Find Hope Farm
Hey there. Welcome to the Farm Educators Roadmap. I'm Christa Hein, former nonprofit girl turned farm education entrepreneur. I've spent the last 30 years creating hands-on programs that connect people to the land animals, and the traditions that nourish our daily lives. If you're listening, you probably believe what I do.
That farm education is needed now more than ever. Not just on rural farms, but in suburbs, cities, and everywhere In between. In this podcast, you'll hear real stories and practical advice from farm educators all across the country, people who are creating change through their programs in creative and inspiring ways.
Whether you're dreaming about starting your first program. Are already knee deep in your own farm education work, or are just curious about how others are impacting their communities through farm education. You're in the right place. Let's dig in.
Christa: Welcome to the Farm Educators Roadmap, the podcast where we help farm educators build thriving educational farm programs of their own. I'm Christa Hein, and today we have an incredible guest who brings a wealth of knowledge about animal welfare and farm management. Lauren Cain, of Find Hope Farm in Pataskala, Ohio.
Lauren joins us today to share her expertise in raising goats with the highest level of care. Since purchasing her farm in 2015, Lauren has dedicated herself to ethical animal husbandry, selling goat milk and handcrafted soaps directly from the farm through a herd share program, but her work doesn't stop there.
She's also an affiliate of Goats on the Go, helping landowners manage overgrown brush using targeted grazing. Lauren is a registered veterinary technician with a Bachelor's in Animal and Meat Science and a Master's in Poultry Welfare. She plays going to dive into her insights on best practices and animal welfare.
If you've ever wondered how to ensure the highest standard of care for your farm animals or how that impacts the success of your farm business and programs, this is the episode for you. Let's jump in. Welcome Lauren.
Lauren: Hi, how are you today?
Christa: I'm good. So I wanted to start by having you share what inspired you to start find Hope Farm.
Lauren: So my goal was always to have a small homestead and be able to produce enough of our own food to only have to work part-time. Turns out, I don't love gardening. It's not my favorite thing. So that hasn't worked out quite the way I planned. But we've been able to find some other avenues that allow us to bring some income to the farm and make it into more of a business than a hobby. I had horses, so we bought land for, to be able to have horses on our farm. We had five acres, which was huge for me, and I only had two horses at the time, and there was multiple large barns. So of course, naturally you have to fill them.
That's the only way to have a homestead. So we got two pet goats the first year we were here, and then, decided to get a couple - I thought milking sounds interesting, something I might like. So I bought two pregnant goats figuring if I really hated goat milk, I would just have more pet goats. And it escalated from there.
Christa: So I'm curious, you have a Master's in Animal Welfare. How does your background in veterinary medicine and animal science shape your approach to your farm?
Lauren: That's a great question. I always used to joke because I'm a veterinary technician, but then my minor is in meat science and I did a lot of processing and so people always had trouble connecting those two.
You are taking care of the animals and keeping them alive. l felt confident in their health and their welfare. Not just their physical health, but also their mental health. And so, my work as a veterinary technician was more with small animals.
So I do, less of the livestock work in my veterinary role. But when we're consuming food products, it's, it's really important to me that those animals live a good life. I don't choose to be a vegetarian or a vegan. I do choose to consume animal products, but I choose to do that in a conscientious way.
And for me, that means understanding how they're raised and the things that they're going through, and improving those as well as I can.
Christa: Yeah, definitely. So for farm educators who are teaching about animals and animal care, what are the key welfare principles that they should really think about and focus on?
Lauren: So one thing about teaching welfare, so I taught as an agriculture educator in Lancaster, Ohio, to high school students for a little bit. I loved teaching welfare. The funny part of the story is that I had no education background, so I came into a career tech program. So I came in as an industry professional, not an education professional.
I had zero concept of the level of knowledge I should be teaching my students and God bless my students who were so tolerant and taught me so much. So I started teaching about welfare and they were so glazed over and then I realized that's because I was just teaching it all wrong and just way over their heads.
