The frisky ruminants—and their products—are kicking it up

Goats are personable. Do you need one? If you live inside the city, probably not. Chattanooga has an ordinance forbidding goats on properties smaller than five acres, and realistically you’d need more than that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t participate in the growing love of all things goat. Goat farms are springing up all over, and you’ll find goat products at every farmers market.

“Goats eat the poison ivy, the privet, the honeysuckle, the kudzu, the English ivy,” said goat farmer Mary Hart Rigdon. “They eat what everybody wants cleared out of their places and turn it into good milk.”

Mary Hart—the “goat-to” gal in the biz, having for over 20 years run Decimal Place Farm, a micro-dairy close enough to Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport that its barn doors rattle at takeoff and touchdown—says goat milk is more easily digestible than cow’s. In addition to a delicious crumbly feta that she sells to Atlanta chefs as well as at farmers markets, she makes tuma, a mozzarella-like goat cheese she says enables cheese-allergic children to have pizza birthday parties.

In Chattanooga, we’re a little behind Atlanta in access to local goat dairy products. Why? Fear, explained a man distributing goat milk at a weekday farmers market who declined to be interviewed, photographed or named. Though he’s doing nothing illegal, he said, the Tennessee Department of Agriculture has tried to entrap him often enough that he’d just as soon keep a low profile.

Waitaminnit. Johnny Law busts people for milk?

Mary Hart, who, before she shelled out $100,000 to qualify as a grade-A (commercial-level) dairy, had her own dust-ups with Johnny, explained: American dairy standards, she said, designed for cow-not-goat, macro-not-micro operations, are spelled out in an arm-thick federal document that each state interprets individually, then uses, with varying individual twists, to b-slap the small farmer. “All of the rules and regulations can be arbitrary and capricious, which makes it very frustrating and heart-wrenching,” she said. But if regs vary from state to state, the controversy at the aforementioned Chattanooga farmers market is a national one—raw v. pasteurized milk. Natural-food proponents, including, notably, the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF), ascribe innumerable health benefits to raw, or unpasteurized, milk. But ag officials worry it carries disease and they call the shots.

So selling raw milk for human consumption was completely illegal in Tennessee until, in 2009, the state legislature effected a compromise by passing a “herd share” bill. Under a herd-share arrangement, you pay the farmer a onetime fee to become part-owner of his animals. This entitles you to pay a periodic “boarding fee” in exchange for milk, which you can now legally drink because, on paper, it’s from your own animal.

Herd-share goat milk is what our nervous non-interviewee at the farmers market was distributing. If you want some, you can find him and other local dairies by clicking on WAPF’s “milk finder” at www.realmilk.com.

And that’s pretty much your only option for local goat milk. Even pasteurizing grade-A’s like Mary Hart’s don’t outright sell it. To do so, the regs would require her to buy an industrial bottle-and-capping machine. “It’s a step too far,” she said.

For local goat milk products, though, the news is better: Herd-share cheese and butter are now legal along with the raw milk, and besides, the Chattanooga area now has its own brand-new grade-A cheesery.

Rafting Goat Cheese is right by the Ocoee River in Old Fort, and proprietor Mack Haynes says his goats love playing on boats; hence the name.

Haynes, who does pasteurize, started his micro-dairy after a career in mega-dairies, so he knew industry standards going in and reports no friction with Johnny Cheese. “The first thing I ever did was call the Tennessee Department of Agriculture,” he said. “They actually helped me get grant money and worked with me every step of the way.”