Even Maine, the land of the "frozen chosen"--one of the nation's whitest, least diverse places--has a growing market for goat meat, sometimes rebranded as "chevon." In the last five years, the number of meat goats in Maine increased by 53 percent, more than double the national average, according to USDA data.

Photo by Kelsey Robinov/Salt Institute for Documentary Studies

In rural Dresden, Marge Kilkelly, a former state legislator, lives down a gravel drive at Dragon Fly Cove Farm, where she raises a small herd of Boer-cross goats. The white animals with distinctive brown faces, native to South Africa, browse on shrubs and trees around her wooden homestead.

"Goats are uniquely suited to Maine and the Northeast," she says. "We have small farms with rocky, craggy land. Many of our pastures are overgrown. Those are the kinds of places that goats particularly like."

She's also a part of Thyme for Goat, a collaboration among four farms, who send their animals to a USDA-inspected slaughter facility, where they're killed humanely for retail customers at farmers' markets. Kilkelly says 90 percent of her customers have never eaten goat meat and buy it because it's lean, local meat. (The meat revival is a boon to cheesemakers; after all, male kids, especially those crossed with meat bucks and dairy does that need to be "freshened" up, are incapable of ever producing milk.) That's hardly the only market.

In recent decades, thousands of East African refugees moved to Maine, opening at least half a dozen halal markets in Portland and Lewiston and serving up spicy sambusas (crispy triangular-shaped pastries stuffed with meat, onions, cumin, salt, hot pepper, and cardamom). Many markets stock their freezers with imported meats, though, and for Maine goat farmers the local market for goat meat has, so far, been difficult to tap into. Although the extension agency of the University of Maine in Cumberland County has attempted to spur production and encourage farmers to market goat specifically to Somali and Sudanese communities, the cultural learning curve for both producers and buyers has made it difficult for Maine goat to move into the ethnic marketplace.

Dawud Ummah, an imam who raised goats at Pleasant Valley Acres Farm in Cumberland, a suburb of Portland, had some customers sign up to buy a goat; when the end of the season came, they didn't have enough money to buy his fresh meat, and he sometimes had to sell it at a loss. But that hasn't stopped him from trying to raise meat goats humanely again this year.

"Right now, for real good organic meat, immigrants--they're poor--they can't afford it," he says. "They buy it for sacrifice, but not for daily eating."

Another problem facing many small meat producers--the shortage of slaughterhouses--is exacerbated for those selling goats, because halal slaughter is prohibited in places where pigs are also processed. State- and federally inspected slaughterhouses can make religious exemptions for Muslims to perform ritual slaughters, which involve cutting the trachea, esophagus, and two jugular veins, but not the spinal cord, with a very sharp knife. Customers can also arrange to custom-process animals on the farm to remain in accordance with both halal and state law, but these meats cannot legally be sold at markets. Maine state law mandates that custom-processed meat be used exclusively by the animal's owner, members of the owner's household, and any nonpaying guests.