When it comes to rethinking land management, Julia Taylor of Rosemary & Pine goatscaping company isn’t just nibbling around the edges. She’s going all in, hooves first.
A New Kind of Land Stewardship
Julia spent over a decade in public service, but these days, she’s behind the wheel of a livestock trailer, pulling into job sites with a team of goats ready to tackle overgrown fields, invasive species, and neglected land.
Based in Upstate New York, her business Rosemary & Pine is part of a growing movement that uses livestock to manage overgrown, invasive plant species in a way that’s chemical-free, machinery-light, and deeply restorative for the land. But behind the idyllic vision of goats grazing peacefully lies a story of burnout, purpose, and community.
From First Responder to First-Generation Farmer
Before Julia started her goatscaping company, she spent over 10 years as a firefighter, EMT, and police officer. But like many purpose-driven folks in public service, she hit a wall. The bureaucracy, the burnout, and the misalignment of values pushed her and her wife, also a police officer, toward a new chapter.
They didn’t want to wait until retirement to live the life they dreamed of: stewarding land, building community, and reconnecting with nature.
That pivot came, serendipitously, at a TEDx talk in Buffalo, where Julia first learned about goatscaping from Jen Zeitler of Let’s Goat Buffalo. Moved by the concept and the woman behind it, Julia reached out, volunteered on the farm, and was soon mentored into launching her own business.
The science checks out. Unlike brush hogs or mowers that risk spreading invasive species through re-rooted cuttings, goats digest what they eat completely. Their waste is nutrient-rich, not reproductive. This makes them a near-perfect tool for invasive species like multiflora rose, poison ivy, and knotweed.
Getting Out of the Weeds in the Goatscaping Business
Julia’s startup story includes all the usual highs and lows: from a tough property search to the joy of landing her first contract. That first job was a collaboration with another land steward transforming an 80-acre tree plantation into a nature preserve and herb farm. Fittingly, it’s a project filled with the same values that inspired Julia’s career switch.
She named her company after two things close to her heart: Rosemary (her late mother) and Pine (the future site of a small-scale Christmas tree farm). Beyond the goatscaping services, the farm is evolving into a regenerative sanctuary, offering people a place to reconnect with land and self.
Collaboration Over Competition in the Agricultural Community
Rosemary and Pine is a reflection of a broader ethos that runs deep in the food, ag, and land stewardship communities: shared values over competition. Julia speaks often about how connections just keep showing up when you’re aligned with your mission. Neighbors drop off hay. Local farmers offer support. And even former competitors open doors.
As a first-generation farmer, Julia has leaned heavily on education and community, citing resources from Cornell Cooperative Extension and mentorship from Let’s Goat Buffalo. She has seen it time and again, the way the agricultural community pulls together in support of each other, rather than pushing away from perceived competition.
The Business Case for Goatscaping
So, who hires a goatscaping company? The answer: anyone with land. Clients range from private landowners to municipalities, nonprofits, and potentially with the addition of sheep, solar farms. Goats and sheep both excel in rugged, overgrown terrain, and are ideal for environmentally sensitive areas where mechanical or chemical clearing isn’t safe or effective.
While the goats do the clearing, it’s Julia who’s cultivating something deeper: a new model of land care that’s rooted in balance. As she puts it, Nature is a self-balancing wheel and “we’re just ripping spokes out. And I see our business as a way of just makeshifting at least some temporary ones to try to help.” Julia is well on her way in her mission to help put a few of those spokes back in, one field at a time.
Rosemary & Pine offers free on-site assessments, depending on scheduling. Services typically run in one- to two-week increments and are tailored to the size and condition of the property. More information is available at www.rosemaryandpinefarm.com, or via Instagram and Facebook at @rosemaryandpine.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage and agriculture industries. Today’s guest is Julia Taylor. She’s the founder of Rosemary & Pine Goatscaping Company. I was so excited to bring her to the show today. They’re redefining land management through an unconventional but deeply effective lens. Goats!
Julia blends regenerative agriculture, animal stewardship and ecological restoration to tackle invasive species, promote biodiversity and improve soil health all without machinery and chemicals.
And one of the things that we were talking about post-recording about why goats are so great for invasive species in particular is because if you take a brush hog through an environment where you need to control an invasive species, the output from the brush hog can sometimes make those cuttings re-root and it can actually become worse.
