The Secret to a Successful Farm Volunteer Program

Got a question? 🤔 

Head over to -- https://thriftyhomesteader.com/farm-volunteer-program/ -- and drop it in the comments—so we can reply! 

Description

In this episode, Deborah Niemann welcomes Anne Petersen of Rosasharn Farm—one of the longest-standing Nigerian Dwarf breeders in the U.S.—to talk about her farm's long-running and highly successful volunteer program. What began as hosting a foreign exchange student over two decades ago has evolved into a dynamic educational experience that has inspired many former volunteers to start their own farms and even veterinary careers.

Anne shares how her program organically developed through her involvement in 4-H, homeschooling, and local agricultural organizations. She emphasizes that the key to a successful volunteer program is education, not free labor, and dives into how she models tasks and responsibilities for volunteers of all ages.

Whether you're thinking of starting a volunteer program or just love hearing about farm-based community building, you’ll find inspiration, insight, and practical advice in this thoughtful and experience-rich conversation.

What You’ll Learn:

• How Anne’s volunteer program started and evolved over 40+ years
• Why education is at the heart of her farm’s volunteer experience
• The importance of modeling and working with your volunteers
• Lessons learned from early challenges, including personality mismatches
• Why understanding a volunteer’s intentions and mindset is critical
• How former volunteers have launched their own farms and careers
• Advice for farmers considering starting their own volunteer program

Resources Mentioned:

• Rosasharn Farm
• Southeastern Massachusetts Agricultural Partnership (SEMAP)
• 4-H Youth Programs
• Local Young Farmer Networks

Thanks for tuning in!

No one ever said raising goats was easy, but it doesn't have to cost a fortune or drive you crazy! You just need the right information.

🔹 Check out Goats 365 membership

🔹 Or explore The Goat Academy

🔹Looking for Deborah's books? They can be purchased wherever books are sold, or you can get an autographed copy on our online store.

Happy goat-keeping! 🐐

Transcript

Intro  0:03  
For the love of goats, we are talking about everything goats, whether you're a goat owner, a breeder, or just a fan of these wonderful creatures, we've got you covered. And now here is Deborah Niemann.

Deborah Niemann  0:18  
Hello everyone, and welcome to today's show. This is a really special episode for me, because I'm being joined today by someone whose goats I actually have purchased in the past, and also just a couple weeks ago. I kind of feel like, you know, I got a couple of her goats 20 years ago. They did some fabulous things for my herd, and I wanted to see some more of those fabulous things in my herd. So I went back and we started chatting, and I discovered that she's got a really fabulous volunteer program on her farm that I thought a lot of you could learn a lot from. 

Deborah Niemann  0:55  
So I'm joined today by Anne Petersen, the owner of Rosasharn Farm, where they live off the land. They have so much more than just goats. They have a self-sustainable lifestyle. They've got a market garden, a farm store. They have a Permaculture system in place. They raise American Guinea hogs and Katahdin sheep for meat. They've got chickens for meat and eggs. And of course, most famously, Anne has been raising Nigerian dwarfs for probably longer than anybody else in the United States, and they've got 14 national titles and tons and tons of milk stars and goats that were number one on the top 10 list. In fact, that's what drew me to her farm 20 years ago, was I wanted to get a buck whose mom had been number one on the Top 10 list. So welcome to the show today Anne.

Anne Petersen  1:48  
Thank you. Can I add one? One thing? 

Deborah Niemann  1:50  
Yeah, 

Anne Petersen  1:51  
I appreciate all the accolades you just gave me. But I also raise livestock guardian dogs, and that should be added too. I have Great Pyrenees, and I raise and train them, and I ship them lots of different places, and I couldn't do what I do on my farm without my dogs, who I consider to be my farming partners.

Deborah Niemann  2:13  
That's right. I love getting to meet your dogs, and it was fabulous to see even how the puppies they acted so appropriately around the goats and everything. I even took a little short video of that, of how sweet the one of the puppies was being while just laying behind the goats as they were eating. And I've also heard wonderful things from other people who've had your dogs also. You've really got the full picture on your farm. You've got everything, you know, like we said earlier, you are producing, you know, almost all your own food, like a lot of us have attempted to do in years past, since our children have left, we don't do that as much as we did when our children were home, because we don't have the help. But that's one of the things we're going to talk about today. 

Anne Petersen  3:01  
So the things we're going to talk about, 

Deborah Niemann  3:03  
Yeah, so you have had a fabulous volunteer program on your farm for quite a long time. Can you talk about how that got started?

