Turning Goat Milk into Pet Food: Labeling and Licensing Essentials

If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to legally sell raw goat milk or farm-made pet treats, this episode is full of first-hand insight and practical tips. Deborah sits down with Carly Brown and Shawn Phillips of The Good Steward Farm in Virginia, where their herd of 28 goats helps power two small businesses: goat-powered landscaping and licensed raw milk pet products.

Carly and Shawn walk us through the behind-the-scenes process of getting a pet feed license, working with state inspectors, completing nutritional testing, and creating professional packaging that customers trust—all while reducing waste and adding value to every part of the farm.

In this episode, you’ll learn how Carly and Shawn:

• Navigated labeling laws and testing requirements to sell raw milk legally as pet food
  
  
• Turned their freeze dryer into a profit-making machine for chicken heads and yogurt treats
  
  
• Worked with state officials to get label approvals and avoid regulatory pitfalls
  
  
• Developed packaging that instantly improved product appeal and sales
  
  
• Balanced their goat business with full-time jobs and a multi-herd setup
  
  
• Maintained transparency and integrity while planning for future human-grade dairy sales

Whether you're exploring a goat-based business, interested in pet food production, or just love hearing what’s possible with a little grit and goat love, this episode is sure to inspire.

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 goat, 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 episode! This is a really fun episode because I get the chance to interview a couple of goats 365 members, Carly Brown and Shawn Phillips, and they are here today talking about their business, where they sell a variety of farm products, including freeze dried yogurt bites. So this is going to be really fun. If you've ever thought about like, wow, I could be making more money selling some of my goat products. Then this is definitely an episode you want to listen to. Welcome to the show, Carly and Shawn!

Shawn Phillips 0:52
Thank you!

Carly Brown  0:48  
Thank you so much.

Deborah Niemann  0:50  
I'm really excited to learn more about what people are doing with their goats for business. As I have said at various times, one of the reasons that I like to interview business owners for the podcast is because a lot of us love our goats so much we just keep wanting more and more. We just can't sell that one special kid every spring, and so we have to find a way for our goats to start paying for themselves. And you're doing a fabulous job with that. And so that's why I wanted you to join us today and talk about it. So how did you get started with goats? Let's just start at the beginning.

Carly Brown  1:27  
Okay, so my aunt had goats. My mother and I went up to visit her one fall in New England. We're in Virginia, and she taught us how to make soap with goat milk. And I'm pretty captivated by anything that is a mindful experience. So you know when you're making soap and you're monitoring the temperature of the oil and you're monitoring the lye as you're adding it to the goat milk, you kind of can't think about the outside at all, right? So I loved making goat milk soap. I bought the goat milk at Walmart for several years. I still love making soap, even though I haven't done it in quite some time. 

Carly Brown  2:04  
Then a couple years after that, I went to a cheese making class. Luella Hill was teaching at Polyface, Joel Salatin operation in Staunton, Virginia, and she taught us how to make mozzarella. And it was the same thing. It was the stirring of the milk and the adding of the rennet and the turning milk into something else, cheese. It was another kind of mindful, magical experience. I immediately wanted to sign up for herd share Poly Face is very far. I drove two hours to take that class, and there were no local herd shares, so I bought cream line milk from a store for a while. It was a kind of, you know, it's an expensive product. It just wasn't quite the same as that raw milk that had been milked the day before and was just a it was a super fresh product. So I kind of gave up on the cheese dream. 

Carly Brown  4:09  
A few years later, my husband and I became familiar with the work of Doug Tallamy, and he's a professor in Delaware that has he's an entomologist, so he's a bug guy. He has spearheaded the native plant movement, if anybody doesn't know this, bugs and plants evolve together. Bugs evolved with very specially shaped mouths that can only eat specific plants. A great example of this almost everybody is familiar with is the monarch can really only eat milkweed. And if we don't have native plants, we can't make enough caterpillars to feed the baby birds. So the songbird population falls, and then the entire ecosystem kind of starts to crumble. You know, things are all tied together. So that led us to realize that we had a lot of invasive plants on our property that were not feeding the ecosystem. We wanted to get rid of them. Getting rid of things like privet and Japanese honeysuckle, which are two big invasives here in Virginia, involves cutting down the root and then basically using a hatchet or something else to get the rest of the root ball out of the ground.