That’s not the case with the goats because they’re ruminant animals so they digest differently. And so their output is nutrient-dense as opposed to being something that can re-root, which is especially critical for invasive, which I thought was wildly interesting.
Julia is a first-generation farmer. I love being able to talk to first-generation farmers, especially on the podcast here, because it’s so interesting to talk about why they wanted to go into farming in the first place. Julia touches on that today. She spent a decade of her early career in public service. She was a firefighter, an EMT and a police officer. So a wildly different change here for her. And she talks about why she wanted to do that. Her desire to restore land and community are really at the root of that along with shared values.
We talk about all of those components on the show today as well as a little bit of regenerative ag and so many goats or some sheep discussion thrown in there too.
Enjoy the conversation.
Maureen: Thanks so much for joining me today. Your first podcast! I promise to take it easy on you. So I always love to start these at the beginning. So tell me a little bit about your background leading up to the work you’re doing now.
Julia Taylor: I appreciate it.
Well, my background has absolutely nothing sort of to do with what I’m doing now. I have a pretty diverse background. For a little over a decade, I’ve been a public servant. I started as a firefighter EMT for several years and the last six years I was a sworn police officer.
Maureen: And what brought you into that work? What made you want to do that?
Julia: So that work I was brought into my mom had gotten sick and I felt pretty helpless at the time. So I actually started volunteering as a firefighter when I was like 21 or 22. And it felt like just a good way to feel like I had purpose and I was doing something good. And that sort of just kept evolving, even though it had nothing to do with my degrees in the past.
It kind of just kept evolving because it kept me moving. It kept me very dynamic. There was selective problem solving. Same, obviously you can kind of see the escalation into, so that rolled into, well, I wanted to acquire more skill sets so I could help more people.
So I became an EMT and then I became a professional firefighter and that rolled into then, well, police responded to all those and more. And I just, kind of kept seeing it as a way in an avenue to continue to try to help more and more people.
Maureen: No, I love it. I was at a conference last week and I was reflecting on why I thought that place was unique and why I wanted to be there. It was Fargo, North Dakota. And it just came down to – I think that there are places that just hit different, right? It’s just a, there’s something special about certain places. I love Upstate New York for that reason. Fargo, North Dakota is the same.
I think you can feel that in a lot of different ways and sometimes it’s a role and sometimes it’s an industry and sometimes it’s a place. And so you just felt connected to that work. So I don’t think that that’s cliche at all. But you said it has nothing to do with your degree. What is your degree in?
Julia: I know you’re based in Rochester. I actually went to RIT for two years and studied industrial engineering. Realized that the kind of engineering world and office life I did a few internships did well but couldn’t see myself thriving and being happy in that career and a sedentary lifestyle – I’m very active.
I also did an Ironman in 2014. I like being active and having dynamic work and a sedentary desk job was just not for me.
I finished my degree at University at Buffalo (UB). I moved home when my mom got sick and I finished my degree at UB for just business administration, just to finish my degree.
And that’s around the same time – as I said before, while I was a student at UB finishing up my degree – I started volunteering. And then after I graduated, I found myself doing a few things, coaching here and there, a few side jobs. And then I got hired full-time with the fire department at that point.
Maureen: So how long were you in public service?
Julia: At least over a decade.
Maureen: Okay. And then what, so then you took a sharp left turn. You made a major change. Why did you do that? And what was your pivot to?
Julia: We’re (my wife and I) were both police officers. And we had reached a point, we both had kind of the same drive in that career. And we realized very quickly that we were limited in our capabilities and we weren’t able to fulfill that purpose of helping people as much as we had hoped.
We didn’t agree, really, with the administrative and managerial practices in our departments. And we desperately tried to improve those systems while we were there, but we realized very quickly, unfortunately, that the systems were kind of breaking us as individuals instead of the other way around. And after a few break point moments, we knew we needed a drastic change.
Maureen: Wow. That’s such a hard position to be in. And I think it’s really that much more impactful for it to be happening in a public service role too, because there’s so many layers to that, right? The idea that this is supposed to be a role that’s helping my community, but there’s all this bureaucracy.