Anne Petersen  3:13  
Sure, I think that there are sort of two ways that it got started. One is early on, when I moved to this property, which was in 1994 this big acreage here, we took in a foreign student, and he was a college student who went to community college locally, and he needed a place to live, and he lived with us for two years, and was very much a part of the family and very much a part of the farm, and that experience of hosting a foreign student really started sort of educational outreach into the community of would be interested people who wanted to learn about what we did. 

Anne Petersen  4:02  
And I think after he lived with us for two years and moved on, I had a string of other foreign students who came here for different purposes, whether they were college students or whether they came here to learn English as a second language from other countries, and they typically stayed here anywhere from six months to a year, and inevitably, because they were living on the farm and living with us and working alongside us with our daily routines, everything from, you know, preparing meals in the kitchen to feeding and watering animals outside, to harvesting vegetables from the gardens, they became integrated into the farm life. 

Anne Petersen  4:55  
And I think after my children were a little older, I got very involved then in the 4H program. And I had lots of 4-Hers coming here on a regular basis. I was a 4H leader for two clubs simultaneously, and my eldest daughter, Margiana, was involved in yet a third 4H group. And furthermore, at that time in my family's history, I was homeschooling, so I had a lot of contacts in the community of curious people and fairly like minded people who would be interested in the lifestyle that we were creating here on the farm, and so it was a natural progression as the years went by to have some of my children's friends and peers come in to do volunteer work. My 4Hers, of course, were here all the time. Regularly, those who were in school would come after school. Sometimes those who were in the homeschooling community would come for various activities here that were related to homeschooling, and often times find themselves getting involved in things that were happening on the farm. 

Anne Petersen  6:16  
And so it was a very sort of organic and natural progression as my children got older and started going on to higher education, especially Margiana, when she was in college, she had contacts friends of hers, other contacts of hers would come to the farm because they wanted to experience farm life. And I think that's really how I started. It was a progression over time that started to include a broader range of people who started finding out more about the farm and wanting to learn more about it, and finding out that we did offer a lot of educational opportunities, and this was a way that they could start to experience managing animals, growing vegetables, or whatever it was to quote the 4H motto, we learn by doing. And I think everybody tends to naturally learn best by doing, but the volunteers that come here and have throughout history, have always felt that that was the best way to really experience what this farm has to offer, and also what farming in general has to offer.

Deborah Niemann  7:33  
Wow, that's awesome how it's just organically developed. So how have things changed through the years? Because it's been going on now for a really long time. You've had your farm for 40 years.

Anne Petersen  7:43  
Exactly. I think I've talked a little bit about the progression of it, and I think that, you know, being established as a working farm in southeastern Massachusetts, I am known. I have a reputation, and there's a network of there's young farmers organization, which we're very involved with. There's SEMAP, which is the Southeastern Massachusetts Agricultural Partnership, which I'm very involved with. And these organizations, and I'm less involved with 4H now that my children are grown, but I still offer consulting to 4H clubs. These organizations tend to be somehow clearing houses or make matches somehow, and if someone expresses an interest to someone else within the organization or association, they're oftentimes referred through the grapevine to me as being someone you might want to contact Anne. You might want to go see Rosasharn Farm. You might want to see what she's doing, and she is known in the community locally as being free to educate people who are interested. So I have people coming, and then, you know, like even one of my veterinarians who I work with, she's particularly dog and cat veterinarian, but she also will see some small animals on the side, and she's a neighbor of mine, in fact, and her grandson needed to do a high school senior project between his junior and senior years of high school, and so she referred him to me, and he's coming here to do a project now, specifically working with the livestock guardian dogs as his summer project. So, you know, there's sort of, like people in the community know of us, and you know, sort of, if they're curious, oftentimes it's a casual question, but often times it leads to, can I come and experience what you're doing? Can I come and experience what the farm has to offer? And that's really how it's evolved.

Deborah Niemann  9:52  
Yeah, I love how you explain that, because I think a lot of people hear about the possibility of having volunteers, and maybe they've only been at it for a couple of years. And they're still learning a lot themselves, and they think, Oh, this is an opportunity to get free labor, but it's really not. Everything you've been talking about here is all about education.

Anne Petersen  10:11  
Exactly, absolutely. That's really, absolutely crucial, and that is not to be underestimated. I am not out there looking for free labor. But for those people who do come to the farm with an interest, again, to learn by doing is the best way. And I say if you're going to come and work with me, alongside me, shadow me as I do what I do, you're going to participate as well. If the water buckets need filling, well, then we fill them. I think another important part of what I offer, besides the education, is that I don't ask anybody to do anything that I wouldn't do myself. 

