How Much Can I Make? - Career Insights For Your Job Search

A Goat Farmer - Job Opportunities in Agriculture

• Mirav Ozeri - Career Insights Journalist • Season 1 • Episode 47

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A Goat Farmer

Ever wonder what it’s really like to run a goat farm? In this episode, Victoria Balentine—owner of Shady Farms in upstate New York— shares her career insights in goat farming and tips for making money in agrotourism.' She gives us a behind-the-barn look at her job and her career switch, from city acupuncturist to hands-in-the-dirt farmer, and the sweet (and sometimes stinky) reality of small-scale farming.

She spills career insights on making money through agrotourism—think goat yoga and farm tours—and talks about what it really takes to keep a modern farm thriving.

If you're flirting with a career change, dreaming of a simpler life, or just curious about farming-life beyond Instagram, this episode is for you. Packed with practical tips, honest moments, and a lot of goat energy—this one's a treat.


For information about booking a goat yoga session or farm tour, visit woodstockgoatyoga.com or find them on Instagram and TikTok @woodstockgoatyoga.

Visit our website at https://www.howmuchcanimake.info/ to submit jobs suggestions for future episodes. Please FOLLOW us and/or WRITE A REVIEW and share with anyone who's curious about their next career move.

Want us to cover a specific job? Shoot us an email!

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Music credit: Kate Pierson & Monica Nation

victoria:

I was a yoga teacher forever and then I fell in love with goats and I had goats. And a friend of mine said, have you ever heard of goat yoga? And I was like, no, what is that? And she was like you should check the videos out. So I go online, I look at the videos and I was like, oh, it's my destiny, I love teaching yoga and I love goats. And so that was just like, oh, my God, it's meant to be.

mirav:

Hi, welcome back to how Much Can I Make. I'm your host, mirav Ozeri, and yes, that was the sound of goats you just heard, because today's episode takes us to a goat farm in upstate New York. We're back with Victoria Ballantyne. If you caught last week's episode, you'll remember Victoria shared her journey as a successful acupuncturist in Manhattan. This week we're talking about her next chapter, her leap into farming. After selling her practice of 20 years, victoria moved to Woodstock, new York, and started Shady Farms. That was five years ago. She literally built a whole new career from the ground up. So let's find out what it's really like running a small farm, and can you really make money doing it? All, right, victoria. So now you have a farm. Now I have a farm, a small farm that I think is growing. I actually know your farm.

victoria:

Yeah, farm, a small farm that I think is growing. I actually know your farm. Yeah, uh, we started out with uh. We were going to start with three goats and I came home with five goats and my husband from a couple of farms nearby and my husband was like wait, I thought we were getting three goats. And I said, well, we got five. It's goat math, you can google it, it's's a thing. Anyway, we started with five and now we have 34.

mirav:

Oh my god.

victoria:

Yeah.

mirav:

But wait a minute, let's back up. Sure, what made you get goats? What made you? Did you dream always of having a farm? No, not at all.

victoria:

I always thought I was going to retire in a sailboat, truly and for the longest time I was watching oceans die in front of me. So coral reefs that I've known and loved since my early twenties, and the Bahamas and the places that I love to go Like, there was this one reef that used to be the size of a city block, like an Avenue, like a full Avenue Avenue, just massive, beautiful reef. And I visited it 20 years later and it was the size of a card table.

mirav:

I know it was awful.

victoria:

Truly no, no, no, really. I just very few times I can even tell this story without crying. And what was on that tiny little smidgen that was left alive? There were so many fish like. It was so abundant and fecund, it was amazing. But it was just this sort of three by three thing left and everything else was just bleached and gone. And I always and the environment is so much in the forefront of my thinking all the time and I kept saying what can I literally do? What can I literally do? And my husband and I got a house in West Shokan and our neighbors on either side were homesteaders and they were doing something called regenerative agriculture and they were trying to be not just carbon neutral but carbon negative. Right, so you sequester more carbon than you consume. And it's like a light went off. I was like, oh, I can literally do that. I can eat seasonally and grow my own food and be hyper local and barter and do all these things. And so I, I that's, yeah, that's how it happened.