I mean, I was employed in professional services for 10 years while I worked full-time on the side. And the thing that was my compelling moment to take the leap into working for myself was the same thing – its that bureaucracy, right?
Where I would observe so many things that were happening that were just bullshit. And in corporate, it happens a lot. And it’s just one of those things that’s kind of like, well, this is how they want to run this company.
Julia: Absolutely.
Maureen: I think it’s that much more frustrating when it’s public service, right? Because it’s taxpayer dollars. What’s happening?
Julia: We should be altruistic and not everyone is. And for some people it’s an ego thing and that’s just the antithesis of what I am about. And I was there for purpose and I felt like I wasn’t serving that purpose anymore. Not in that capacity.
Maureen: So you decide, all right, we gotta do something different. And what are you doing now?
Julia: So now there were obviously many growth periods and trials and tribulations along the way.
Now I run a goat-scaping company in Albion, New York. We’re a small farm, a small regenerative agriculture farm. So we’re focused on improving the soil, improving the soil, carbon sequestering, and really creating a biodiverse atmosphere here where people can come and reconnect with nature and experience the healing effect of that.
Maureen: So tell me why. How did you land on goatscaping? Because with regenerative – we’ve had a lot of guests on the show talk about regenerative – there’s many different aspects to what regenerative means, how it’s defined, what it means to a different business and brand and company and consumer and all those things. Why goatscaping?
Julia: So goatscaping, I now just, can’t see it as like the best ecological option for land management as far as an alternative to heavy machinery and chemicals, pesticides, you name it. The pivoting moment, I guess, actually of when I decided to even start to pursue the avenue of goatscaping was, it was kind of the perfect timing, call it serendipity, the universe, whatever you want to call it.
Last year, right when we were in that kind of breaking point moment, realizing we needed a dramatic change. We knew we always had this dream of having a farm and a homestead. It was a retirement dream. We also kind of realized in those careers, retirement was kind of a farce. I knew multiple retirees that died of a heart attack within the first year or two of their retirement.
We realized very quickly that we were just grinding ourselves down for potentially our lives. So we were trying to figure out a way that we could make our dream retirement into a business and just kind of skip the grind part. And again, call it serendipity, whatever. Actually I think the TEDx talks in Buffalo are occurring now.
But last year, Jen Zeitler performed or presented rather, and she runs Let’s Goat Buffalo. Jen Zeitler had this amazing presentation about how she used her business of goatscaping to reconnect with nature and for her own healing journey. And that resonated obviously very profoundly with me. She talked about the benefits of it, but it was more so about her journey from being an occupational therapist in a very corporate world. And she again, made that very crazy kind of switch in a lot of people’s minds.
And to me, it just made all the sense in the world and I immediately started hounding her down. I think I reached out to her on every platform I could afterwards. And I even signed up for her volunteer hours on her farm. She runs a care farm down in Springville, New York. And we spent the entire time just talking about her business. She saw the passion and the desperate need on my part to just want to do this.
And she loved that, you know, energy and she leaned into it. She also has a waiting list for like two years and knows that there are a lot of people that want these services, but she’s, you know, limited in how many jobs she can take on. So she actually took it as an opportunity to help us start our business.
Maureen: So she had a wait list of people who wanted her goats and you were like, I think I want to do goats. So she then got to help you start in many ways?
Julia: She was absolutely the best mentor I could have asked for. She just showed up out of nowhere and all of sudden everything just kind of started falling into place. I spent all last summer kind of apprenticing her under her business while she helped me get the groundwork going for my own.
We spent just over a year looking for a property. We finally secured our little farm in Albion this past winter and we’ve just been rapidly building since and I’m working on our first contract of the summer currently right now.
Maureen: So first of all, congratulations. I’m a big believer in like, I’m not a religious person, but I’m a big believer that the universe will send you things when you’re paying attention to them. So there’s a reason you went.
Julia: It’s so funny you say that. That was part of what Jen had to ingrain in me. She’s like, you know, I know you came from a career where you don’t really trust people, but she said you need to, you’re going to find that once you start kind of tapping into whatever you want to call it, your Dharma, your purpose, once you start tapping into that, she’s like, you are going to receive things from people.