Anne Petersen  10:56  
So if I'm cleaning a barn and I have someone here working with me that day, shadowing me, or if it's one of my volunteers who is here on a fairly regular basis, we do what needs to be done together, like this high school student who I just mentioned when we're working with the dogs. He's only been here a few times so far, but when we're working with the dogs, we're working with the dogs together. I'm not turning him loose to go out there and be training the dogs. 

Anne Petersen  11:30  
For example, last week, when he was here, we took two six month old puppies into the poultry yard for a lesson on appropriately working with poultry. And neither of them are ready to work with poultry unsupervised yet, but he was responsible for one while I was responsible for the other. And we started with on leash walking in the poultry pen, and then we let them off leash so we could supervise them and correct them as necessary together. And it's by doing these things together that people get the richer experience. They aren't figuring it out on their own. They're working from my modeling

Deborah Niemann  12:18  
Exactly. What were some of the challenges or mistakes that you encountered early on.

Anne Petersen  12:24  
I think a few. I will tell you, for all who are listening here, that not only do I offer like day volunteer positions where someone is free to come in for like an hour or two hours at a time, but I also have the opportunity here on the land to have people volunteer and stay on the farm. I have a camper that I can host volunteers in, and I have a room in my house. And when I have people staying for a period of time, they are very much a part of the family. And, you know, we cook meals together, we eat meals together. We talk about farming, you know, sort of throughout the day. And it's not that they're with me all the time, but if they're interested in learning about dairy goat management, for example, they would be with me during chore periods. 

Anne Petersen  13:19  
And or if there's something else in medical emergency, if there's birthing or something like that, they're right there. They're right here on the property. So if something comes up, they have the opportunity to be right here for it. And I will say that I think one of the hardest things that I had to figure out early on was personality type, and I've had a number of young – Well, most of my volunteers tend to be young people, because young people don't have commitments that they need to be earning a lot of money to pay a mortgage. They don't generally have children that they have supporting, etc, like that. 

Anne Petersen  13:59  
So usually it's young people who maybe are students still, maybe they're taking a year off from their education. Maybe they've gotten a degree, and they don't know what to do next, and they're trying to figure out which direction they want to go. The people who tend to come and want to learn about what I'm doing tend to be people like that, who are more or less, I would say, like in their early 20s, who sometimes late teens, but more or less early 20s who are trying to figure out what they want to do with their own lives, and so this gives them an opportunity to actually put into practice what farming is like, and learn the ups and the downs, learn about, you know, the reality of it, and not the romantic vision of it. 

Anne Petersen  14:48  
And there have been a number of young people that I've taken in, primarily young men who've been so much at loose ends that they have had, like drinking and drug problems. And I was not. Not tuned in enough when I first met them to notice that, and I think like they're in the same boat as a lot of the young women that come here too, except that my impression and my experience is that the young women who come here are a little bit more focused on actually wanting to learn about animal management and farming, whereas the young men who have come here have been more at loose ends and coping in a very different way. 

Anne Petersen  15:31  
And I think that the lesson for me has been to become much more aware of where they are in their heads and evaluate more why they're here and what their particular demons might be, if you want to put it that. I think some of their parents who have directed them to me have looked at this as an opportunity for them to straighten out their lives, but I don't want to be a counselor to straighten out their lives. And I've raised four of my own children, I don't want to be the mother to them, to, you know, lead them in the right direction. That's not my responsibility. So being more tuned into exactly who's coming and why they're coming, and again, what their struggles, their personal struggles, might be.

Deborah Niemann  16:29  
Yeah, that's a great point. We've had a few volunteers on our farm, and we're thinking of starting to do that again. And it recently occurred to me that we really did not ask a lot of questions or know a lot about people before they came, and we never had anyone with drug or alcohol problems, but we definitely had some that I knew had some problems, but they were mostly just very, very quiet and did not really talk much.

Anne Petersen  16:57  
So quiet is okay, yeah, going, you know, spending the evenings getting blitzed isn't

Deborah Niemann  17:04  
Yeah, you're making me realize, wow, it could have been much, much worse.

Anne Petersen  17:09  
Yeah, it could have been. I've had a number of local parents who have literally wanted to drop their kids off here to do honest work. But if those kids aren't in it for the right reason. It's not going to work.

Deborah Niemann  17:26  
Yeah, that's interesting. I can totally see what you're saying, because we had somebody here once. It was a mom and her teenage daughter, and it's like, well, let's just hang out together for a day and see how it goes. And so we were working in the barn and cleaning out stalls together and stuff. And at one point, her mother said something to her that was kind of akin to, if you're not good, I'm gonna send you here as punishment, which did not make me feel good, because I was like, Okay, that is not why anybody should be here. And it was obvious that the girl was not into it. It was her mom who was the one who thought she should be there for some reason,

Anne Petersen  18:06  
Exactly. And I've been through that before, too. And so again, back to your question. I think being much more tuned in having had those experiences, being much more tuned into, why is this person interested in coming here and or is this a genuine interest of theirs and not their parent trying to find something for them to do? And I can't say I have had a lot of really bad experiences. I have not but I have found myself taking a parental role with some people when that's not the role that I want to take.

