Karen Freudenberger

The exciting news on our front is that two New American families will be raising goats on a farm owned by the Vermont Land Trust just a few miles from downtown Burlington. It’s immensely exciting (as well as more than a little bit daunting) to have gotten this far. Two families are moving to the farm in a couple of weeks and will be joined by about 100 bucklings in March. By autumn, if all goes well, we’ll have a custom exempt slaughter facility at the site so that New Americans can buy a goat at the farm, slaughter it, and take fresh meat home to their families. We’re still a long way from replacing the 3,000 goats imported frozen from Australia to Burlington/Winooski every year but the pilot project represents an important first step. At this point we’re hugely busy, whether making “goat jackets” for the baby bucklings to keep them warm during their first weeks at the farm, training the Bhutanese goat raisers in how to fill out IRS schedule F, figuring out waste water permits and insurance issues, and organizing community work parties to clean out decades of junk from the long disused farm buildings. As I was saying...exciting and daunting!