But what I found with time is that I loved teaching them about welfare because so much about animal welfare is learning observational skills and then having to use those observations you made to make a decision and defend it. And so that was a huge thing for my high school students that they had never had to do.
I'm not asking them for the right answer. I'm asking them to think about it, take the knowledge that we have about how to evaluate welfare, and then make an argument and defend that argument about those animals welfare. So I really, really enjoyed it as a teaching tool. The most basic form of evaluating animal welfare is the five freedoms, and when we talk about the five freedoms, it's a very simple framework. Freedom from, basically ensuring freedom from suffering in the basic health requirements are met. Super straightforward, easy for kids to learn, but not super fun for them to learn. It's a very black and white framework. And then if we take that a little bit further and we get into the three schools of animal welfare, where we're looking at natural living, biological functioning, and effective states, that's when we start looking at decision making.
That the kids have to prioritize what of those three schools of welfare they think are the most important to them. Or as they evaluate an animal situation, there's always gonna be pros and cons. So where are, there's there some lacking areas of welfare and are those outweighed by some of the strong points of welfare, maybe in a different school of welfare?
Also, I find the science behind it, really fascinating. And the kids really loved to start learning about how we evaluate an animal's preferences. So how we start looking at the choices an animal can make to demonstrate what they prefer rather than us projecting on them what we think they would like better.
Christa: Could you briefly just go over that framework for us?
Lauren: Schools?
Christa: No, the five Freedoms.
Lauren: Alright, so when we're talking about the five freedoms, which is that very basic, straightforward framework for evaluating if needs are met for an animal. So we're talking about: freedom from hunger, thirst, and malnutrition. So we wanna make sure that we have fresh food, we have fresh water, and that our animals are receiving adequate nutrition concerns. Freedom from discomfort. So discomfort in the form of pain, injury, having a nice place to sleep, any sort of, desirable thing that they might be experiencing. Freedom from pain, injury, or disease. Freedom to express normal behavior. And freedom from fear and distress. So, the pain, injury and disease, we always wanna keep in mind that that's a, a goal, not a guarantee. We can't guarantee that our animals will never be injured or hurt or get sick, but we want to try to make sure that we can treat them appropriately.
And then the expressing normal behavior is a fun one because - how do we decide what normal behavior is in a species? And to do that, we will look at some wild animal counterparts or wild or feral counterparts of an animal that we're raising in domestication and see if we're seeing some of those same behaviors, or find a way to replace a natural behavior and let them express that a different way.
And then freedom from fear and distress. And the big thing with that is just appropriate handling skills.
Christa: Great. Can you talk a little bit about your work with Goats on the Go? How does that work and what are some key welfare considerations that you're using for the targeted grazing?
Lauren: Yeah, the Goats on the Go.
So we bring in a herd of goats and we use a solar powered electric fence to provide high intensity targeted grazing. Prescribed grazing. What's so cool about it? I love what the goats are able to do. They always blow my mind with how effective they are. I love sharing that with clients. In specifically looking at welfare, what's really neat about that is that our grazing goats actually experience pretty excellent welfare because they get to do so many things that a goat naturally enjoys.
And so when we look at research surrounding natural behavior. In goats, we see goats like to climb. They like to eat a variety of different foods. They don't like a boring, plain, straight grass diet. They like to consume food that's primarily above their heads, they like to have things to play with.
Goats are naturally curious and exploratory animals, and so many of those needs are met through the grazing. We're usually not grazing a monoculture. There's a lot of different things for them to snack on. They can strip leaves, they can climb trees, they can strip bark. They find ways. I have one goat that really loves to knock the trees down so that all the other goats can get them.
He just runs into them and keeps walking until they fall over and just, they just go between his front legs. It's hysterical. But yeah, they get really excellent. Now, the balancing act there is some of the things that an outsider might say, oh, I have concerns about. So for example, we don't provide a shelter when our goats are out working in the woods grazing.