mirav:

And you brought the idea to your husband. What did he say?

victoria:

Well, he's never been particularly interested in sailing anyway. It's always something on my own, so he wasn't exactly heartbroken about that part. But no, he really loves the ethos of it. He really loves the idea as well. You know to to be carbon negative is a pretty amazing thing and you know we all feel environmental catastrophe happening around us, Like we're all aware of it, and to feel like I can do one tiny little thing on this tiny little postage stamp of land that I have feels really meaningful, especially with all the things that are going around. Like, at the end of the day, I feel like I'm being kind to the planet and I think that that's a nice way to live.

mirav:

So you started with five goats, grew to 43. Tell me about the early days of the farm.

victoria:

We got thrown forward because of the pandemic. So our timeline for this place was not to start really full-time farming until my stepson graduated high school. But the pandemic kind of threw everything into fast forward. I mean, you know, I stopped doing acupuncture in, I was working for the person that I had sold the business to and the next thing I knew I was living up here full time with my stepdaughter and my husband and so we just said, Look, we're here, we're not going back into Manhattan, let's just start it. So we started. It was. You know, it was a pretty stressful, weird time to start a farm.

mirav:

And what was your dream at the time? To have to be just self-sustained.

victoria:

To try to grow as much of our own food as possible, same with protein, right. So as much, source as much of our own protein from the property as possible. That's where goats come into play, because you were talking about homesteading. As long you know, if you're not a vegan, you immediately start saying, okay, so where's the dairy going to come from? So what are you going to have? Are you going to have sheep? Are you going to have a cow? Are you going to have goats? And a cow is way too much milk for one family. So then you have to deal with doing cow shares and you know who's going to milk it, who takes care of it. They're large animals.

victoria:

So I started working at all these other farms Once I had the idea of wanting to farm. I worked at a chicken farm, a meat bird farm, I worked at an egg laying farm, I worked at a goat dairy farm, I worked at a hog operation pig farm and I tried to learn everything that I could before I started. And goats just really, really landed. I just fell madly in love with them. They're amazing. They're just best things ever.

mirav:

So tell me what you have on your farm today.

victoria:

We have 34 chickens, 34 goats, three livestock guardian dogs, a big market-sized garden. We have an orchard with apple, peach, pear, pawpaw, hazelnut, elderberry I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of stuff and we're going to do we're actually doing meat birds finally at the end of the summer. So we're going to get 25 little baby chicks in the mail, which is how you get chickens, which is hilarious. They come in the mail, it's adorable. And then we'll raise them for about 10 weeks and we'll process them and we'll have 25 meat birds for the freezer for the winter.

mirav:

But this is what I want to know. You know chicken world. It's the fastest paid purchase in America. Yeah, everyone's gone crazy for chicken. What does it take to grow chicken from beginning to end, if you can tell me?

victoria:

You get them in a little box that's peeping.

victoria:

You take them out of the box and you do what I call the beak dip, which you dip their nose in their water source so that they know where it is.

victoria:

You check their little butt for something called pasty butt, because they get kind of dehydrated in the mail so you want to make sure that they don't have anything on their little back feathers and if they do, you dip their little butt in warm water and then you put them in what's called a brooder, which is essentially a heat lamp hanging from a ceiling in a kiddie pool. And first you start out with towels so it doesn't hurt their legs on pine shavings, but then eventually they graduate to pine shavings. You feed them chick starter and then chick grit, and then they grow and there's all sorts of things about keeping the temperature correct in regard to the heat lamp and they can get cold. So then they huddle under the heat lamp. So then you lift, you know all that kind of stuff, and then after about six weeks, if it's temperate out, you can start letting them outdoors and that way they can be free range and run around. You have to have protection for that?

mirav:

That's what I wanted to ask you about because my friend who lives also in the country had a net and had a chicken coop and a mountain lion came and ate it.

victoria:

There's something called electric poultry netting, which they definitely didn't have. They probably had all sorts of fencing. But the thing about an electric poultry netting is it's electrified and you can make it very, very, very hot and you can make it very, very, very hot. So any predator, whether it's a bobcat or a bear or a dog or a coyote or a fisher, they come up and they touch that with their nose and they jump 10 feet in the air and run away. So that's what we use and we've had no losses here. We've had no predators actually take and get away with the chicken.

mirav:

Okay, so now you get a lot of eggs and you get a lot of milk from the goats. Yeah, what do you do with all of that?

victoria:

Well, we sell. So once these new chickens get in full, full laying, they're going to give us probably two dozen eggs a day. So we sell to friends and family. We are a farm. We're recognized by New York State as a farm, which is a whole other process. We need to make sure this place isn't a money pit, so we try to make back what we spend on the farm. The eggs are incredibly unique. I mean the birds are truly free range. They have a massive hill to run around in their house. We call it the chicken summer palace. I mean it's absolutely beautiful. So we sell the eggs. We sometimes we don't really sell the vegetables so much as we trade. So, like we do trades, we did a trade with a local artist where we give her eggs and cheese and vegetables all summer and at the end of the summer she gives us a piece.

mirav:

Wow.

victoria:

Yeah, it's really cool. I mean things that we could never afford to buy. It's amazing. It was like, ah. So I mean, and she loves it, she loves the idea of barter and she loves the idea of you know, getting all this fresh, free range, wonderful, organic food, and we love having her art in our house. It's fantastic.

mirav:

It's an investment too. Yes absolutely what surprised you the most about having a farm?

victoria:

Wow, I don't even know where to start. So many things I mean, you know it's, so you know it first. It's so much less so now, but at first it was so stressful and maybe it's my temperament, but I just take so seriously keeping everybody safe. For instance, if the poultry netting went down, I would be in a complete panic just thinking that at any second, you know, a pack of coyotes was going to go over there and get my chickens, and of course that wasn't true at all.

victoria:

I now know that they learn the poultry netting, so if they'll stay away from it for a good long while, like, they're not going to come test it again and again and again. So if the fence goes down, I don't have to freak out. You know what I mean. Like I'll get to it when I get to it. And like you know the animal husbandry oh, the births, yeah, so much more of so. Like, just you know when animals get sick and you're the one who has to give them the injection and you know, a lot of the times you're your own vet and you know, as you've seen, the births are so intense.

victoria:

Oh, and you have to be there for lots of reasons. And so you know, there's a few week period in the spring where I just don't sleep because I know that there's a goat due and I have to be there when she gives birth. And then this year was the most stressful year for goat births. Why that? We've ever had Almost every goat had a major problem that I had to go in and intervene. Yeah, it was really intense, it was really a lot. So I was elbow deep and in a goat frequently the best that was.

victoria:

I had to get knee surgery because I slipped and fell on the ice and I scheduled the surgery between births and my surgeon was kind enough to help me do that. He was so flexible and bless his heart. So I know, you know I'm I'm having the surgery on Monday and the last goat in the first group is due on Saturday. So I'm like, okay, it'll be fine. So of course, saturday comes and goes and she doesn't give birth. And then Sunday comes and goes and she doesn't give birth and I have to leave for the surgery at 10 AM. At like eight in the morning my husband and I are looking at each other like what are we going to do Like she, just my goat's just looking at me like, yeah, I'm good. And finally I said, well, she's overdue, I think I need to go in and just feel and see what's going on. And my husband said, listen, don't go in just because you're under time pressure. And I said, well, I am under time pressure, but I also think that there's a problem and I should go in. And I went in and, sure enough, there was a breach presentation and so I had to turn it and get it. And then, you know, everything happens. And I got all the babies latched on and their umbilical cords cut and everything's good and everybody's dried off and healthy and everything's fine.

