Almost 2 years ago, I quit my job as a SWE at a FAANG and started raising a small herd of dairy goats. We use the milk for personal consumption and to make soap to sell.
They give a nice rhythm to the day: I greet them shortly after rising and lock them up as the sun sets. We have daily conversations while I milk them and we gossip about the chickens.
The switch has forced me to hone my construction and machinery skills, but I still enjoy finding ways to slip tech solutions into my setup.
I recently started working again in tech remotely, but I'm doing non-profit work which is in much greater alignment with my personal values. I'm a lot happier and a good part of it is due to the goats.
It's not for everyone, but I've enjoyed the change in pace and outlook. And the fresh milk.
My wife and I have found Nubian goats, said to have the best tasting and creamiest milk of all goats in the land. We haven't had milk from every kind of goat, but this saying is possibly true. It's also easy on her lactose sensitive stomach.
I'm still doing sysadmin work remotely while I slowly grow our own herd of dairy goats (12 now as of last week) for our soap business. Still a very low-tech setup but I may finally splurge on an electric milk pump this year after 5 years of hand milking.. I've had enough!
We both hand-milk and use a pump. We've had a Simple Pulse for a while. It has been reliable and easy to clean. I'd say using a pump adds 5 minutes of overhead for setting up and cleaning, but it's not that much more given that I'm cleaning a bucket and strainers anyways.
Goat's dairy can be a bit of an acquired taste :). I drank goat's milk when I was young due to an allergy and I remember switching to cow's milk and it being yuck for a while. Love goats though, my grandma kept them, they are smart and feisty.
How big is the herd? How far away did you end up having to go--are you near a big city still, or far out in the boonies?
I think a lot of people in tech have pastoral dreams that may not be solidly based in reality, but as someone who grew up with a herd of sheep, it's still pretty attractive even when you know what's involved :)
Sorry for the delay! I only just saw this question.
We have 6 goats and 13 chickens. We live in a town of 3.5k. It is large enough to have the necessities like grocery and hardware stores. At the same time, there are less than 2 dozen people living within half of a mile of me.
We can get to a town of 11k in 20 minutes and a city of a quarter million in 35, so most everything we would want is accessible, but we need to plan out trips a bit. The only thing I'm really missing is access to a variety of cuisines. There is but one Ethiopian restaurant within a hour, 3 Indian places, and no Burmese. The one Chaat place we knew of closed during the pandemic. But we do have 7 bars serving the same Americana within 10 minutes of us!
Interesting note: I went to a farm stay last weekend. In New South Wales, blackberry thornbushes are pest plants in farms. And what the smaller farms do is they rent goats from people who do goats-as-a-service for a few days. The Gaas people will come in to a farm, install small fences around the blackberry thornbushes and set the goats to business.
And, on a similar note, where I live, some shepherds do sheep-as-a-service. Their sheep graze on your farm in return for their manure. They have done this since time immemorial.
On the one hand, I completely believe this; goats are beings spawned from the deepest pits of hell and thence sent to our world to chew on inappropriate objects. On the other hand, WTF: did they actually manage to chew through an electric fence? Seriously??
Every "operations center" should have a goat on staff.
They're great for first line customer response, provide invaluable counseling services to the other employees (goats are never confused about priorities), and even help with paperwork.
Get the sales guys high enough and they might convince management to try the "new special rare imported coffee beans", even. That can backfire and you find yourself having to source more pellets, or hire more goats.
> If it's late and you have a lot of goat-milking to do, at least you can see your kids before they have to go to bed. You can probably even make them help you milk your goats.
I'm still not entirely sure which meaning of "kids" this one uses, and whether the ambiguity is intentional.
I really like the pets vs cattle analogy (or did when it was a newer thing and people needed convincing not to handcraft servers, that seems mostly in the past now for me, fortunately) but it's amusing just how inaccurate it is if you think about it.
I'm pretty sure dairy farmers don't shoot cows in the head if they get sick, with the same carefree shrug I do when I terminate Kubernetes pods and nodes, but maybe they do?
> I'm pretty sure dairy farmers don't shoot cows in the head if they get sick, with the same carefree shrug I do when I terminate Kubernetes pods and nodes, but maybe they do?
Dairy farmers tend to be very practical about putting down animals that are past a certain point. If a 7 year old cow needs $N of surgery to live, but she can realistically only be expected to give another $N*0.5 worth of milk in her life, she's hamburger.
I haven’t had goats (really want some) but with chickens we would keep em until they stopped laying eggs and then we’d eat them. Some chickens that were more pet like would survive into old age, but most chickens are stupid and not really pets.