Carly Brown  4:24  
I was about 40 something when we started that process. My back is old. I am no longer fit to be using a hatchet to dig root balls out of the ground. My husband grew up on a mountain in Cullowhee, North Carolina, and it was the only mountain in Jackson County that didn't have kudzu, because his father was smart enough and saw the future and had gotten a couple of goats. And those goats were famous even today. If you went to Cullowhee, North Carolina, you could find people who remember Snowball, the goat hanging out on the mountain side. You know, he was this big, white mountain goat looking thing. I never met him. Of course, my husband knew that goats could be real helpful in eliminating invasive species, and we had also become familiar with some of the problems with large scale agriculture, so we thought that we'd get a couple goats. We have some freezer kids, and I'd be able to live out my soap and cheese dreams. 

Carly Brown  5:09  
And then here comes the goat math, right? A local farm decided they didn't want goats anymore. They had a bunch of Oberhaslis that were in milk for sale. So two weeks after we got our first goat, we went and picked up this third doe that was in milk. I had a kind of, I don't want to, don't make fun of me, guys, but it really was almost a religious experience. The first time I milked a goat, me and that goat were communing like we were communicating, and it was a beautiful thing. And I was like, this is wonderful. And then I learned that you had to separate the bucks from the females after they got breed. So I needed a wether so we had four goats, and then it just went on from there. Now I've got 28 and that's the story of how they ended up with goats.

Deborah Niemann  5:54  
I love it. That is so great. Yeah, I just wanted a couple goats so I could make goat cheese, and before I knew it, two goats turned into 20 and...

Carly Brown  6:04  
Still don't have any kids in the freezer. We haven't gotten there yet. I think that we will one day. We still hope to achieve that part of the dream. But for right now, we're landscaping and we're milking.

Deborah Niemann  6:15  
Yeah, well, you're able to put all of the wethers to work. So that's pretty cool.

Carly Brown  6:21  
Yes, we had dates of the butcher. USDA butchers around here are booked very early, like if you want an appointment in 2026 you probably have to make that appointment by November of 2025 there's not a lot of them, you know. So we had appointments for our kids, but we found them a job for and we canceled those appointments. So may not always work out, but it's working out for now, and I love those things, so I'm very happy about that.

Deborah Niemann  6:49  
Yeah, so tell us then, how did you get started with the landscaping business?

Carly Brown  6:55  
So we got started landscaping because our social circle is mostly comprised of our friends in the Master Naturalist group, where we volunteer in a group called Tree Fredericksburg, and they're pretty tapped into the invasive slash native plant issues. So people were asking us if they could borrow our goats, or they were asking us if we had considered renting them out. They were asking us if they could get used to clean up the river bank down by the Rappahannock. People making the suggestion to us that we do that. I didn't think that it was going to be possible for us to do that because we didn't have enough goats. 

Carly Brown  7:28  
Usually, goat landscaping is kind of an overstock situation, where there's a lot of goats in a smaller area for a short amount of time. But people kept asking. And I looked around at the yards that are in this area, and we live in the suburbs of DC, they're small. So I just started thinking, you know, small yards, small number of goats. This could work. We had our business license, we found somebody who would insure us, which was quite a chore, and we put it out there on Facebook, and we started getting bites. This was last year that we started. And I'll tell you that this year, I'm concerned that we're not going to be able to finish all the contracts that people want to sign. It's worked out very well. I'm just excited about it. I'm really excited that we went ahead and took that leap, and then it's working out for us.

Deborah Niemann  8:17  
Yeah, that's awesome. And so you, not only were you able to put 10 kids to work or 10 goats to work, but now you're all the way up to 28 goats working.

Carly Brown  8:27  
Yeah, this year, we got a pretty big contract with the city of Fredericksburg. It wasn't big money wise. We cut them a deal because we wanted to clean up this area in a local park that we have here, and we knew that if we were going to keep a herd in that park, we needed to expand our numbers. So the most fun day of my life was when we realized that we needed more goats. I called the young lady who sold the very best doe that I have, that I love so much. And they had a buckling-heavy year, and we drove four hours to pick up nine bucklings and four hours home, and then we just started tossing goats over the fence. And it was so fun. It was so fun.

Deborah Niemann  9:08  
I know I would love an excuse to buy more goats.

Carly Brown  9:10  
Oh, man, I know you roll up there and you see all the baby goats, and it's like, Well, which one do you want? All of them? It was a magical day.

