12 - Two Dachshund Farm
Christa Hein: 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.
Welcome back to the Farm Educators Roadmap. Today's guest brings us a beautiful blend of fiber arts, farm animals, and agritourism magic. I'm so excited to introduce you to Anne Akers, co-founder of two Dachshund Farm in Franklinton, North Carolina. Anne and her husband Rodney are celebrating their 50th Anniversary this year, and they've been building a truly unique destination on their 17 acre property.
Two Dachshund Farm is home to a whole fiber flock - think alpacas, sheep, angora goats, rabbits, and even llamas. Not to mention donkeys, chickens, guineas, and horses. Anne brings her lifelong love of knitting and crocheting, her experience as a teacher, and her deep curiosity about the fiber process to everything she does on the farm, whether it's hosting a birthday party, giving a hands-on tour, or welcoming a school group.
She's creating a space where people of all ages can fall in love with the many animal sources of fiber. Let's dive in and hear how Anne and Rodney turned a dream into a working, welcoming and wool-filled reality. Welcome, Anne!
Anne Akers: Thank you. It's so nice to be here.
Christa Hein: Yeah! Anne, I wanted to start at the beginning.
When did you and Rodney first start dreaming about building a farm and business together?
Anne Akers: I think we had the kernel of the idea for a lot of years, but we officially started working on it, when our children left for college and we knew we wanted to do something different when we retired - and we were kind of leaning in the direction of moving to the country.
And we were thinking maybe open an Airbnb or a winery, and we kind of looked into that a little bit, but about that time, alpacas hit real popularity. And so we had been out visiting some farms and the idea hit us that it would be really fun to do something like from farm to yarn, or farm to sweater instead of from farm to table because we're both big into the fiber arts. We really enjoy it. Have purchased a lot of things over the years that in the way of art, we really appreciate the arts. And we thought, well, this was kind of a nice complement to our interest in art. So, when our children - we started looking when they went to college. And then around 2015, we finally found a place that would work. It's not perfect. But it works.
Christa Hein: So what was your life like before starting the farm? How did your journalism background and teaching experience shape this path?
Anne Akers: That's a hard question. I guess what I take from that I was for many, many years, taught English and then I was a school librarian. And so, I have a passion for literature, for reading, for writing. All of that plays into this. And so now on the farm, I have found that I can actually use my experience from doing that, working with the farm, and making unique experiences with kids based on what I'm very much experienced with as my career.
So as my career, I started out in teaching and I've taught elementary, middle, high school, and then when my kids went to college, I went back to college and got my PhD and, and so I've actually taught college-age students as well school library. Pre-service school librarians is what I taught and I loved it – it was my favorite job.
And my husband got his PhD and he's been kind of in education. He was a 4H agent for a while. I grew up on a farm. small farm, family farm everything went back into us. We didn't do any outside sales, so the animals were all practical. It was more of a vegetable farm than it was an animal farm.
We didn't raise livestock for selling purposes or breeding or anything like that, but all of that, I think, for me, it was just natural that I, we, moved back to the country. We lived in the city while our kids were in school because school systems were so much stronger. Once they went away, we were able to go anywhere. We weren't stopped by certain, you know, characteristics of the education system or whatever. So, we were able to follow our passion to move back to the country and it just kind of became a natural thing that we would start with alpacas. It kind of fell into our lap and from there.
We fell in love with animals. We thought this is cool. We need to get some other animals and develop the fiber and the process. So, I think that's kind of how we got into it. I could go into more detail, but I think that's enough.
Christa Hein: That's awesome. So, I read that you've been knitting since you were nine. So, has fiber art always been a part of your identity?
Anne Akers: You know, I think I didn't quite realize it until I started looking back on fiber arts and I only started calling myself a fiber artist about a couple years ago. It was like I didn't think of myself as an artist. And then I started seeing the term pop up in the fiber arts and I thought, well, I really like that because it is - it's an art.
And so, it just came together that what we do is art and has value. So from that point on, yeah, I think, it did. It just became something that I didn't identify with it first, but I do now, and I really like that.
