Carol Coulter and Dave Walker – Interview Conducted at Heritage Homestead Goat Dairy In
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Carol Coulter and Dave Walker – Interview conducted at Heritage Homestead Goat Dairy in Crumpler, NC by Willard Watson. Q1 – Who are you, When and where were you born? My name is Carol Coulter and I was born in 1956 in Newark, New Jersey. My name is Dave Walker and I was born in 1988 in Burlington, North Carolina. Q2 – What did your parents do for a living? Did you contribute to the family income or help parents in their work in any way? CC - So my mom was a stay at home mom until we all left the house and then she just worked part time at Sears. My dad worked for AT&T in NYC so we liked to go to work and help and get telephone wire, but no we couldn’t really help him. I started working when I was 14, pretty much then it was like if I wanted jeans, or if I wanted to eat out, or wanted to go to the movies, then I would just pay for things myself. My dad was super big into investing and saving so we had a lot of education about that. So bank accounts, and you know talking about how to invest money, and how to save, and how to get what we wanted. DW – My dad was in the furniture industry in the Piedmont and he made furniture, he sold furniture, he sold hardware that goes on furniture, he sold lumber, imported lumber from Brazil and Africa and sold that, so I kinda grew up in the furniture industry. And then my mom was a children’s librarian in Alamance County and so that’s where I would spend my time after school and on the weekends hanging out at the children’s library volunteering as Clifford the Big Red Dog doing that and the Fourth of July parade for a couple of years. Q3 – What do you do for a living? CC – Yeah, so I just retired from Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture and I’ll be full time here at the farm now, working with Lon at the dairy We’ll probably add some new cheeses this year, since I’ll be in the kitchen more and Lon’s excited cause he’ll go out of the kitchen and start doing more in his blacksmith shop, and hide tanning, and broom tying, and all the pioneer arts he really enjoys. DW – I’m the program director at Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture, so a lot of what I do is help bring people together and connect them with resources around sustainable agriculture, and I’m a first generation farmer - I have some pigs over in Valle Crucis. Q4 – Carol, what type of farming operation do you have here in Ashe County? CC – So we have a small licensed goat dairy. We milk about 22 goats twice a day, every day, whether you want to or not. We make cheese, fudge, and caramel sauce and we sell at farmer’s markets, we sell whole sale to natural food stores, chefs, wineries, we do a lot of festivals and then we also have ducks, chickens, we raise a couple of pigs on the whey from the cheese making - whey fed pork is really yummy - and we raise and breed Great Pyrenees dogs. And, Lon just built us a wood-fired pizza oven, so this Spring we’ll start doing agro-tourism. People love to come and tour the farm so you can make a reservation for the evening milking and get a farm tour, do a little cheese tasting and then make your own pizza in the wood fired oven. So that’s the new piece we’re adding now that I’m home and we have a little more time and can try to organize that. Q5 – Carol, how long have you had your farm and how long did you work with Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture? CC – We bought the farm in 1994 and Lon and I were working at the NC Outward Bound School, so you can imagine we didn’t have a whole lot of money. So it took us about 15 years before we were actually able to build, like we built everything here, this part of the property had nothing on it. The house you passed when you came in is where we lived originally and we fixed that up and then we started working out here and the intention was never to be a dairy. We ended up getting goats cause this place hadn’t been farmed in like 25 years and it was full of multiflora rose, so we bought the goats to control the invasive species and it happened that I got dairy goats cause as a city girl, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. And I just really enjoyed milking them and starting to make dairy products. So I drove Lon crazy until he built me a dairy, so he’s a really good guy. And it’s fortunate that he’s a builder cause he built everything on the property. So since 2009 we’ve been licensed dairy, but before that we had goats and we had different animals, llamas - Lon can butcher and do things. So we kinda thought we’d be this little homestead, but it kinda grew to something bigger and now we’re fulltime farmers. So interestingly enough I was one of the founding mothers of Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture. So I was part of the startup and then when the farm started I didn’t have as much time and I kind of dropped out a little bit and kinda kept in touch and then in July 2014, I came back, there was a position open and I came back to Blue Ridge Women in Ag. I was attracted to it both because it was a really great organization and it was a part-time position which fit in well with the dairy work that I wanted to do. When I started there wasn’t as much going on as there is now, so it was a lot easier back then. Q6 – Dave, how long have you had your farm and how long did you work with Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture? DW – Last year was my first time farming on my own. The year before I had done it with a friend of mine, to raise pigs. She grew vegetables in Valle Crucis and sold at the Watauga (County) Farmer’s Market and so she had done pigs before and I wanted to see how it was done so we partnered and then last year it was just me kinda on my own doing it and I had 10 which was a pretty good number. So it took a lot, learned a lot last year so going into this year I feel a little bit more confident. And then I’ve been with BRWA for almost three years, and before that I worked for High Country Local First in their entrepreneurship program for a year or two and came to Boone a year or two before that for the Appalachian Studies program and so one thing kinda leads to another. The farm definitely grew out of working with other farmers and working with entrepreneurs around food and wanting to better understand what they’re going through. Q7 – How did you decide on your career? CC – When Lon and I left Outward Bound our goal was to kind of live this simple life, work part- time, be homesteaders, he’s super big into gardening. His undergraduate degree is in agronomy so he’s a soil guy and he’s always messing around with soil and he loves the garden. He’s not so much an animal guy but I’m an animal person and not so much a garden person so it kinda blended nicely. I’ve never been able to get him to learn how to milk goats cause he knows if he does he’s gonna end up having to milk. So he’s the cheese maker, he loves being in the kitchen he’s a really meticulous and precise person which is important to making consistent cheese. I’m kinda whoop de doody floopdy doo and then my cheese is sometimes really good and sometimes it’s just edible - so it’s better that he’s in there. But I really like the animals so I do all the animal care, the milking, the kitting, he’ll help with the heavy stuff like you know unloading hay and things of that nature, but he’s pretty much the cheese guy. And I’m the market person, he hates being in large crowds of people so he doesn’t really go to markets or anything. So we have this division of labor. It was really kind of an accident I mean I grew up in the city so my farm experience was eating things that came from a farm, and I was the kid you could get to go and grab the electric fence cause I didn’t know any better kind of thing. So there was a pretty steep learning curve, but people who are in the goat business are really generous and so I started attending a lot of workshops and learning and we just built it from there. We started with two goats, well three goats cause there was a buck, and then it just grew every year. We’ve stayed really small, I would say, in the scheme of dairies that are in North Carolina we would be considered a micro-dairy and what I’ve observed over time is that you can make it small or you have to get really big.