People are going to want to just give you support and you’re going to find that everything just starts kind of coming together and falling into place. And I was very skeptical when she was telling me this, when we were, you know, just chatting about a year ago. But damn, she was right. Everything, and don’t get me wrong, it has been grueling and there have been a lot of moments of growth where it was very difficult.
Maureen: We’re talking about serendipity and the idea of things kind of coming together serendipitously and happening in your life for a reason. Pick back up there for us.
Julia: Yes. So that was one of the, I think the one of the first serious conversations She and I had about getting into this business. And when you truly have a passion for just wanting to put something for not only your community, but your environment out there that it’s kind of, it’s just altruistic in that kind of way. And then once you have a passion that you’re just, you’re driving for in that way.
She just told me that everything just starts, people will just start finding you that you need to connect with. And if that isn’t true, I mean, even just moving to Albion, New York, I am unbelievably grateful for the connections that we’ve made even in just the short time that we’ve been here. We somehow connected with all of the people that we needed to, that we’re passionate about.
What we’re doing and or they’re doing something in the same way or we fold into each other’s vision perfectly. Actually, the job that I’m on right now that I have the goats grazing on currently is a former tree plantation, 80 acres that this woman, Rosemary Gantz, is turning into a nature preserve, herb farm that will also have a lot of retreat aspects.
The two of us have just been like two bees buzzing around because we just kind of fold into each other’s visions perfectly.
I can’t say enough about the Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) office. I feel like the networking we’ve done there has just been invaluable to our operation and the connections that we’ve made. Even just the resources from Cornell, like their small farms courses.
As a former city [person], we’ve taken a lot of time educating ourselves because we are first generation and we didn’t grow up doing any of this.
So we’ve been really immersed in educating ourselves so that we are responsible about what we’re doing and caring for our livestock and our animals. I did the goat production course through Cornell this past winter, and I am just a sponge for learning as much as I can. And I’m among a lot of like-minded individuals.
Maureen: Yes. I love it. It comes down to that idea of like you mentioned, folding into someone’s vision. It comes down for me with the way that we work with people and that attraction mindset is what you’re talking about, right? The idea of what is meant for you, we’ll find you. Yes, 100%. I am here for it. The idea of shared values of like when you surround yourself with people who have a like it, a liked mindset.
And I’m all for diversity of thought and opinion.I’m all for that diversity of thought I think is critical, but I’m talking about values. As in, what do you stand for?
The idea of aligning with like-minded people is just – I think – the secret sauce to good business, truly. Because when you build that and you find people and align yourself with people who have that kind of shared value, like Let’s Goat Buffalo, right? That she was happy to help you because she saw in you that you were not trying to take advantage of her, right?
And so that’s the idea of shared value alignment and that is one of the things that leads to business success. I mean, I think that’s the secret sauce to healthy business.
Julia: I’ve been blown away by how generous people are. It seems like as soon as we’re aware of a need, all of sudden somebody swoops in and is there. I, again, we call it the universe, whatever. It’s been, I’ve been awestruck honestly by it.
We’ve even had [things happen] just as simple as we needed to find hay and then the neighbor next door wandered over, her nephew did, and he’s like, “I have a hay farm, why don’t you come on by?” And he ended up giving us actually hundreds of dollars worth of hay, just because he thought we were really nice and genuine and really liked what we were doing. And he knew that we’d look after his uncle.
It’s just this whole community and the farm and what we’re learning. I think about the farming community especially is that it’s these close ties and no matter what’s going on in the world.
All we have is each other in our local community. And if you can lean on someone, then they know that they can lean on you. And I feel like the farming community is all about just supporting each other, at least the community that we’ve been a part of. And it’s not even if somebody is doing something similar to you. It’s not a competition. It’s how we can support each other and both thrive. And that’s how Jen sees it.
Maureen: I totally agree, yes. And that is a common thread that we talk about often on the show here with folks that I bring on that are various sectors of food bev and ag. That idea of collaboration and shared values and everything like that, it is frequent in the industry, which is a beautiful thing. So tell me a little bit.
Like I’d love a high point and a low point from your career post-public service. Like, cause I’m sure you’ve got a lot of both from exactly. So tell me about a high point and a low point.
Julia: That could be a whole other podcast, but I’m not here for that soapbox. I would say a high point was landing our first contract and meeting Rosemary and learning about the amazing thing that she’s doing with her 80-acre former tree plantation.