Christa Hein: So, I wanted talk a little bit about your land and the resources that you have there. So, you and Rodney built your own barn and shelters. What was that experience like for you both and what role did the animals play in shaping the infrastructure and the flow of the farm that you wanted to set up when you first bought it and started planning
Anne Akers: We had to technically, I guess once we got the animals, that's when we really started figuring out shelters.
And there were some shelters on the property that we renovated that worked really well. So that's where we started with the first animals we got, which were the alpacas. And then we added a donkey for protection. So, we needed a shelter for the donkey and there were some run-ins in the back of the property, which we used until we were able to scrape up enough money to put in the barn.
And everything has been based on money. So, what you can do now and gradually add to it. So, we've finally got the barn developed. We knew we wanted to add horses for pleasure. I grew up with a horse. I'm a horse fanatic, so still, even now, still. So, we decided we needed a barn, and originally we thought about that was where the alpacas would go because it was a nice way to protect them.
We don't have the same problem here in North Carolina that people have out in the west and Midwest with bigger predators. Our predators here would be more like somebody's neighbor dog. There are coyotes in the area. We've got a lot of subdivisions around us right now, and so some of these animals have been kind of pushed out.
They've even seen some bear in this area. So, I keep that in the back of my mind. And originally, we were thinking we would put the animals in this nice protected barn. But as it turned out, we didn't really need to do that. They've got their own area and the other part of the property the big thing was the fencing and getting it high enough to keep some of these animals out or run electric to help keep some of the animals out.
But all of that was based on the different needs of the animals and whether what kind of protection they needed. So we're still building, we're still recreating, renovating, trying to figure things out because it's the beauty of it is you're continually learning.
You're not ever going to know everything. So for us, I mean, that's what we like. As educators, it's very stimulating for us to know that we're gonna be learning forever.
Christa Hein: So you have lots of different animals on the farm, and the main focus of the animals that you have seems to be fiber. So, what is that fiber processing journey like for you, from having the animals to shearing, to yarn? Talk us through that process.
Anne Akers: Well, that's one thing from small farming that is probably the hardest. For fiber farmers, because there's just not enough small mills to do all the processing. And of course, the bigger areas, bigger mills and things there are co-ops around.
But you lose your individuality if you join the co-op. You don't know when you get a pair of socks back if it came from your animal. So, there's a big problem in not having enough small mills to process. So, I started off trying to well, let me back up and start you from the very beginning.
So, the alpacas are sheared once a year, in the spring. We're getting ready to shear them in May. We already sheared the sheep. They're sheared once a year. Most of 'em - we have two that are Icelandic and they get sheared twice a year. But everybody else predominantly is once a year.
And the goats, the angora goats, we have to shear them twice a year. And I learned to shear them myself, kind of because it looked like I could handle it in watching the process.
They're smaller animals so they're not so hard for me to handle. And you just put 'em on a stand. And so I watched how people were shearing them and so I've taken on that job and do it myself. And it saves money. So that helps, you know, anything you can do to save money. So I shear them twice a year.
I usually do one or two a day until I get through with it. Just take my time, you know, very cautious with it. So, and the llamas we shear like the alpacas, once a year. I usually have a professional to come in and do the llamas and the sheep. So I do the goats. The process is all hands on deck. We have to corral the animals.
Then you have to, based on how they're sheared, you bring them to the shearer and you wait. We usually do worming and weighing and some medical things at the same time. Their teeth, a lot of times you have to file down their teeth. And their feet. We trim their toes, so it's a process and then they're ready for summer.
We try to get 'em nice and shed that heavy coat for the summer. And then we bag the fiber. Alpacas have three different kinds. It's divided, three different kinds. The top is considered first that comes off their back. It's first quality. That's what you're gonna find made into garments, things that will touch your skin.
Seconds and thirds are coming off the animal sides and their legs and their bellies. So, it may or may not be good enough to work into yarn of any kind, but there's loads of things you can still do with that fiber. One of the things I tell children is the nice thing about fiber is you don't waste any of it.
Every bit of it, even the nasty dirty stuff can be used for something if nothing but mulch in your garden. And now they're actually learning how to make pellets out of the fiber. England uses some of this for insulation in their homes, but a lot of people are gonna put it on their garden for mulch.
