A Year in the Highlands of Ecuador documents the lives and rituals of the people of Cañar as Blankenship records them in words and in her startlingly intimate photographs. From the foods they eat, to childbirth, to healing ceremonies, weddings and funerals, she writes with compassion about the people she gradually comes to call friends.

Not just some rich Westerner who drops in, takes some pretty pictures of colorful natives and then drops out again, she conducts photography workshops for the local people, especially the Cañari women, so that they can preserve their own visions of their culture as they struggle to merge ancient traditions with new technologies. In one scene, she's scheduled to teach photography to several cloistered nuns:

"Over the centuries, the cloister has grown to encompass an entire city block. all of which is enclosed by a twenty-foot wall, except for the beautiful church on one corner. As I stand waiting, an ancient woman who works in a stall nearby selling the herbal drinks and pastries made by the nuns hobbles down the street toward me, holding an enormous key on a metal ring. How old is that key? It is her job to open the outer doors of the convent twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday, for one hour, when outsiders can have limited contact with the cloister.

"Inside the dark, stone-floored anteroom, I pull the thick rope hanging from the ceiling that rings a brass bell announcing a visitor. I have a few delicious minutes to sit quietly on the stone bench built into one wall, and I try to imagine what it would be like to pass through this entry as a young novice, knowing you will never see the outside world again."

This is a terrific book for armchair travelers and seasoned globe-trotters alike, or anyone who wants a good book to curl up with on a long flight,  while looking out at a rainy beach or even in your own favorite chair.

* * *

I have to confess that this second book, HugoSF, was written by a friend. Fortunately he's a terrific writer, which I knew already from reading his blog, A Gentle Iconoclast in Paradise.

In this self-published first novel, author Jeffrey Hannan introduces us to Hugo Storm, a somewhat hapless denizen of the dot-com bubble that held millions of cubicle-dwelling Americans in its thrall. The bursting of that bubble, as might be expected, swamped him in its wake, but being the surviving sort he jumped into the booming real estate business.

Oops.

Hannan's way with words paints Hugo's world in deft and humorous strokes, the story never taking itself too seriously as it explores its hero's world: the post-millennial worker bees, queens, queers and movers that inhabited Bagdad by the Bay at the turn of the 21st century. It reminded me of other books that draw portraits of time and place and people, like John Berendt's dark poem to Savannah, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

"The Internet leveled the playing field among everyone—at least that was the theory. Standing on the deck of the Industry Standard bulding at the corner of Battery and Pacific, the ambient buzz was intoxicating and real. The social air was ripe with the smell of equal economic opportunity. You could see it condensing like spittle in the smiles of nouveau hipsters sipping wine and swilling beer."

Or this:

"In Silicon Valley there were myriad characters of varying means and intellect, but none that was as revered, feared, envied, loved or despised as much as the VC. The Venture Capitalist. They scoured the region for ideas and when they found what seemed like a good one they stuffed the underneath of it with cash as if it were kindling and set the whole thing on fire. They recruited a management team then took over the Board and stoked the flames to their ultimate end, which sometimes included walking away to let the fire burn out on its own."

This is a fun read and one that makes a perfect vacation book…an enjoyable trip to take on your next trip.

Photo at top by Judy Blankenship.