Maureen: So wait, who’s Rosemary?
Julia: She’s establishing the grateful forest there [and is a Rosemary & Pine client]. Well, it was kind of kismet that we met Rosemary and she’s our first client. In the first contract that we’re working this year. But Rosemary, it’s just actually a coincidence. The Rosemary of Rosemary and Pine is actually named after my late mother Rosemary.
And Pine, we are actually planting acres of Christmas trees. So in about five to six years, we’ll actually be selling Christmas trees off of our back acreage, very small scale. But the reason that kind of folds in perfectly with our farm and our regenerative farm is we like what Jen does in Let’s Goat Buffalo, if you’re not familiar. She has kind of a Christmas tree recycling program. She doesn’t grow her own Christmas trees. But she accepts Christmas tree donations at the end of season from the local community. And people will pull up with, you know, pickup trucks full of Christmas trees and the goats just ravish them because it is an amazing infusion of vitamins and greenery mid-winter that they are absolutely in love with because they’ve been eating hay for a couple of months at that point usually. And they love, love, love the Christmas trees.
Actually this last spring, my wife and I even took and used some of the lumber to start building a greenhouse for her with the reused lumber from the trees.
Maureen: Christmas trees. So cool. I love it. So Rosemary was your first client. So continue on from there.
Julia: Yep. So that I would say that high of making that connection and feeling that synergy and also just having revenue on the books as a first as you know, a business and that’s that’s a huge moment.
And I would say, gosh, I know there were a lot of lows with the property search we made. Countless offers on properties and various homesteads. Our kind of scope was within about three hours of Buffalo since that’s where a lot of our family and friends are. And I knew we were getting pretty close when I knew I felt like I was close to my breaking point and was almost ready to give up because I knew it just had to be around the corner because I didn’t know how much longer I could take hearing no.
I would say that was a pretty big low point. And I think my first real farm lesson was when a fox took about eight of our animals. That was a pretty low moment as well, but we’re trying to take everything in stride.
I actually had a call with Jen shortly after because I was just beside myself. And it’s a part of farm life that you lose animals, sometimes you do your best, but the way that she even phrased it, which I thought was, I try to remind myself regularly is, it’s still nature and nature is always going to be a fierce force. And who are we to think that we can control everything in nature?
And it was a really good reminder of what regenerative farming is and coming back to the land and focusing on, you know, I like to explain to people that nature is this beautiful self-balancing thing. And if you think of it like a wheel, humans just can’t help, but just kind of like manipulate spokes and take them out.
We think that we’re helping, but we’re really harming because it is this delicate balance of everything. And we’re just ripping spokes out. And I see our business as a way of just makeshifting at least some temporary ones to try to help her, you know, keep spinning. That’s like the analogy I like using.
Maureen: Yes, I love that analogy. I love that visual because I think also sometimes it’s about taking a spoke of the wheel out and putting something back in that’s stronger because the idea of goatscaping is land management in a more sustainable way. And so you are still changing what was done before, but you’re putting in a different spoke is kind of how I see it.
So who is your ideal client? Is it mostly municipalities that have difficult-to-reach land or is it corporations? Who are you targeting?
Julia: So you name it, pretty much anyone with land or property, we do private, we do municipalities. One of the jobs that I helped Jen with was actually in Casanova Creek Park in South Buffalo. That was a very public-facing job. We did a lot of educational elements in the park with the goats. And I also do private residential businesses.
But essentially any one that has the land management need where they have an overgrown area, specifically if it’s taken over by a multiflora rose, which can be very, very difficult to remove, poison ivy, poison oak invasives like knotweed that just kind of take over and push out all of the native habitats and plants. Those plants are the goats’ specialty.
And that is their kind of ideal. I also did a few jobs last summer where we had a pond that you almost couldn’t even really find and we opened up a few access points. And it’s just really anything land management needs, but they’re particularly good with the invasives, which are what a lot of people need to push back so they can try to reclaim some of their land for the native habitats and the native plants. That’s the ideal situation.
Maureen: Interesting. Cool. So do you have a trailer for them and you just trailer them around and you show up on site and like, do you have to gate them in for the area that they’re going to control or how does that look?