Deborah Niemann  9:19  
Yeah, we drove to Massachusetts a couple of weeks ago to get two bucks, and it was really hard to not bring home more, but I only had two dog crates, and it was even going through my head, like, Could I get some more dog crates? Like more dog crates would fit on the back of the truck? And it was like, probably not. The stores are probably closing soon, and I don't think we're gonna pick up the goats in the morning. I don't think we'll have time. There won't be any stores open then. Anyway, I talked myself out of it. Thank goodness. 

Carly Brown  9:39  
It was a good move. 

Deborah Niemann  9:52  
Yeah, I could have brought home a lot more. I know one of the things that a lot of people worry about is the safety of their goats when they're doing goat landscaping. And I absolutely loved a story that you shared in our private goats, 365 group about a month ago or so, when a bunch of joggers stopped what they thought was theft of your goats. Can you tell us what happened?

Carly Brown  10:19  
They thought that people were stealing goats, but we believe that they were dumping goats in our fence down at Old Mill Park. The city has kind of adopted our goats that are in the park. So there are people that regularly visit them every time Shawn and I are down there caring for the goats. There are people who want to talk to us. They want to know their names. They are visiting them. Woman named Heather stopped us yesterday. She had put her dog to sleep. She was crying. She saw the goats at the park, and now she visits them every day because she needs some sort of communication with animals. It makes her feel better. 

Carly Brown  10:56  
Yes, I was very worried about putting the goats down there. We got some webcams so we can watch them whenever we want to. I was more worried about drunk folks stumbling through the electric fence and hurting themselves. I didn't really worry about the goats being stolen until I learned that a local Alpine farm here actually did have a buck stolen out of their field. That kind of set off a whole new type of worry in my brain. But that's the most severe incident was when we thought that people might be stealing our goats. The joggers were not going to let that happen, and that story ended happily.

Deborah Niemann  11:33  
I really love the fact that the people in the area have taken such ownership of your goats, and that they are letting you know when you know they think something is amiss, that's great.

Carly Brown  11:44  
They absolutely are. We have gotten calls because people have been concerned that the water's too hot. We've gotten concerned when people think that the goats are panting. We've gotten a call when somebody thought a goat was breathing too loud. We've gotten plenty of calls, and every time we get a call, we go right downtown, we check so far the goats have all been fine, but I really appreciate that people are texting us and calling us and sending us messages because they think that something's not right. You know, it's stressful not having eyes on them. 

Carly Brown  12:14  
When I work from home, I get to look outside my window, and depending on where they are, because we move them around all the time, you know, I can usually at least see one goat, and it makes me happy, because I know where there's one goat, there's the rest of them. Fredericksburg is certainly adopted those goats that are down in the park now. And I just feel so lucky. I'm not sure that we would have wanted to leave them there for so long if that hadn't been the case. And we are leaving them for a long time, we're actually going to be there until March of 2026 now they'll be moving around to different areas of that park.

Deborah Niemann  12:44  
Wow. That is amazing. That must be a pretty big park.

Carly Brown  12:47  
It's big. It's beautiful. There's a canal path that kind of goes around the whole city here, and it walks right by Old Mill Park, which is, it's a beautiful park. You know, it's right up next to the Rappahannock River. There's all sorts of Bluebird houses there. There's all sorts of wildlife that's down there, but you can't see it, because this embankment was kind of covered with just a bunch of plants that weren't really contributing much to the ecosystem, as far as you know, making baby bird food. 

Carly Brown  13:26  
The goats have cleared that you can see the park now, the ultimate plan is that we're going to move them around, and then they're going to get moved back through the same areas so that they can do more permanent damage. I'm reading capturing sunlight now by Woody Lane this, I think this was one of your recommendations. So I'm learning about how to more effectively help the goats kill plants. We're going to put some real damage on the invasives on that embankment, and hopefully they've already got seed that are going to turn into a beautiful wildlife or not wild, but a wildflower bed, when it's all said and done, it's going to look beautiful. Deborah, it's a nice park.

Deborah Niemann  13:57  
Yeah, that's awesome. That's really exciting. And yes, Dr Lane was a guest on the podcast because another goats 365 member had read that book and said you should have this guy on the podcast. In fact, he and I wound up talking so long we split it into two episodes.

Carly Brown  14:14  
Yep. Well, he's got two books. I'm halfway through one, and I'll be working on two as soon as I finish.

