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Feb. 28, 2018 - Sean Hannity Show
20:58
Forget the Big City … It’s the Country Life for Me
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Come on girls.
Hi girls.
Caitlin and Brendan Foley keep a cow for warmth, a donkey, he's kind of a watchdog, a billy goat with a punk hairdo, and three dozen other goats on their farm, Hoofprint Cheese Company.
Happy goats, delicious cheese, wonderful life.
That's the goal anyway at the Hoofprint Cheese Company in upstate New York.
As far as we can tell, the goats are happy and we know the cheese is delicious.
But farming is lots of work, little sleep, and it's generally not so lucrative.
Still, it's a job like no other and for many, it's wonderful enough.
On this edition of On the Job from Express Employment Professionals, we'll meet a couple who's come back to the land to make a living doing what they love.
If you want to find your next job, or if you're a company hoping to grow your workforce, Express Employment Professionals is for you.
Find more information at expressprose.com.
Now, Karen Michelle brings us a story from New York's Hudson Valley about how a 10-year-old's love of goats blossomed into a way of life.
The Hudson Valley of New York State has a long history of farming.
In Dutchess County alone, less than 100 miles north of Manhattan, in 1890, there were at least 3,400 farms.
But 100 years later, the number had dwindled to just over 600.
There's hope.
The farm to table movement has spawned a resurgence in farming, small farming, and younger generations are choosing to stay, and newcomers are also tilling the soil, tapping the trees, and breeding livestock for meat and milk.
Both 31 years old, Brendan and Caitlin Foley are among the young folks opting to make a living, or at least most of one, milking goats and making cheese.
But it still takes real outside jobs to keep Hoofprint Cheese Company going.
Oh, Miss Bell that you are something.
You know that?
Caitlin Foley has always had a thing for goats, as her mother Diane Massarone knows well.
This one at about age eight decided she wanted a goat.
I guess most kids ask for a pony, but I really just wanted a goat.
I read about them and learned about them and how much of a personality they have.
And so I just really wanted a goat.
The family, mom, dad, Kate, and her two sisters, were already raising pigs and sheep.
That's in addition to her parents' other jobs.
He is a caretaker of the estate where they lived and kept the animals, and she at a local private school.
But Kate, evidently as straightforward then as she is now, insisted a goat.
Diane gave in.
Well, we knew nothing about goats and we said, sure, sure, sure.
And we just kept pushing her off and pushing her off.
And she just kept at it.
I want to go.
And she would look at pictures of goats.
And so finally, we decided when she turned 10 that we would surprise her with a baby goat.
So she, did you come home from school?
She came home from school and we told her to put her boots on.
We had to go to the grocery store.
And she couldn't understand why she had to put boots on to go to the grocery store, but we were going to a farm where she could pick out her baby goat.
And that was her surprise 10th year birthday present.
Which meant going into the farmer's living room where she had a play pen full of baby goats for Kate to choose from.
There are a whole lot of kinds of goats, depending on the kinds of counting, but most folks are familiar with two kinds of goats.
Alpine, the ones you usually see in fairy tales and movie musicals, and spaniel-eared Nubians, who even to this formerly non-goat person, really are adorable.
So she had the long floppy ears that I thought were very cute, and she had her coloration, her pattern was really cute.
She had a belt in the middle that was white and brown on the head and the rump.
And she was the most friendly, the most outgoing.
She was one that would follow me around the living room.
And I just knew that that was the one that I wanted.
And so we brought her home.
And she was a Nubian goat, so I named her Newbie.
And we had her for her whole life living with us.
Or with her family, Kate's family, who had to build a barn for Newbie and learn about goats, how to milk and breed and birth and care for a growing herd.
And then Diane started making cheese.
And, well, there was lots to do, which she says was no big deal.
Well, my husband grew up on a dairy farm.
And I grew up at the Millbrook Hunt Club.
So we were used to animals.
And we both had a passion for animals, and that came through in our kids.
And it was just a normal way of life for us.
They clearly passed that love of caring for animals on to Kate.
She even worked at her high school zoo.
Yes, there was a zoo.
She went away to college to study biology.
And during her first year on a visit home, she started dating a young guy who'd worked on their farm, Brendan Foley.
That was about 10 years ago.
I was thrilled.
I loved Brendan right from the start.
And he was always part of the family anyway, so it was great.
Time passed.
Caitlin graduated and started working in zoos.
Brendan finished his degree in applied mathematics.
We picked up and we moved to New York City.
Kate had gotten a job at the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn, and I was in the process of getting a job in Manhattan at an actuarial consulting firm.
So we lived in Brooklyn for four or five years, four and a half years or so.
By then, they'd had enough of city life.
Just as the Hudson Valley had lured artists to its light and landscapes, that's how it was for the young couple.
We got to the point where we decided that we didn't want to do what we're doing for the rest of our lives.
And we're young enough to be able to make a change and we don't have kids.
And we still weren't married at this point.
But we had been together for quite a number of years.