Julia: Yep. So we have a livestock trailer that we’ve converted to – I like to refer to it as the mobile barn. We typically do a week to two-week contracts, sometimes months, depending on the job size. But we do typically book in weeks. And so day one, we roll in with the trailer. We set up electric fencing. We let the goats out. (I’ve got lots of great videos of them!)
Truly just running out of the trailer and ravishing these, you know, massive groves of multiflora rows that you and I wouldn’t even be able to walk through. I have pictures even from today where I was showing Rosemary the before picture and you couldn’t even see the goats that were eating in it. And then we were standing in front of where it was just, you know, woody stalks that are just barren basically. And they just get right to work and they do stay on location. So they’ll stay on the job site for the entirety of the job. If there are any health concerns or anything like that, we do, we’ll shuttle them back and forth to the farm if needed. I know that we did that a little bit last year. I know Jen had a couple where she was concerned about their hooves. So we swapped them out for another goat at the farm. But yes, we stay on location and I even, we have one goat about to have two goats that are in milk and I even milk on location.
Maureen: Yes. So like you guys stay, do you and your wife both stay with the goats when you guys go on location somewhere?
Julia: Yes. When I said I dove in from being a city and I really dove in. So I do a lot of pastoral herding. So I do try to stay with the goats as much as possible, it just helps with our bond. There are times when I have to leave to go pick up hay, run errands, and tend to my own farm for a bit. But I do try to be on location as much as possible. I also have a goat cam that I set up that I focus on the pen for when I’m not on location. I’ve got that next to me right now.
And we just monitor, we’re mostly just monitoring for health and making sure that they always have a good source of water and that everybody’s doing well. But I honestly just, I find it so therapeutic and I love hanging out with the goats all day. it’s more of like, I just want to be there. I don’t really have to for a lot of it, but I find a lot of good benefits from bonding with them. And when they’re more comfortable with me, it obviously makes my job a lot easier.
Goats are infamous for being escape artists and we have a few minor escapees here and there, but they’re pretty easily wrangled back because of the rapport that I have with them.
Maureen: Yes. Man, what a change. You went from wrangling like the bad people. Yes to goats. That’s such a lovely transition. Yes, right. Different, yes, different types, but just such a different pace of life. I love that for you.
Julia: Criminals. Which can be criminals in their own way. But still very dynamic, still so much problem solving. And I like to tell people that the problems that I have now though, they make sense and they have real solutions. Whereas the problems that I was facing before, as you mentioned, were rooted out of bureaucracy and political dynamics and egos. And none of that made sense to me.
Maureen: Yes, values that did not align with yours. Yes, right. Yes. So how much can a team of goats clear? Like I’m thinking selfishly because behind me, you can’t see it through this window, but we are on three acres with our house and then we have an adjacent three acres that we also own that is overgrown.
We’ve talked about, should we get a tractor just to do a pull behind to go through there, but there’s old farm equipment that’s in there somewhere that’s been there forever since we bought it. And so we’re like, well, we don’t want to ruin anything. And it goes down to water. And so I feel like goats would be a great solution, right?
Julia: They would uncover that. That’s why they are, I like to say very genuinely all the time, they are the best solution and the most eco-friendly. The reason goats are so amazing is they can traverse very difficult terrain, rocky ledges, without any issues. They have amazing depth perception.
The goats can basically cut out path spaces that otherwise you would be unable to access. [Using goats provides access] without heat or chemicals and pesticides. It depends on what’s overgrown.
Maureen: Cool. I love this so much. I feel like another place where it would be really beneficial is solar, right? Because they can go under the solar panels.
Julia: So. Yes, it’s funny you mentioned that because I know we’re talking a little bit earlier, but one of the things that I’m actually actively pursuing and looking to get into now are folding in some sheep. Because goats would not be ideal for solar for the potential of them climbing on the equipment.
I wouldn’t want to be responsible or liable for any damage to any of that. But sheep, however, they don’t climb, they don’t traverse, you know, very docile though. So that is actually one thing that we’re looking into expanding into already, even though we just started, is folding in some sheep.
Maureen: I haven’t had animals where I lived in many years. I grew up on a dairy farm, you know, but we don’t have any animals now. I have two animals who are my children, but that’s it.
But I feel like once you have them, to add a couple more, you know, what’s a couple sheep when you’ve got, when you’ve already got goats.