We haven't even tapped into the uses for that, so one of the beauties of this is nothing gets wasted. We even have these little things called bird nester balls, and we put you know, fiber, that's not the top quality. We'll put that in the little nesters and hang it up for the birds. And every now and then I'll find a bird nest and there's a little bit of fiber in it.
So it's just, you know, it's just really cool to see that nothing from these animals is ever wasted and then from there I started trying to process my own fiber and it's backbreaking work to wash it without the commercial washer that the mills use. So during COVID, I decided to go over and volunteer at the local mill in exchange for getting my fiber processed.
So that has worked out real well because it's a very expensive process. It ends up being very expensive if you price a skein of yarn, natural yarn. What's built into that is the whole process from shearing all the way to the finished product in the mill, but the mill will take it and commercially wash it.
They run it through machines to get out as much of the - what we call vegetable matter. I'll leave that to your imagination, but that's all sorts of things that you find in the fiber. And then it goes through a carder and from there it goes to the spinner where it's spun into beautiful yarn, or you either spin it into bats where other people can buy it and actually spin it themselves. Or we spin it into core wool, which we use for needle felting. So it's just a long process. You don't get your fiber very fast, unfortunately. So that's pretty much the process.
Christa Hein: What's your favorite item to make with your fiber, and what do visitors get most excited about?
Anne Akers: Probably dolls that I make when I first got my first fiber back. It was a blend of one of my alpacas and one of my sheep and I made a what I call a Sammy doll, because part of it was made out of one of my alpacas named Sammy. So this was actually a crochet doll and it is a little alpaca doll, and he has a little scarf on, and because he's made, well, he is actually made from one of my alpacas, one of my sheep, and then his hair and his tail - that comes from one of my goats. I can't keep those on the shelf.
Those got wiped out fast and people really appreciate that you made it. They're always asking me, what did you make? What is your stuff here? I can't keep up. I make really cute little, uh, knitted lavender sachet dolls, and I can't keep them in stock. They're either a teddy bear or it's a little girl with a big hat on and they're about the size of a lavender sachet, and people just scarf 'em up. So they want, that's what they want, they either want your fiber or they want your artwork which is very nice.
Christa Hein: I see in your farm store you also sell handcrafted goods from local artists. How did those collaborations come about?
Anne Akers: I went out and started beating the bushes. Some people I met, she's kind of turned into one of my best friends. She brought her grandchildren out for a tour and we just hit it off. We had, she's a big crocheter and she had already had an Etsy store, and I said well, you know, what I'll do if y'all volunteer, to work for me for events or run the stores sometimes, you know, to help out on the farm. I'll let you sell your products in the store without commission.
And she's so she's been doing that ever since we first met. She brought her stuff out and it sells and she actually has taken over. So when I have a big event, she runs the store for me and frees me up to be able to do whatever I need to do around the, I'm usually the overseer of all the events, so it really helps to free me up that I can, you know, put out fires and not have to worry about the store at the same time.
I have just - as I've seen people and met people and they tell me they do a craft, I’ve said, well, bring something in and let me see what it is. And this is what I, you know, I charge a minimum commission, very, very low commission. I wouldn't charge anything at all, but everything I'm doing is trying to raise money to feed my animals.
So, I feel like I have to do a little something but I promote their art. I was at a vending event and a mom walked up with the cutest little earrings and I said something to her and it turns out her 14-year-old daughter had needle felted these little birds. And I said, well, you need to bring those into my store and try to sell 'em.
So, I've been actually selling her needle felted birds for the last couple of years. And they're pretty good sellers and she's gotten better at it. So, I can see the progress from when she first brought 'em in till now. So you know, I recruit people if they come up and they say I love to crochet.
I say well, bring something in. If you want to try to sell it in the store, I'll be happy to put it in the store for you. So, it's just our way of celebrating the local art. I think that's really important.
Christa Hein: Yeah, and what a great way to build a community of your local fiber artists as well.
Anne Akers: That's kinda what I think. I feel like this is one way to let people know that we have all these different types of artists in our little country county.
Christa Hein: So I see on your website that you also welcome school groups or families to the farm for field trips or parties. When people come to the farm for a visit, what do you hope they'll experience?