victoria:

I ran back to the house at nine 52 and washed my arms and then went down to get surgery. The whole way down I was like I can't even believe that just happened. I can't. I had eight minutes. I had eight minutes Like it was just amazing. Wow, so that's you know. So just so many surprises. Every day, every day, there's something new that surprises you. You were like I didn't know that was on the menu. You know, I didn't know that was going to happen.

mirav:

I know that you do something very unique, which is goat yoga, and it's incredibly successful. Tell me about this a little bit.

victoria:

Well, the fun part of the story, and less pragmatic, is I was a yoga teacher forever and then I fell in love with goats and I had goats or was getting goats. And a friend of mine said, have you ever heard of goat yoga? And I was like, no, what is that? And she was like you should check the videos out. So I go online, I look at the videos and I was like it's my destiny, cause I love teaching yoga and I love goats. And so that was just like, oh my God, it's meant to be so that's Woodstock goat yoga. But the more pragmatic thing is one of the things that I really wanted to talk about and that people talk about a lot is how do you help small farms make a living?

mirav:

Yes, it's so important.

victoria:

So I mean, if you think about it, you know you can buy a whole cooked chicken at Costco or wherever for like eight bucks.

mirav:

Yeah, exactly, I mean it's just it's insane.

victoria:

So how on earth is a farmer supposed to make a profit when they're actually selling their chicken for, say, $4 a bird? And that's also a life, that's a creature for $4. Like it just. You know it's such anyway. And so we end up with these massive operations, right when you're raising 10,000 chickens because at the end of the day, you're only going to make a dollar a chicken. So the only way to make a living is to have these huge operations.

mirav:

I know, but I know a lot of people that are aware of the fact of how they grow this massive operation of chickens, and they don't want to eat it.

victoria:

No, no, exactly. The humans suffer, the chickens suffer. It's terrible for everybody, the environment suffers, right, it's way too much poop in this, you know, in the same place, and all that kind of stuff. So how do you help a small farm turn a profit? So there's a lot of answers to that. One is pastured poultry and finding a market, and we can talk about it if you want. But the other is ag tourism, so agricultural tourism. So people are so interested in farming and they're so interested in where their food comes from and they're so interested in animals that you know you can create something on your property where people will come and pay a certain amount of money to have an interaction with your chickens or with your goats or with your garden and all that kind of stuff. And each mat for goat yoga is $45. So if you think about the profit margin of $45 per mat and I have, you know, 20 people in the class versus ten dollars for a dozen eggs- right or you know, two dollars for a tomato.

victoria:

So ag tourism is a really great way of sharing what you know, of getting people excited about their food and about what's organic and all that kind of stuff, but also helping the farm have a small income. And so our ag tourism is goat yoga and it's so much fun there's people just absolutely love it. It's really sweet.

mirav:

I know you always booked when when you do that, that's fantastic.

victoria:

And do you also do tours of the farm? We do. We do After the goat yoga. We have a cheese tasting and farm tour. Uh, so people can come and learn about organic, regenerative gardening. They can tour the farm, they can meet the giant dogs, they can meet the mom goats, they can see the dairy. It's whatever they want to do. I'm easy. You know, sometimes we spend a lot of time with the chickens it just depends on what they're interested in and then we finish it up in the garden with a glass of New York State rosé, which is actually a really great vineyard. They're called Fjord. They're wonderful and their rosé is fantastic. And then the different cheeses that I make, so we'll have like chev and feta and brie and all that kind of stuff, and so, yeah, it's really, really fun.

mirav:

And do you think it brings them closer to the environment?

victoria:

Absolutely. People everybody, most people really want to know what they can literally do about climate change, and one of the things you can literally do is to source your food as locally as possible farmer's market and eat seasonally, which you will do by default if you're going to the farmer's market. And so they're very excited to learn all about this stuff, and frequently they get inspired and they're like, oh, maybe I could do that. You know what I mean, why?