Deborah Niemann  18:48  
From your perspective, what are some of the more common problems that farms have when they decide to start a volunteer program?

Anne Petersen  18:57  
I can't speak for a lot of other farms because I don't speak to a lot of other farms that offer what I offer, because what I offer is largely an educational experience. I think a lot of times when people are looking for volunteers, they're looking for free labor, and that can suit both parties fine, but that's not really what I'm doing. I am actually educating. I feel like this is more of an extension of my 4H work as a 4H leader for all the years that I did that. 

Anne Petersen  19:34  
Let me bring it back to a few questions ago, where I mentioned that I don't have any volunteer here doing something that I'm not also doing alongside them. So I don't set someone up in the barn with a pitchfork to clean the barn, and I'm not there. I'm doing it too, and we may take turns on who's shoveling out the manure and who's pushing the wheelbarrow to the compost pile, but we're both working together, and occasionally I will have someone do one barn or shed while I'm doing another barn or shed. But it is clear by my example that I am not asking someone to do something I would not myself do, and I think that's crucial. It's very possible that other models work really well, where the volunteers are more of a labor force. 

Anne Petersen  20:30  
And when I was an adolescent, when I was a high school student, I volunteered at the Boston Museum of Science in their live animal center. And I know that the model that they had at that time, which I believe is probably still the model that they have, is that their volunteers clean the animal cages, they prepare the food and feed the animals that are safe for the volunteers to feed. And when we would come in in the afternoon, after school, we would come in and be given an assignment of a task, to clean out whatever animal cages was our task to do and or to prepare the food or to clean all the counters or to clean the refrigerator. 

Anne Petersen  21:15  
This is a different experience, and yes, I got an enormous amount of education passively by being able to participate in the care of exotic animals at the Museum of Science, it was a phenomenal experience. However, it was not primarily meant to be an educational experience for me, whereas I think my volunteer positions here are identified by both me and the volunteer as being primarily an educational experience, and the work that's participated in is part of the education in terms of what animal management is all about. And if you don't keep your pens clean, you're going to have problems. 

Anne Petersen  22:01  
You know, if you let two intact male Pyrenees into the same pen, particularly when there's a bitch in heat in another pen, you're going to have big problems. So again, it's a matter of educating every step of the way. And yes, the best way to learn is to do, and so if we're milking, we're milking, and we may take turns milking. I may milk first and model what I'm doing. I'll answer as many questions as there are, but at some point, you as the volunteers, presumably going to want to try milking and take your turn, and then I'll offer you some guidance about how you might improve your technique. 

Anne Petersen  22:50  
And during the whole milking process, we're going to talk about handling milk safely, and we're going to talk about chilling milk safely, and we're going to talk about the things that we in the household do with the milk that we produce right here. And then if, for example, we're making cheese in the kitchen, we bring the milk into the kitchen together, and we set up a batch of cheese for home consumption, and we do every step together as long as time allows, so that they're getting a full experience from the beginning to the end.

Deborah Niemann  23:25  
Yeah, and I know a lot of your former volunteers, you've maintained relationships with them through the years, and they come back to visit, and some have even started their own farms and their own goat breeding programs, right? So they've led to some really fabulous things for a lot of people.

Anne Petersen  23:44  
Absolutely, for me, it's not just the pleasure of teaching at the moment, but for me, it's the building of community. And I do feel that we have what I refer to as a farm family, and that includes many of our past volunteers, some of whom have lived here for periods of time on the farm with us, and some of whom have, you know, come and gone daily or weekly, or however we set it up. I have a gal who came to me a few years ago. She's an Army veteran, and she was a little bit at loose ends, but she wanted to start a herd, and she'd gotten a couple of goats, but she didn't really know how she wanted to manage them, or the best way, and she wanted to start breeding and getting into, you know, milking and showing. 

Anne Petersen  24:36  
And so she came to me one morning a week for a year, and she learned an awful lot, and she got into showing, and she got into breeding, and she has learned how to manage her herd. And in fact, the next step after her volunteering here was to apply for a program in vet tech, and now she has just completed her vet tech certificate, and she's working for a veterinarian. So this was a stepping stone for her while she was trying to decide what to do with her interest in animals. On the other hand, another example I can give you is I had a young man who came here years ago, who was, again, a little bit at loose ends, not sure what he wanted to do, but was very intrigued by the idea of farming, and he came and he ended up living here, and ended up living here during COVID, and we were kind of trapped here, because, like many people, kind of we constrained ourselves. We pulled in. We became a pod. And his girlfriend moved on to the farm too, and they stayed here. 