Deborah Niemann  14:19  
Yeah, that's awesome. So in addition to the goat landscaping, you also are selling pet food. You're selling your goat milk as pet food. How did that get started

Carly Brown  14:32  
That was driven mostly by my husband. I was a little bit reluctant. Two things happened. One, we had milk. I process it as much as I can, but you know, I'm sure you know that there is always going to be some milk that just gets lost because it gets too old or you run out of time to do something productive with it. I hate to be wasteful. Additionally, my husband, it's so funny when I say this, but work for food gigs with some local farms. He participates in a chicken harvest at our friend's farm couple miles up the road. They are doing regenerative farming, so the chickens follow the cows. And you know, it's a beautiful operation, but they're done when they kill 300 chickens. There's 300 chicken heads, and this is where it gets a little bit gross, folks. Sorry, there's 300 chicken heads that normally went into the compost pile. 

Carly Brown  15:21  
We knew from going to the fancy dog food stores that people were freeze drying chicken heads and were selling them for money every time a bucket of chicken heads was going into the compost, we were kind of like, wow, that's that's just the same as setting money on fire. So we started freeze drying the chicken heads, and we're, we're doing that with the farmer there, and they're actually selling them in those bags that I shared with you in the 365 group. And I am selling raw pet milk for goats. If I had five or 10 more goats and milk, I think that I could sell five or 10 more goat milks worth of half gallons of raw pet milk. It wasn't easy to get started. We had to get a pet feed license. We had to get lab testing done. We had to get labels approved. 

Carly Brown  16:19  
And again, you have to have insurance if you're going to do this, you know, but it has been a great way. I've not had to throw away any extra milk this year. At one point, somebody stopped by. We don't know how he found us. We think that somebody who came to buy the previous weekend told him about it, and he just stopped by and said, Hey, I'm here for milk. So we were like, Here you go. This is awesome. I did do some Facebook marketing on marketplace, and I did do some on the next door app, but I didn't put a ton of marketing effort into the raw milk for pet sales. If you do go into the Bougie dog stores, you will see that there's milk specially packaged. So people are already looking for this product, and there is a certain set of people that are looking for things that are made in their own community. So I am so happy that Shawn, my husband, pushed me into that arena, because it's been wonderful, and it is going to give me a reason to get some more milking does in the future as I get ready to grow.

Deborah Niemann  17:05  
Yeah, exactly. That's awesome. 

Carly Brown  17:06  
One thing I'll say about the pet milk is that before we went pet milk, we did explore human dairy requirements, I know that I could convert my garage into a three room milking operation, where you have the dairy parlor and you have the cooling room and the milk storage stuff, and then you have another room that would just be for the cheese making. I know how much money I would have to spend to get started on that. We did have the dairy inspector come to our house and walk us through all those requirements. 

Carly Brown  18:01  
I'm not completely comfortable making that sort of capital investment yet on the garage and turning that into a facility, but I am always very careful. There are some people locally who are selling raw milk for animal consumption, but it's a wink wink, nudge nudge type of thing. I don't participate in that because it's still in the back of my mind that one day I'm going to want to have a human grade dairy here, and I want to be on the right side with the dairy inspector. 

Carly Brown  18:12  
You know, I think a lot of goat folks know that raw milk is awesome and it's wonderful for human consumption. I just don't toe the line, because if I want to be legit one day, I want to be legit. So I have told a couple of people who said, Oh, I'm going to go home and make paneer. And I think to myself, I don't want to know that. Don't tell me that. I know you have to hit heat paneer up and paneer gets pasteurized during the cheese making process. I don't want to know if people are doing that. That part of walking the line always makes me a little uncomfortable. I do strictly stick to animal consumption. That is the main focus of my sales.

Deborah Niemann  18:43  
Exactly. All you can do is label it and tell them that's what it's for and everything.

Carly Brown  18:49  
And yes, and the label says on there, real big, not for human consumption. What folks do with it is really up to them. I just know that I am legal Beagle, and that's really important to me, because I like that dairy inspector lady that came here, so I'm going to do right by her,

Deborah Niemann  19:06  
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. I love that. And I know people who have gotten certified as dairies and stuff do wind up, you know, usually having a really good relationship with their inspector and everything. And in the end, it is all for public health. Because even though, like, I would never do anything that I thought was shady, and you would never do anything that you thought was shady, some people would, and some people did before we had rules and stuff,

Carly Brown  19:37  
Absolutely, those rules are there for a reason, and I'm happy to follow them.