mirav:

don't you sell your stuff in the farmer's market, all the garden stuff?

victoria:

Um, because we're still primarily a homestead and we're mostly just doing this for ourselves and family and friends, and that's a lot of time to spend off the farm. For me right To go and spend six hours in a parking lot to sell some broccoli, right? I mean that goes back to for our business model, that goes back to ag tourism, right? So the goat yoga or the farm tour is going to be a much better use of my time than selling broccoli. Cornell Extension actually asked me to be a part of a panel discussion that a lot of small farmers attended where we talked about so how do you monetize your farm in a way that isn't just selling broccoli and that's the ag tourism. So we do it through Woodstock, goat Yoga and Farm Tours, and other farms are figuring out what they can do. You can get eggs but you get to pull them out from under the chicken and it just costs extra. Or you can go pet their llamas or you can go goat walking.

victoria:

I know a woman who's about an hour west of here. It just takes people out in her fields with their goats and they just walk around. People love it, but that's an amazing extra income. I think she charges $40. She gets 10, 20 people Saturday and Sunday and that's an incredible extra income for her farm. Are you considering doing it? It's super fun. But no, I, I mean we're. I mean the goat yoga and the farm tours are plenty for us. I mean that's great, I don't need to, I don't want to add anything else, we're good.

victoria:

So we have a scheduled time for goat yoga and then we have a scheduled time for the farm tour, which happens to be after goat yoga, and we usually sell out weeks, if not months, in advance, and that is the only AG tourism that we do.

victoria:

And I think it's an important point because the downside of that is the only ag tourism that we do. And I think it's an important point because the downside of that is we have people that drive up to our farm all the time, who want to look around and pet the goats and do all that kind of stuff, and we absolutely can't have that. You cannot have people that don't understand animals walking around your farm unsupervised because they don't know what they're doing. So they can leave, leave gates open that are supposed to be closed. They can feed animals the wrong thing they can. You know, we have three large livestock guardian dogs. You know, if nothing else, you can get knocked over by a livestock guardian dog because you're in somewhere you shouldn't be, and then you've hurt yourself, I mean. So we have to be very careful to only have ag tourism and only have people here when they are very closely supervised by us and that they're on a very specific schedule.

mirav:

Did you have to get permits for that from New York state?

victoria:

No, the nice thing about being recognized as a farm in New York state is they give you leeway to find income streams. So, generally speaking, with some exceptions, you can have ag tourism, farm tours, goat yoga, even a small farm stand, and you're not going to be interfered with by the town or permits or all that kind of stuff to a certain extent. You do get some wiggle room as a farm Because, generally speaking, new York State is incredibly supportive to farms.

mirav:

How do you deal with all the natural disaster and pests and critters in your garden and storms?

victoria:

Yeah, that's kind of what I meant about. I didn't know that was going to be on the menu for today. Like it happens all the time, like what surprises you about the farm? Every day surprises me. So I remember one time there was this substantial rainstorm but you know, we get substantial rainstorms fairly frequently and this one was pretty bad.

victoria:

But there was something I was like and I go out and one of our streams had essentially sort of jumped the bank, whoa, and was coming towards the barn and because of the way that the leaves had fallen and kind of gotten stuffed into the bottom of the welded wire fence, it was creating this weird channel where all of this water was suddenly shooting towards the barn and we're on a bit of a like a precipice over there and it started collapsing in front of me and I was like, oh my God, I come running back to the house and I'm like Jerry, I think we've got a problem.

victoria:

And because I said it in that way, jerry was like oh my God. So we go tearing back out there and now we're in this torrential downpour, moving physically, trying to put rocks in boulders to try to block the stream, while digging out all those leaves that were causing this, like channel, so stuff like that. You're just, you know, in in every, every year there a new pest. Last year it was like the plague of chipmunks, this year, literally a groundhog got into the garden last night. I'm still trying to figure out how he took out every single one of my lettuces and every single one of my kales.