Anne Akers: I want them to experience the joy of the animals, but also the practicality of this type of farm life. We get so many people to say, we wanted do what you're doing, and I think - we try to be very realistic about it. Why is fiber farming good for small farms? Because it really is, it's a nice complement to our land because these animals do not tear the land up.
They're not like the horses and the donkeys and the cows and even pigs for that matter, but we don't - I mean there are some people that do eat their animals at harvest. I don't. I tell people meat is a four-letter word on my farm. I cannot love on these animals and then turn around and think about eating them.
And that's the way we grew up. You know, when our chickens quit laying, we ate our chickens and we had beef cows that we ended up eating. We raised pigs and these were things that I didn't enjoy. I like to eat, but I tried not to make friends with these animals that I knew had a very limited lifespan on our farm.
And I understand it. I don't, I'm not knocking it, it's just not for me. I just want to be able to go out and nuzzle my animals and appreciate 'em. Oh, I was running some fiber yesterday at the mill and it just gave me great pleasure to work with this fiber that happened to be one of my little sheep.
And it just and I got some yarn back before Christmas and I knew the little lamb and it, I'm sitting there every time I'm sitting there knitting or whatever I'm doing with it. I think about that little animal and it just gives me great pleasure.
So, these are the things I try to help people understand what it means to be a farmer, how your life is dedicated to taking care of these animals, that it is a responsibility. You cannot just hop up and plan a week at the beach. You've got to figure things out. How the animals are gonna be taken care of, who's gonna take care of them? How's that gonna fit into the overall economy of the farm? All of these things have to be taken into consideration.
So, we try to help people understand that part, but also the art, that this is an art that, the crafts that you see that you do with fiber. It is an art. So if you had a great grandmother that knitted you a baby blanket, you should cherish that. I did so many gifts when we were young family made so many things for people because I couldn't afford to buy things for 'em, and I just got the sense there were people that didn't quite understand how much love went into the making of that gift.
So I think it's really valuable for people to understand that this is an art and it should be appreciated. Just like pottery, just like a painting, and I think in turn, that makes you appreciate other art because then you realize it's somebody's creativity that you are getting to share in.
Christa Hein: Absolutely. What kinds of classes and events have you hosted on the farm? And then also related, what would you like to add in the future?
Anne Akers: So we do public. We're trying to coordinate. Like I said, this is an ongoing learning process, so we're trying to learn how best to consolidate our tourists. So we have done, now we're doing public tours, little bit lower price, but we hope we get bigger groups at one time - first weekend of the month and then if you can't come, then you can always book a private tour. But for us, it's much better to have a bigger group on a Saturday or Sunday than to have a Wednesday with, you know, maybe a couple. Or a family of four, because we give the same tour regardless. So, we're trying to work towards that.
But those are the two types of tours we offer. And then, we do all sorts of groups. This Sunday we have a Girl Scout group that's coming out. We'll give them a tour. I usually, depending on the group and the age of the people coming, I will pull out and do a whole fiber talk and we let them see the different types of fiber and touch it and compare.
And then we talk about the products that you make from it. And then I always like to show things that we found on the farm that may or may not necessarily go into the fiber piece of it, but I show, you know, we found different animal bones. We have different skeletons on my goats. I've got a couple of horns that have fallen off, bits and pieces of squirrels tails that my cat, our cat got a hold of, you know, the little big bugs, things that'll maybe fascinate some of the kids. I throw them Guinea eggs and Guinea feathers in the mix so they'll see those and then I always talk about the fact that there are other artists besides humans on the farm. And I like to get them thinking about that. And what I'll end up, I showing them will be bird nests.
We have one particular little bird on the farm that actually takes a piece of the hay twine - it's usually blue, I think maybe green, but she'll take one little strand out of that. I don't know, there's probably 10 strands in a piece of that fiber orfthat bailing twine. But she'll interweave that one little piece in her nest inside.
When the kids say, you know, at first they don't think about weaving as a fiber art. I said, so birds are weavers, just like humans can be weavers. And I said, what else can you think of? And then I might say, something has eight legs, not my favorite thing in the world, but it produces beautiful weaving, and that would be a spider.
So I try to get the kids to think about the art and then how nature is also an artist on the farm. So I pull that out and we talk about that. So that would be any, pretty much any group. And I found it based on the age of who's in the group. I may do more or less because the little kids don't care much about that kind of stuff. But the adults seemed to enjoy it.
