UNION, Maine — Cheryl Rudy stood in her farm field in Union, watching her herd of goats and smiling.
“They can be very ornery,” she said. “But they’re loving.”
Rudy knows goats well. She’s been farming with them for 35 years.
The work of her Wandering Goat Farm is now getting a boost from the federal government, in the form of a grant from the USDA, totally nearly $250,000.
It’s one of 10 grants the agency is giving to small farms and agricultural producers in Maine to help them grow and succeed with value-added products.
In the case of Wandering Goat, the product is soap made with goat’s milk. Rudy and her daughter, Tanya Miller, have made the soap for the past 11 years.
“It has nourishing qualities for your skin,” Rudy said. “It has a lot of nutrients in there, a lot of fatty acids. It really gets into your skin and helps coat it and moisturize it.”
That helps explain the popularity of the soap the mother and daughter produce in the small shop behind Tanya’s home. They combine milk —sometimes as much as 25% of the mixture — with lye, then with a blend of oils and finally essential oils and herbs to get the scent and texture desired.
Miller said they currently produce 63 varieties of soap, sold in farmers’ markets, online, and through 35 retail stores in and out of Maine.
Sales keep growing.
“We increased 100 percent this year, which we weren’t ready for, but we kept up,” Miller said.
The USDA grant should make it easier to keep up and grow even more. They said the money will purchase production equipment that will allow Wandering Goat to dramatically increase the amount of soap it produces.
The funds will also let them hire two part-time workers, one for production and one for the office.
“I’m looking forward to the bookkeeper starting,” Rudy said. She handles those tasks at night after a day of tending goats and making and shipping soap.
“It was absolutely thrilling to know we would be given this opportunity,” Miller said. “And that people believe in us.”
The USDA also helped boost another goat farm, about 30 miles away in Waldoboro.
Copper Tail Farm is the dream of Christelle and Jon McKee, who moved from Oregon to midcoast Maine seven years ago to start their own farm. They had worked together on a farm on the west coast and came to Maine to raise their own family, as well as a large herd of dairy goats.
“We are first-generation farmers. None of our family has farmed,” Jon McKee said.
The couple came to Maine with seven goats and now have a herd of 75.
“They’re just so fun [and] mischievous. They get into trouble,” Christelle McKee said. “They’re so sweet. You can cuddle with them.”
They have also learned how the goats can support the farm. Christelle and Jon McKee produce soap, yogurt, and cheese from the milk they gather each day by hand. Cheese, said Christelle McKee, is the top product, followed closely by the yogurt.
They say the USDA grant will also allow expansion, more equipment, and facilities to produce more products. And they will finallty be able to hire someone to share the workload and give the couple more time to develop new products.
“It will be a huge game-changer for us,” Christelle McKee said.
They said the goal of the grant and the farm is to allow these improvements to increase farm revenue so that the growth can be sustained long-term.
Jon McKee said it will help show small farms can still succeed with the right ideas and the right people.
“Everyone just says, ‘Oh wish I could.’ But all you gotta do is try. We tried, started with seven, now have 75. You just have to work hard,” he said.
That may be the common quality among all ten grant recipients.
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