Deborah Niemann  19:41 
I know I personally have been intimidated by the idea of producing anything that is going to require a label that talks about nutritional information, and you guys deserve so much credit. This is one of the things that just impresses me so much about your business, is that that did not stop you. You're like, oh, we gotta have nutritional information on our label. All right, we're going to do that. So how exactly do you do that?

Shawn Phillips  20:08  
It's a road that you have to be ready to walk down with a lot of detours and variables involved. Our journey started with just reaching out to the Virginia Department of Health and asking, we want to sell dog treats. How does one do that? And the initial response was simply, you need to get labels. You need to get labels approved, and then you can sell them. And I was like, well, you're going to have to give me more information. So the nice people sent me a link. They've got this nice little handbook in Virginia that kind of outlines all the steps that you have to take. And you get this pamphlet, and you think, well, this is going to be an easy road. It's very cut and dry, very simple. Just follow the steps. 

Shawn Phillips  21:35  
And then as you start following the steps, you start under covering all the little nuances and well, for this kind of product, you have to have this kind of label, and for that kind of product, you need to have this kind of testing, and you have to have a wait sometimes, but not all the time. And it's just a lot of email traffic, a lot of phone calls, but we finally were successful doing it. And credit to our health department. They are responsive and they are very helpful. They're a pump, not a filter, so to speak. They want people to achieve and succeed, but you have to ask them all the right questions. For example, in the handbook, they simply say you need to have nutritional information, you just send it to a lab. 

Shawn Phillips  21:45  
Well, whenever you Google Labs for testing, you can get a $15 kit, or you can get $1,000 test kit and so I reached back out and I said, Well, I I don't want to spend $1,000 getting this testing done. Do you have a list of people approved vendors? And she said - Well, we can't really do that, because that shows a little favoritism. But what we can do is we can tell you this is specifically what has to be tested for, and let you know that you can call the people and talk to them. And here are some people that you could call and talk to. 

Shawn Phillips  22:11 
So not really a list, but sort of a list. And so we called one of the companies and explained what we were doing. And he said, Yes, we've done that before. Yes, we do pet treats. Yes, this is very easy. Here's our website. And he walked me through the website. We executed some requests, followed by mailing packages off. And the biggest expense, honestly, for like, the goat milk, or the goat milk, specifically, we had to package it and keep it cold, to get it there overnight, so that it was still what we were going to be selling. And so you had to pay a premium for the packaging and mailing of that.

Deborah Niemann  22:38  
Yeah. So when you're getting this nutritional testing done, what kind of stuff do you have to do, like, what kind of information do you want?

Shawn Phillips  22:45 
Each health department is going to say what they have to have on their packaging. This is not a national requirement. This is a by state requirement. So whenever you contact them, they'll tell you, but it'll be something about crude protein, moisture content, whatever nutritional values they want. So you take your product, what you're going to sell to the end user, and you send it off to a lab. We sent ours off. They have a pretty quick turnaround. There's a nice little internet interface that you can kind of get your reports back. And they test the product, they give you all the results back, and they give you a sheet of paper that you then in the State of Virginia, I have to send back to the health department and say, here's our testing. This is the values, and this is what we're going to put on label, and then also a copy of the label. 

Shawn Phillips  23:38  
And so you get a couple little opportunities to tweak things at that point. For example, I didn't know how much weight was going to go in here for, say, a chicken head. It's they want to have a weight, but I don't know a weight. I know a quantity. I want to put three in there, but they want to weight. And so several dialogs back and forth between the tech and her boss and me, I was allowed just to put a net weight and a blank line and tell them I was going to Sharpie in the weight. And they said, Yeah, that'll be fine. That'll work again. 

Shawn Phillips  24:18  
There's a lot of communication that has to go on between you and the professionals. They do want you to succeed. They are a pump, but you have to ask all the right questions and kind of tease things out sometimes, because it wasn't on her radar, the technician's radar that I could just write the weight in. And she didn't think that she could approve that, but she talked to her boss, and her boss was like, yeah, that seems legit to me. That's fine. It's no different than him saying he's gonna put eight ounces in, and then putting seven ounces in, we have to trust them, so I'm gonna put the weight on, and that's gonna be that.

Carly Brown  24:42  
And about the communication you do want to make sure that, like if you talk to somebody on the phone and they tell you something, it's nice to send a follow up email and get their confirmation of that in writing and then save it. Don't accidentally delete that email, because people come and go in those organizations, and if somebody goes and you need to pull that email up. You know, you don't want to play gotcha, but you do kind of want to maintain any documentation and communication that you've had with folks for the future.