Whereas like, if you’re going to farm, I would love to have chickens. And we were just talking about, potentially like, do we get some free-range chickens to meander in our backyard?
But it feels like a big leap to go from nothing to chickens. Whereas I feel like if you’ve already got goats to just add some sheep is not that big of a deal.
Julia: Exactly. And I’ll have you say that for my wife too. No, luckily she’s been great about if anything she wanted the sheep before I even was like, maybe I could work it into the business. She was like, no, can we get sheep? So no, I really at this point I did it for a while I thought that maybe I’d get into sheep a few years down the line.
But it’s just like what you said, I’m feeling, you know, pretty comfortable with the goats and I’m already doing lots of daily routines with their care and it really won’t be much, you know, to really fold in a few more.
Maureen: Right. Yes. And the industrial scale of solar from a farming perspective and the necessity of continuous management underneath those panels is ongoing. And especially if you’ve already got the right insurance for municipal partnerships that you could, you know, for any municipal-owned solar fields or those that are typically corporate-owned, which is why I say that as well.
But that could be an ongoing contract, now, like we will come twice a year, four times a year, whatever it is and manage under the solar panels. And you don’t have to hire somebody to come with a weed whacker and it takes them three days. You know, it takes my goats three weeks. You can reap all the benefits of the story of that too. You know, I mean, you message that, right. And I think that that is a huge potential. I love that.
Julia: They often have actually very inflated budgets for their lawn care, essentially at the solar farms. So that was already kind of on my radar. That’s why I was like, in a couple of years, once I have my bearings, I’ll do sheep. And Jen actually had someone reach out to her recently about that they had a few solar contracts and about if her goats could do that. And she advised them that sheep would actually be better. And she said that she had zero interest in getting into sheep at this point, but that another business that she was aware of was looking to build a flock. So I might actually be working with that gentleman in order to cater to his needs and establish potentially a flock solely to run those contracts. So that is something that I’m kind of actively pursuing right now.
Maureen: Yes, which also goes back to what we were talking about with the idea of when you are open-minded, you know, the universe sending you things. And like, I equate that to when you are open-minded and you are ready to think about next level things and you hear something or something comes across your path and you just sort of decide like, this is the direction I’m going and I’m just going to like…
This is interesting, I’m just going to veer over here a little bit and explore what this is, and it can really change the trajectory of things. And so I feel like that’s a perfect example of, well, we had been talking about this and then we weren’t talking about it, and then the opportunity fell on our plate, and now we’re like, well, if we have an opportunity to learn through this one and then do more, why not? I think that’s like.
Julia: Full disclosure will most likely be folding in three sheep because I just started a little bit of research the other night and we got in contact with a woman who has some health problems. She’s downsizing her farm but doesn’t want her sheep to go to auction. She wants them to have a great home.
That’s honestly how we get the majority of our goats if they come from farms where they are no longer viable. Like our one goat that is in milk, our little matriarch, Linda, she had mastitis two years ago. She came from a breeding dairy farm. She has a little teat. Everything functions well. She’s happy, healthy, but she was no longer viable for their farm.
They put a lot of care and work into her and loved her very dearly and didn’t want to see her go to pasture, so to speak. So instead she now gets fresh pastures every day as a second career. So that’s the majority of our goats.
Jen [from Let’s Goat Buffalo] actually runs a rescue with her care firm, but we’ve become sort of a pseudo rescue just kind of basically replicating her business.
Maureen: I love it. Well, so tell me what’s next for Rosemary and Pine and how people can get in touch with you and think about bringing you into their operations. What’s next and how do they get in touch with you?
Julia: Well, what’s next is probably some sheep. So folding in a flock with the herd. And as far as how people can get in touch, we’re on Instagram, Rosemary and Pine, Facebook as well. We have a website where you can actually fill out a form to request an assessment. We do free assessments, scheduling allows. And the website is www.rosemaryandpinefarm.com. I think that was it for your question.
Maureen: Yes, that’s it. That’s awesome. Well, thank you for coming on. And I knew zilch about goatscaping. And so you’ve broadened my horizons and I will go talk to my husband about bringing some goats over there to that adjacent three acre lot. And I’d love to just see the experience too. And so I appreciate you taking the time to educate me today.