We're doing it generally during the summer months, so we're not talking about any real extreme weather. And we do make sure wherever they're contained, they have shade, but they don't have a three-sided barn with straw. So when our clients might have questions about that, we can explain to them. Yes, on the one hand, we don't have that three-sided barn with straw. However, what we see with our animals is that they really enjoy this work. They're very happy to load on the trailer. They're very comfortable resting in the middle of the woods at night. They don't have trouble sleeping. We keep cameras on them.
So understanding how to talk to your clients about that and share the pros and cons is important.
Christa: Yeah, that communication with people that are interacting with your animals is so critical to their understanding of welfare. I mean, you're not a farm educator per se, but you do so much education in the work that you do, providing the goats, and then also through selling your products.
Can you tell a little bit about your herd share and the goat milk soap that you sell?
Lauren: So through the herd share program in the state of Ohio, it's illegal to sell raw milk for human consumption. So the only legal way to obtain that is through a herd share program, which is like a subscription. And with our herd share program, I always joke with my clients that I don't know that I could possibly consume anyone else's raw milk. There are risks associated with raw milk and it's really important to be an educated consumer. And so to that end, as a producer, we require all of our clients to come for a short tour before they can purchase a herd share and consume any raw milk from our farm.
And I really emphasize to those consumers that it's really important to understand how the animals are raised when you're consuming a raw product like milk. The animal's health and care really affects the safety of the product. And so, we do a lot of education through that route. And then, we do the goat milk soap.
I started that to kind of justify having more goats. However, you only need like one goat to run a goat milk soap business. So that did not work out the way I planned. But we end up, I end up doing a ton of education in that route as well because the term goat milk soap is not a regulated term that could mean that I put a tablespoon of powdered goat milk in my soap.
And so explaining to people how we make our soap, why it's so different and important is a lot of fun for me. And also explaining just the basics of cold processed soap versus chemically produced detergent based soap is a lot of fun. I enjoy that part.
Christa: Now I noticed on your Facebook page that you also mentioned goat yoga and birthday parties.
How did you get started with those and what role do they play in your farm business?
Lauren: I joke that anything that you can think of that you need a goat for, we can do. So the strangest request I've gotten was to do a retirement party and they just wanted me to go give a goat to a guy in a warehouse and say happy retirement.
I really enjoy goats. They’re a very accessible animal for people who've not had much experience with livestock. They're all, almost all of our goats are bottle fed, so they're very interactive.
They really enjoy people, they provide such a great opportunity to discuss with people, food production and livestock and behavior and all these kinds of fun things. So the birthday parties are a lot of fun. They are the, the birthday parties and the yoga are a better income source than the soap and the milk. Brush clearing the Goats on the Go is by far my most successful area of goat business. The birthday parties are largely for adults, not kids surprisingly. So, the vast majority is for adults.
Christa: Wow! So kind of moving into a different line of thought. What do you think are some simple effective ways that either farm educators or new farmers could develop strong animal welfare practices from day one?
If they're just starting to plan something, or I guess even retrofitting something that they already have, like what are some easy steps that somebody could, you know, make sure that they are taking care of their animals in a way that is appropriate.
Lauren: So, in the most basic sense, the five freedoms of animal welfare are, are fairly simple to implement.
I mean, those are the things that we're talking about. Making sure that you have appropriate nutritious food, making sure your animals have a clean place to sleep, and those all play a role in welfare. And that's where I would say anyone that's just started. Those are the first boxes to check the five freedoms is your basic checklist.
Let me make sure I'm handling these things appropriately. Once you're ready to move past that is when you wanna start thinking about the three schools of welfare and different ways to evaluate animal preferences. There's a lot of amazing animal welfare research out there. Google Scholar is a great way to find good research on animal preferences and science backed solutions that we have found.