We do birthday parties and usually for the birthday parties we don't talk a lot about the fiber and we get into some of the interest, you know, trivia with the animals when we do the tour, but we don't do a lot of education for a birthday party.
The kids are already wound up and excited while they're there. So that's mostly just a tour, meet the animals and if we can put in a little education about the animals, we try to do that. We've had senior citizen groups come out. We've got a lot of homeschoolers come out. We've got a huge school field trip that comes from Wake County, the big county next to us.
And they came because my granddaughter was in fourth grade that one year, and she went in wearing our T-shirt and the teacher was all excited and she said, do you think they would let us come out for a field trip? And she said, sure. And she told me and I said, well, yeah, that'd be fine. And it, we were thinking a class, right? 30 kids maybe. It was the whole fourth grade.
Christa Hein: Wow.
Anne Akers: So we got our baptism under fire with 75 plus kids and about that many parents. And now they liked it so much. They said they think it - this class did field trips all the time. That was part, they were charter school and that was part of what the fourth grade did, was field trips all the time. And she said they booked every year. So they're coming back again in two weeks and she said, we think this is our favorite field trip.
Christa Hein: Oh, that's fantastic.
Anne Akers: So pretty much we've done a corporate event where they come out and they'll would take 'em on a tour and then they might have lunch on the farm.
We do a big lavender day coming up when lavender's blooming. We just started that last year. So this year will add on to whatever we've learned from doing that. But the things that I'm constantly planning and thinking and I would like to incorporate some sort of a reading or a story walk.
And that's been on my mind for, since we opened the farm. I haven't quite nailed down how I want to do it, but I want to incorporate a story walk. I want to do, um, some more lessons with lavender. We don't, we have not done a lot with the lavender yet, so I want to figure out how to incorporate that with the kids to learn, because that's kind of an interesting plant as well as the fragrance and the beauty and the art that comes out of it.
When the kids come out, when anybody comes out, but with the school field trips, we've been able to do shearing. So, the kids get to see the whole process, and then we talk about the uses of the fiber.
So, all of that is, let's see. I think that we've had people talk to us about weddings out here. And we may or may not do a wedding. It just depends. Probably do a small wedding, we probably could handle that. Okay. What other events classes? I guess we've done classes out here. We need to figure out our class space. That's a big thing that we’re constantly trying to figure out is how to have climate-controlled classes or either a good place to hold a class outside when it's not too humid, where we have lighting if we need it. So those are things that we're looking at and thinking about working on.
Christa Hein: Nice. So in the few minutes that we have left, do you have any advice for somebody who is wanting to start out as you were, when your kids moved away with this idea, what advice would you give to somebody?
Anne Akers: I think the same advice that you hear all the time. Visit as many farms as you can, and it doesn't matter that they're fiber farms. If fibers your love, yeah, visit fiber farms, but visit flower farms. Visit vegetable farms. Visit places that have been in business for a while and see their operation. But just visit, visit, visit, talk, ask, ask questions.
We joined the local, the North Carolina Agritourism Society, and that's been our association, and that's been really good. We've made a lot of contacts. Done a lot of networking. So in addition to what we've learned through the conference, we've also been able to find people we can ask questions to.
And I think that's the big thing is find mentors, people that will talk. You learn a lot more and a lot quicker. Of course, you're gonna read and you need to read. I've joined a lot of Facebook groups and they've been helpful as well, but I think getting out and seeing people and talking to them is, it's the most important thing you can do.
Christa Hein: That's such great advice. Anne, thank you so much for sharing your heart, your story, and a peek behind the scenes at Two Dachshund Farm. I love how you've blended creativity, education, and fiber arts into something that's not only a business, but a joyful and deeply personal experience for your visitors.
For our listeners who want to learn more, you can explore Anne's work and schedule a visit at twodachshundfarm.com. Whether you're curious about wool, dreaming of agritourism, or just love hearing from people who are living their values, I hope this conversation inspires you as much as it's inspired me.
Until next time, keep dreaming, keep growing, and keep connecting folks to the land in ways only you can. Thanks Anne!
Anne Akers: Thanks for having me.
Christa Hein: 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.