Anne Petersen  25:50  
During that period, they had a baby during COVID here, while the baby was born in the hospital, but they had the first year of the baby's life here, and then when the baby became mobile, it was too small for them to be where they were staying, and they moved out with the idea of looking for a farm of their own. So during the year of COVID, Barry actually approached me and said, Could I start up the CSA? We had had a CSA in the past, but we weren't currently doing it. He said, I would like my contribution to the community at this time to be offering fresh local produce for our neighbors. And I said, That's a great idea. Let's do it. 

Anne Petersen  26:32  
And so he took the bull by the horns, and he started up a CSA at that time. And what it led to was eventually they purchased a farm in a neighboring town that's under a conservation easement so it can never be developed, but it has a small farmhouse on it, and now Barry and his wife and child are living on this farm and farming their own. So this was his incubator. He took the initiative to want to start the CSA. I said, Yes, let's do it and his farm start. Sort of his farming experience was right here to start with, but now he's doing his own

Deborah Niemann  27:13  
I love it. That is such a great story. So I think it may be easy for some people sit there and go, Wow, you've been so lucky to have such great people show up at your farm. Now you have mentioned a couple that were not so great, but do you have any tips on how to choose people that are going to be a good fit?

Anne Petersen  27:33  
I think twofold, one, really look into their interests. If they're not really interested, it's not going to be fulfilling to either person, either party, either the host farm or the volunteer, whether that's for, you know, a once a week, couple hours once a week type thing, or whether it's somebody who can live on site, if they're not interested, they won't be committed. I think that's absolutely crucial. 

Anne Petersen  28:05  
And then the other part of the very closely related to that, is personality. Is this a personality that you can live and work with? And of course, that becomes much more crucial if you're hosting them to live on the land, but even for somebody that's coming in once a week for a couple of hours, you want to be able to get along. But part of that has to do, of course, with personality type, and part of it has to do with interests. 

Deborah Niemann  28:34  
What advice would you give somebody who's thinking of starting a volunteer program on their farm, like, what should their first step be?

Anne Petersen  28:41  
Community outreach. I think community outreach, we have not quite an open door policy here on the farm, but very much of an open door policy in that if someone is interested in coming to the farm, even to look and see, even to meet and greet the animals, yes, they are welcome to come. We want people to understand how local farms contribute to the local economy, how local farms contribute to the local food supply. 

Anne Petersen  29:13  
And part of that mission is being open to visitors coming in, and when you start opening your doors and inviting people to me, it was a natural progression that I would start answering their questions and educating them if they had questions. And as time goes on, there's more of that networking and word of mouth, and the more associations and organizations that you can participate in locally, the greater your outreach will be. 

Anne Petersen  29:51  
So you know, we host our local agricultural organizations around here, offer these Twilight evenings, which are educational events happening on different farms around and every month is a different farm featured, and there's usually a farm tour and a question and answer session and a potluck afterward. Great way to meet people in the community, great way to meet other farmers. And several of the organizations that I mentioned early in the conversation do similar educational events, but they're not just educational. They're community building, and that's what it's all about. 

Deborah Niemann  30:27  
That's awesome. I love this. This has been such a fun conversation. Do you have any additional thoughts you want to add before we wrap up today?

Anne Petersen  30:35  
I think one of the things I just want to say, which probably circles back to a number of your questions, Deborah, is flexibility of the host is really important. And I think that probably also knowing how much information to provide at a time, and that would, of course, vary according to the capacity of the individual who's volunteering to take it in. Some people can take in much more than others, but I think a generosity of spirit is absolutely crucial too, because there are going to be a lot of times when your volunteers are going to be wanting things from you, and if you're not willing to give, you're not going to have the experience you want, at least you won't have the positive kind of experience that I'm seeking. And maybe that's not what everyone is seeking, but to me, that's what makes it a give and take and rewarding for both parties.

Deborah Niemann  31:39  
Yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you so much for that. It's been great chatting with you today.

Anne Petersen  31:44  
Great. It's been really nice to be with you, too.

Deborah Niemann  31:48  
And that's it for today's show. If you haven't already done so, be sure to hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss any episodes to see show notes. You can always visit fortheloveofgoats.com and you can follow us on facebook at facebook.com/lovegoatspodcast, see you again next time. Bye for now you.