In the 108-year-old hayloft at Harley Farms Goat Dairy in Pescadero, there’s a hand-made wooden chair with its seat carved to perfectly fit farm owner Dee Harley’s butt. “Three Finger Bill made it for me because I was pregnant with Ben,” Dee says fondly. It was supposed to be a rocking chair, but Bill got cross and never finished it.

Original art and woodwork are everywhere at Harley Farms. Three Finger Bill made the hayloft table from a single tree trunk and constructed the chairs without ever using a nail. (Photo by Philip Wartena)

Like the chair — its wood worn smooth by thousands of visitors — Harley Farms is a deeply personal creation that Dee has chosen to share with the masses. The 160 goats who live there comprise the county’s only surviving dairy, and the award-winning cheeses they make bring people from around the world to their doorstep. Whether it’s chefs smelling the goat-cheese painted walls of the shop or locals clamoring to hold one of the 300 baby goats delivered every spring, Harley Farms is accustomed to attention.

But Dee often wrestles with her decision to bring a thousand visitors per week to a farmstead she originally created to thrive in the blissful solitude of nature. The accessibility that keeps her business afloat can crowd the quiet country road she fell in love with and overwhelm her family and employees. For the first time since the farm’s inception, Dee recently cut back business hours in the farm shop from seven days a week to just three. It’s part of an ever-evolving effort to weigh the benefits of a public presence against privacy needed to run a working farm.