Some saw the Y2K computer meltdown scare as the pending end of the world’s social order. Others used Y2K as more of a means to an end.
Take Marcia St. John, who wound up not preparing to survive but to live. To really live.
“My brother was in mainframe computers, and he convinced me it was going to be the end of the world,” St. John said. “It was the end of my world. Once I got the bug, I started heading in a totally different direction.”
That direction was farming.
Today, St. John lives on nine gently sloping acres of greenery in Everett with a herd of more than 100 Swiss goats called Oberhasli, a phalanx of Anatolian guard dogs, two rat terriers and a collection of free-range chickens.
St. John’s main business is selling raw goat milk, and so far she has connected with 19 stores and food cooperatives from Whatcom down to Pierce County. She hopes to soon be selling cheese.
Y2K was merely the catalyst for a change her soul had been searching for.
St. John owned a successful cleaning business called St. John Services in the Seattle area before she began preparing for the meltdown. She said she let go of big bucks to muck around in goat poop.
“I had it for 25 years, and that was a moneymaker. A huge moneymaker,” said St. John, who turned the business over to a relative. “It was very good work, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore.”
In preparation for her life change, St. John hid four goats in her back yard in Ballard. She ripped out her lawn to grow her own food and herbs. She left Ballard, bought some land in Eastern Washington and dreamed about farming.
Then she found what she was looking for: a small farm in Everett was in foreclosure. Though there weren’t any barns or fencing, St. John saw it as perfect. In 2002 she sold her land east of the Cascades and moved to the farm.
As St. John talked, her crew — a group of interns she hired through an organization called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms — brought in the Oberhasli goats to clean and milk.
“Hi, Esther! Hi, Penelope!” St. John yelled to the goats. “What do you have to say, little girlie?”
Before being milked, the goats’ udders are cleaned with an iodine solution, then wiped with a wet rag until the cloth comes up clean. Then the goats hop up on the milking stand that has a bucket of feed for each one. St. John said she’s getting about 45 gallons of milk a day.
“The deal is, as long as they have food they’ll let you milk them,” St. John said.
The goats are milked twice a day. Goat milk has capric acid in it, St. John said, so the trick to making really good raw goat’s milk is chilling it fast in an ice water bath within an hour after milking.
Oberhasli milk is mild and sweet. Some customers say it tastes like a milkshake, St. John said.
Besides taste, raw goat milk is like liquid gold for your immune system. St. John ticks off the health benefits with professorial knowledge and the passion of a believer.
“I was kind of on the fence until I started reading about raw milk,” St. John said. “It’s an incredible substance, and somebody should make sure it’s around.”
St. John cited research done by the Mayo Clinic back in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s that used the unpasteurized milk cure on people with tuberculosis, liver and kidney disease, or diabetes and heart disease. They were put on a raw cow’s milk diet for six weeks, and in one year, about 18,000 patients improved.
“Most of our food is dead in the stores. It’s irradiated. It’s just dead,” St. John said. “Raw milk has a plethora of enzymes, live enzymes in it. It’s a source of all this stuff that your body needs (in order) to digest.”
St. John also knows of lactose-intolerant people thriving on her milk, giving an example of a little girl who blew out all the family growth charts as she became taller and thinner than the rest of her clan.
St. John has been selling her milk since 2007 for $14 a gallon. The milk has a shelf life of two weeks. And St. John hasn’t had any trouble finding stores wanting to stock it.
Though she sells the milk for a pretty penny, St. John said she has yet to make a penny for herself. She’s living by the axiom that money isn’t everything, but living the way you want to certainly is.
She said it doesn’t cost much to live when you have your own milk to drink and your own cheese and eggs.
“When you are a farmer, it’s more about the lifestyle than it is about the money,” said the 48-year-old St. John. “I wouldn’t change it.”
Theresa Goffredo:
425-339-3424,
goffredo@heraldnet.com
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