But when you're just starting, focusing on the five freedoms is great. Those are the easy boxes to check.
Christa: So is there any key piece of advice about raising animals that you would want to give people?
Lauren: My favorite piece of advice comes from a very reputable dairy goat breeder out on the west coast who's been super successful and she always recommends, what she calls coffee management.
And coffee management just means when you are drinking your coffee in the morning, just spend that time observing your animals. Not doing chores, not feeding, not cleaning. That time that it takes for you to drink your cup of coffee every morning is the time that you spend just observing and watching. Our skills of observation will keep us so far ahead of problems if we just take that those few minutes to learn what is normal?
What do my animals do every day? What are the weird ticks? What are the funny little behavior things that my goat has an odd habit of doing? And so if you know what normal is, if you know what they look like every day, it's so much easier for you to catch a problem before it becomes a big problem.
You'll know whether that goat that's pressing its head into the wall is a weirdo that does that every morning, which, I have those. Or if it's a goat that's expressing pain and frustration and there's a problem. I love that. That's my favorite piece of advice that as a, as a producer I ever received.
Christa: Awesome. Oh, I love that, so just curious, how many goats do you have and are you in kidding season right now?
Lauren: I have too many goats. It's 104 as of today. We are in the midst of kidding season, so we run our farm in two different groups. So the grazing herd is managed and lives separately from the show and milk goats. So the grazers all kidded out in late January, early February, and the milkers started kidding out in mid-February. The milkers are very spread out. So I do use a lot of reproductive technology with the show goats. So we have some artificial insemination kids that are coming. But because of that, we don't do as good of a job keeping those in a tight kidding, a tight area, space and time.
So, instead of having 'em all close together, they're very spread out. So they started in February and they, I'm still reading some, so they'll kid through July, which works out well for me because I like to have milk through the year for our herd share clients. So I don't mind if I have some real late kidders.
But currently there's only one goat in the house, so that's a good thing. And that is a great example of observation skills. So that kid, he's a four-week-old buck kid that started - all of a sudden he was slow to get up when the milk came out and he was weak in his hind legs. Not just lazy, but it was like he was trying to get up, but he would sit up like a dog and then kind of wobble when he stood up and then seemed fine.
And so we brought him in and were treating him for floppy kid syndrome. So just worried about a little bit of acidosis. But if I didn't know what was normal for him, he was the kind of goat that just was slow to get up every morning, then it wouldn't have been a big deal.
Christa: So I'm curious, how would people find your farm, Find Hope Farm if they wanted to book a goat yoga session or Goats on the Go, what would be a good way to get in touch with you?
Lauren: We do have a website. It’s just www.findhopefarm.com, and all of our ventures are connected through that website. I really, really despise social media, I try to stay active on there, but it's very hard. But the only thing we have is a Facebook because I can't learn anything else. I just don't have the mental bandwidth to spend my time doing that right now, unfortunately.
So, but we do, we are there on Facebook, so that's the best way to reach us if you have questions. We have a Find Hope Farm is our main farm page, and then Goats on the Go Columbus East is just the grazing venture, so only the grazing is under the Goats on the Go. Everything else is Find Hope.
Christa: Great! Well, thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise with us today. And to our listeners, I hope you're walking away with some new ideas and inspiration for incorporating strong animal welfare practices into your own farms and education programs.
If you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with fellow farm educators. Until next time, keep growing, keep teaching, and keep making a difference.
Outro
Hey farm educators. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Before you go, I've got something special for you. If you're ready to build a farm education program that people are excited to book, grab my free guide, Five Simple Steps to Growing an In Demand Farm Education Program. It's packed with the same steps I used to grow my own farm education business.
It'll help you get noticed, attract clients, and make an impact. Just head over to www.farmeducatorsroadmap.com/fivesimplesteps to get your free copy. It's quick, easy, and will make your programs irresistible. I can't wait to see what you create. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