Our Nubian goat takes about a half hour of walking down to the barn, feeding, and milking daily. Night time is only a brief feeding (if winter) and lock up, maybe 10 minutes. But that's 1, not 24. For just the milk, the labor is worth it for us. Farmers style goat cheese is fairly painless to make with maybe an hour or so actual handling time total for a 5 lb block.
Yeah, my friend certainly loves her goats, and the entire lifestyle around them. Her day job is research with an agricultural institute and basically lives and breathes goats.
Plenty of farms with goats and llamas to visit on weekends if you work in southern ontario. Or AirBnBs on mini-farms. Goats always stand out as the funniest animals. But their eyes endlessly creep me out.
We get away from the city and do this quite often.
Snowops for sure! I calculated a few weekends back that I had moved over 150 tons of snow in the previous 24 hours. Also threw 4 or 5 sheer pins and ate a hidden Amazon package with a snowblower, but that's part of the territory.
I had goats while I had a job, and it was a great counter balance. That is, until they got sick. Both of our boys had calcium stones, and both had surgeries.
One of them would eventually get an infection and his penis swole all the way up. It was a mess, and we had to have the vet euthanize him. I have never cried so hard in my life because he was the lovable and affectionate one. He wasn't awkward, and he'd come up and bear his head in your chest and let you hug the shit out of him.
The other boy was more awkward but still lovable, and we maintained his health with on and off urine burns and a variety of issues. He would eventually succumb to arthritis.
The girl was awful, and only I was able to love on her. She was super aggressive to my wife and every single female visitor. I don't know why, and I tried everything the vet had us do.
I love goats very much, but I do recommend that if you go in then go all in and get a herd. Develop a strong relationship with a vet. Prepare for loss as herd animals meant for milk production may have bad genetics. Don't trust small time farmers to have good genetics, and make sure you get a vet that knows what they are doing with respect to castration as timing is crucial.
My advice is go for with fiber producing goats as they may last longer, but they are most likely not as lovable since the sheering process is super traumatic.
It basically was. If your urethra is blocked by a calcium stone, then bad things happen. The boys were making stones left and right, and they were not fixable via diet.
Obviously it's still a ton of work being a farmer. But the problems you face are never ones of incompetence by your boss's boss, you can effect change any time you want, and the work you do leads to simple, ethical, productive outcomes. If you don't mind working hard for a start-up but are always pissed at organizational incompetence, maybe farming is the answer.
where the RBDMS guy is like ... that's it. I quit. I'm going to go be pig farmer ..the sweet smell of pig shit is so much better than putting up with yours.
I laughed way too hard at that video...somedays though I think I'd love to have goats. Esp. baby goats they're so cute. I also love goats milk and have a dairy "issue" (I still eat it but my tummy doesn't like me after).
I have not quit programming but I do run a meat sheep operation with my wife. It's almost profitable.
There is a steep learning curve. It's a lot of hard work. The pay is not great. You have to be the right kind of person, and it helps to already have capital so you don't start out in debt.
In my case, my wife is a large animal vet so our vet bills are minimal.
I strongly dissuade anyone considering this change from just quitting their day job, buying some land, and starting from boot. Go work on someone else's farm first, or start as a side gig. Figure out what you are doing and where your market is. You can go bankrupt very easily and surprisingly quickly — one disease gets into your herd because you didn't take the right bio safety precautions, or your feed gets contaminated and you have an abortion storm, and you're out almost all of your capital, and the characteristic time period for making more income is - of course - a year.
I did and I did. I still raise goats and run a business selling soap made from their milk, but I also work remotely as a SWE. We never wanted to do it full time, but I did get to take a bit over a year off before going back.
I have absolutely loved the change. I spend my day alternating between coding and farm tasks. It's a great balance to my day.
It's full time. Fortunately, it's very flexible, so if I need to go do some chores for an hour in the middle of the day, I can make it up later. Goat pics also help with team bonding.
I can't answer that question, but doing both (ie a 'hobby' farm), it's nice to be able to just afford a vet.
We went from 2 miniature dairy goats on our 400 square meters urban home, to rural after they had kids. It'd be very hard to more than 2 adult goats on a city block, noise issues.
I think the droughts and fencing and killing would be an impressive thing to do as a farmer, but not for me. I do see a market around Airbnb, I know a few hobby farmers who get far more from their Airbnb. Also WeWork would be interesting to test.
They give a nice rhythm to the day: I greet them shortly after rising and lock them up as the sun sets. We have daily conversations while I milk them and we gossip about the chickens.
The switch has forced me to hone my construction and machinery skills, but I still enjoy finding ways to slip tech solutions into my setup.
I recently started working again in tech remotely, but I'm doing non-profit work which is in much greater alignment with my personal values. I'm a lot happier and a good part of it is due to the goats.
It's not for everyone, but I've enjoyed the change in pace and outlook. And the fresh milk.