victoria:

They're all just gone, you know, and it's like you know, a few years in, I don't let it upset me anymore, I'm just like, oh all right, well, I got to deal with that. So what is your day-to-day?

mirav:

like in the farm.

victoria:

Well, this morning I get up at 6 and I meditate, and then I go out to the barn and start milking at 7.

mirav:

How many?

victoria:

goats do you have to milk each day? Right now it's 7.

mirav:

Okay.

victoria:

And when I went out to the barn, the first thing I did was I put a bunch of milk on the stove to start a yogurt, because it'll warm it up to 185 degrees while I'm milking all the goats. The timing is kind of perfect. So then I go in, I feed everybody and then I start milking the goats, and that takes about six minutes per goat. And then I came in with that milk and I took the beginning of the yogurt and I cooled it down and I added culture and then that's out there cooking right now. That'll be done later today.

victoria:

And then I started another cheese by adding culture and rennet and stuff, and that'll be something else. I have to do with it in 24 hours and it'll be done in about six weeks. It's called a valence. It's actually an ash rolled cheese. It's so beautiful. And then I changed everybody's water and I gave them hay and then I put all my little goats we call them the bottle gang. I put all the bottle gang out on the hill so they can free range. I took care of the chickens, I got the eggs, then I worked in the garden and then I came in to speak to you.

mirav:

Wow, yeah, well and what do you do in the winter?

victoria:

you don't have so much work in the winter right, I get to relax, so but the goats are still in the barn so in the morning I still have to go feed and make sure that everybody's okay, and usually in the middle of the day I just check on them and then I tuck them into bed at night. But yeah, this is full throttle here essentially from May well, march to October, and then it's total downtime November, december, january, february.

mirav:

And do you have any kind of help during the busy season?

victoria:

I didn't used to, but my husband has gotten kind of a promotion at work for lack of better words, and so he's going to be really needing to focus on that. So I have actually been working with a wonderful young woman who's been helping me out a lot. She's fantastic. She learned to milk. She's doing great. She's absolutely wonderful and so yeah.

mirav:

So I do have kind of part-time help now, which I did the first time I really had that. Okay, if your farm had a song, what song would that be?

victoria:

oh, something good, hmm oh, I know I milk the goats every morning to yoga music and there's one song I think it's called uh, it's mc yogi. I think it's called peace Out, and there's something about it that I'm always trying to be in the moment when I'm milking them, because it's just so beautiful and pastoral, and I find my mind wandering of like who am I going to breed this fall? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what am I going to do? And then I always try to just keep coming back to that moment of the beauty of just milking this animal and our relationship and animal and our relationship, and that song always just reminds me.

mirav:

Oh right, right, right, Just be in the present moment, Just enjoy this while you have it, while it lasts. You never know when it's going to change. Do you have plans of growing your farm or living it? We are too big.

victoria:

We. Originally we really thought that we would do meat birds. We thought we'd have a lambing operation. We really thought we might even do you know three or four pigs. But I've come to realize that we're primarily a goat farm. I get great joy out of making cheese, so I don't want to try to do all those other things, so I'd rather buy lamb from a local farm and buy you know pork from a local farm and stick to the goats, the chickens. This year we're getting meat birds, which I'm very excited about, but we're really hitting critical masses to like what we can do.

mirav:

So All right, so just before we go, if people wanna come and tour your farm, where do they find you?

victoria:

We are Woodstock Goat Yoga, so we're locatable on Instagram, tiktok, woodstockgoatyogacom and woodstockgoatyoga at gmailcom. So we're easy you just Google Woodstock Goat Yoga and you'll see everything you need to see.

mirav:

All right, thanks a million. Sure, that's fantastic. That's a wrap for today. If you have a comment or question or would like us to cover a certain job, please let us know. Visit our website at HowMuchCanIMakeinfo. We would love to hear from you and, on your way out, don't forget to subscribe and share this episode with anyone who is curious about their next job. See you next time. You.

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