And, you know, so we don't have those types of obligations and people that are relying on us in that sense that we can make a change.
So it wasn't very long afterwards we decided that, you know, what if we started a farm?
And what if we did something, you know, along the lines of what Diane was doing with goat cheese and goats and goat milk?
Because Kate knows goats.
You know, I like goats.
I took care of them, but I'm not an expert in it by any means.
Kate really is, that is 100% her domain.
How scary was that?
It was pretty scary.
We both had, you know, pretty good jobs that we were doing just fine down in the city.
And to leave that and make that change, it was a little bit scary, but we knew it was 100% what we wanted.
So that's what we did.
Well, this is only a little over two years ago that we made this decision.
And we had nothing.
You know, we didn't have any goats.
We had no machinery.
We had no equipment.
We didn't have a place to do it.
So we spent the next several months trying to figure out how to do this and how to start and how to make this transition.
The first thing we did was we moved back up here and we started acquiring animals.
But at first they had trouble finding goats, a goat.
And so Caitlin's parents called the farmer where she'd gotten a newbie.
She did have this one little doe that she had really liked and she had kept.
And she said that she would be willing to sell her to us.
And so my parents called me up and said, We found your first goat.
Let's go back and, you know, we're going to go get her.
And it was sort of reminiscent of when I was 10 years old and we did the same thing.
But we went there and they had this very cute little doe named Velvet.
And we picked her up and brought her home and she started a hoof print off.
Hi girls.
Come on over.
Come on girls.
Come on girls.
Come here Velvet.
The logo is a goat's hoof.
No surprise there.
And there's a model.
Hi girls.
Happy goats, delicious cheese, wonderful life.
It kind of goes along with our goals for the company.
Oh, honey.
We had talked about not being organic.
That isn't of any particular interest to us.
But we do want to provide a good living environment for the goats.
We want to make sure that they're healthy and what they're doing because we think that that passes through in the milk.
And we think it's the most humane thing to do.
So the happy goats is right in line with what we're trying to do.
Delicious cheese, we hope is what emanates from that from happy goats.
And the last line, wonderful life, is we hope that this is the rest of our life.
But this is what we really want to do.
This isn't about making the most money you can make in life.
This is about rather doing something that you want to do that you like doing that you feel good about doing.
So providing a living that you can live off of sustainably and at the same time provide great food for the community.
We're going to take a short break and when we come back, well, Brendan sounds calm talking about that good life.
Getting there is a bit of a stretch.
They, like many of the new generation of young farmers, also work off the farm, as we'll hear when a group of them get together for a meal.
You're listening to independent producer Karen Michell with a story we call, Forget the Big City, It's the Country Life for Me.
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Now back to Karen Michelle and the young farmers of the Hudson Valley of New York State.
Sukoup Farms is the site of this month's gathering of a group of young farmers.
So we're, okay, let's see if I got it right.
Harlem Valley Farm and Food Alliance, right?
Okay, this is, I guess we're already a year old.
Right?
We had our first event in September.
It was our first farm day.
People went around and toured each of our farms in a single day.
Jennifer Soukoup is one of 10 members of the group, all seated around an impromptu table in the Maple Farm shop and production space, eating dishes sourced from their farms.
Pig was the main dish and flavored with Sukoup's maple syrup.
Jennifer had gone to college to become a chef.
Hoofprint cheeses, Kate, and Brendan Foley were among the eager eaters.
One of the things that you probably noticed just going around the room, we're all in our 20s.
30s and 30s, and essentially 40 caps us out.
So I feel like we're really the next generation of farming in this area.
And we're all trying to band together in order to provide some support for one another.
And really, all of our goals here, we all want to have farm-to-table production, so direct sales to consumers.
So all of us have there's something less tangible that appeals to the group too.
My name is Josh Viertel, and I feel like one of the really special things about this group having to come together and create some of the connections that I think our grandparents probably already had.
So when we need a bunch of round bales of hay because we're running short for cattle, or advice about what style of trailer to get, or an issue with someone in town hall.
You know, when you lose rural communities and you lose farms, you're not just losing those farm businesses, you're losing a sort of way of life where you think to lean on each other.
And that's a really important thing.
And I think for us, a thing that called this group into creation was maybe trying to create that or in some way formalize it, make sure that we have that in a time and a place where that doesn't necessarily always exist.
But things have changed.
Where there were once hundreds of dairy farms in Dutchess County, now there are about a dozen.
In the past, dairy farms sold their milk to bigger companies who do the processing and selling.
Quite a different business model.
Some farms changed completely.
Jennifer Sukuk.
My father-in-law used to have it as just a dairy farm and then he had some beef cattle and he never sold any of that directly.
He made maple syrup, but it was only he, you know, gave some to his family and friends.
So when I took over, I really started shifting it from just that wholesale to retail and it's been really slow.
I mean, it's been five years, but it seems like it's so slow changing.
And then, yeah, yeah, even like with the pumpkins in the fall and stuff, we've gone from just putting it on a cart outside to pick your own in the pumpkin patch to then turn into, well, we'll take a hay ride up there, which is now turning into our whole fall.
Some of these young farmers, like Jennifer and her husband, took over the family farm.
Others started their own.
Most of them went off to college to become something else.
A physical therapist, a biologist, a mathematician, a chef, diesel mechanic designer, but they were called back to farming.
Not that most of them can make a go of it without at least someone in the family keeping an outside job.
Andrew Richards' father-in-law had an apple orchard.
He wanted to start a distillery and asked Urbanite Andrew if he wanted to do it.
He said, sure, he could read books to figure out how, but it took his wife to make it possible.
Without her job, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing.
Yeah.
Healthcare, the whole thing.
I do take care of our son.
I'll take credit for that.
There were lots of nods around the table.
Most of these farmers and distillers have kids.
Brendan and Kate Foley are the exception.
I think the goat kids are going to be our kids.
They both have outside jobs.
Kate works for a farm animal vet nearby.
So I'm there Monday through Thursday.
I'm usually there at 7:15 and I leave there about 4:30.
And of course, you know, chores are done on the farm before and after that.
Kate's job is technically part-time, so no benefits.
That's where Brendan's job is key.
Hi, Tom.
It's Brendan.
How are you?
Brendan works for a pension and health actuarial consulting firm.
Much of his work involves being on the phone with his clients.
So I guess, you know, the first thing is I had sent you over.
About half of the week, Brendan can stay home, at the farm, that is, wearing his usual t-shirt, muck boots, and a bandana on his head.
But on other days, he puts on a dress shirt and takes a commuter train into Manhattan.
When he and Caitlin decided to move 90 miles away and start a farm, he'd already been working for the company for a few years.
His boss was amenable to the arrangement.
And for now, Brendan says the four-hour commute is worth it for the health care and retirement benefits.
Well, there's certainly a very long-term goal of having this be our life, this being the cheese and the goats.
That's long-term.
But in the foreseeable future, the reason for having the outside job, the reason that at this point it is a necessity, is because all of those things that we take for granted in life, such as health benefits and like the ability to retire, is very hard to do with a farm.
The cost of entry into this business is very high and the margins are not particularly high.
If you have an outside job, you can help fund this operation and you could also continue paying for those things that, you know, those what-ifs.
You know, what if something happens?
What if I, you know, fall down and break my leg and I can't do any of this?
I still have disability benefits.
I still have, you know, I still have a job that I can go to.
So to the extent that we can keep at least one off-the-farm job for the time being is imperative.
It's essential.
Long term, we hope that eventually the business turns to a point where it's profitable enough that we can start paying ourselves a reasonable salary with health benefits and with retirement allowances or benefits and IRA or a 401k.
That's the goal.
It's just in the next few years, it's difficult.
So essentially, he's there working nearly all the time.
Brendan had gotten up at 3.30 in the morning to check on a batch of cheese.
It wasn't ready, so he came back at 5.
The couple had to do chores then anyway.
And today, between calls to clients from the room that holds medicines and cleaning supplies and a whiteboard that keeps track of the pregnant dose.
We've got Chloe, Belle, Lilac, Shobani, Cheyenne.
Brendan makes cheese in a room nearby in a big stainless steel vat with dials and charts that look like something out of an old black and white movie featuring a mad scientist.
I just turned the heat off at 139 degrees in a super.
Today, Brendan's making a cow's milk cheese for a local dairy farm.
I know with 100% confidence that this is.
She's their only client, but Hoofprint hopes to make making cheese for others 20% of their business.
Now they sell raw goat's milk, goat yogurt, and four of their own cheeses, all sold out for the year, except for a few precious vacuum packs.
You like it?
I love it.
Thank you, Mom.
It's a pale yellow, hard cheese that hits your taste buds immediately, but like a fine wine, has a long finish.
This is a beautiful cheese.
And at $30 a pound, it's not cheap.
We're not trying to be some exclusive cheese manufacturer here.
But I think that part of what we're doing here is not just making cheese.
Part of what we're doing is providing a farm experience.
And those are things that you don't get off of a store shelf.
Those are things that have value to people.
Perhaps no one more than Diane, Caitlin's mother.
I hated them living in the city.
I worried every day and I knew they weren't happy.
And I was just thrilled.
When you decide on a job and you want to make a certain amount of money, you want to make that money because you want to have a certain lifestyle.
But the way they were going, they weren't living the lifestyle they wanted.
So they, this way, they're living the lifestyle they wanted, and that's priceless.
Though Brendan acknowledges there's a social downside.
Always smelling like barn.
It's not necessarily like a cow.
It's not like, it's just barn.
Brendan Foley.
He and his wife Caitlin run Hoofprint Cheese Company in Millbrook, New York.
That was independent producer Karen Michelle presenting Forget the Big City.
It's the country life for me.
And that's all for this edition of On the Job from Express Employment Professionals.
Find out more at expressprose.com and you can listen to every podcast this season at expressprose.com slash podcast.
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