Shawn Phillips  25:15  
I actually went the extra step, and after they said, but their email was, your products are approved, you're good, I asked them to email me back the packages that were approved so that I could have a an electronic track of them, sending me what I can sell and how it needs to look on a package, just to cover my own interests, and also to make sure, like Carly said, that I have a document that says these were approved were legit. Because in our case, some of our products are being sold by other farmers, and I don't want to put them in a position where they're going to get in trouble. So I want to make sure all my eyes are dotted and T's are crossed.

Deborah Niemann  25:50  
Yeah, that is great advice. I love the idea of definitely make sure everything is in writing somewhere, so that you don't have to worry about somebody's memory being bad or somebody leaving.

Shawn Phillips  26:05  
 Right, right. 

Carly Brown  26:07  
Yeah, 

Deborah Niemann  26:08  
Earlier, when we were chatting, you said that there you had some interesting experiences with the yogurt bites and getting the nutritional information on those.

Carly Brown  26:11  
Yes, Shawn actually did the communication. He is the one who has the patience to go through these massive amounts of regulations and rules. But I had thought, you know, when you buy a thing of yogurt, you see that active cultures and in the ingredients. And so I just assumed that the ingredients for yogurt were going to be milk and the cultures, because you don't add anything else. For the freeze dried ones, I do add a couple drops of rennet to stiffen it up before it goes in the freeze dryer. And then pumpkin, because I do a pumpkin yogurt bite. It's nice for dogs, telling me so when they get upset. But Shawn, can you explain why they wouldn't let us put the cultures. They would not let us list the individual cultures.

Shawn Phillips  26:55  
We couldn't scientifically back that up. They said it would be cleaner and more appropriate for us simply to say goat yogurt. I thought they wanted us to be more thorough, but they were more interested in just saying, What are you selling? Goat yogurt, freeze dried treats. Then just say the ingredient is goat yogurt and the pumpkin, which was easier for me, obviously, yes, but I was trying to be very, very specific. And again, it's the dialog back and forth. You can read a piece of paper, you can read the handbook, and you can interpret it, but their interpretation, that individual text interpretation, is really all that matters, and so you have to tease that out and say, What do you want me to say? How do you want this to come across? They were more focused on the nutrition, the actual crude proteins and things like that. As long as I got that tested. They had what they needed. They didn't need me to put all the different cultures in the actual ingredients list. 

Carly Brown  27:51 
But that's counterintuitive to somebody who makes cheese and yogurt. Yeah, you know, like, what's your question every time somebody makes something good, I wonder what that culture is and how you know it was very counterintuitive to me. So I will say that I listened to Shawn on the phone, talking to these folks many times. I think in the end, like talking to them, actually having conversations with them, was better than going through the big, long guidebook. Yeah, I think they really helped us.

Shawn Phillips  28:19  
Absolutely. And I've got the the history of having run a brewery in Frederick in Virginia and working with a lot of different state and county and city regulations, and learn a lot of lessons doing that where it really is. It's essential to sit down and look at someone and talk to them and say, I interpret this this way. How do you interpret it? Let's figure this out. Figure out how I can stay within the boundaries, but not, you know, have to go through this huge hurdle. And honestly, they were very accommodating, very helpful. It took longer than I anybody would want it to, but it was done and done right? And I know that whenever I sell my product, one I'm selling a good product, and so I'm not gonna face the wrath of a dissatisfied customer. But more importantly, I'm not going to have a gotcha down the road where some inspector comes and says, Hey, what are you doing? You're doing this wrong. I can confidently say, No, I'm doing it exactly right.

Deborah Niemann  29:18  
And then once you get the information for the label, then you have to put that on a package. And I love one of the things that Carly shared in our goats 365, private group online was that you guys could not sell the chicken heads for half the price you sell them now, when you were trying to just sell them in a Ziploc bag, as opposed to a professional package,

Shawn Phillips  29:44  
Right. A Ziploc bag with a chicken we should have had a chicken head as a visual display. Yeah, it's fine, but a bag full of chicken heads, you can imagine, doesn't look great, but a simple little package like that looks wonderful, and just kind of has our farm and the ingredients that we use and we left the back clear so that if we put chicken heads in here or freeze dried goat yogurt snacks, we can change the wording of it and put all the things that the health department wants per snack on a little brother's sticker label on the back, and that way the the front is always pretty and easy. The sticker in the back show shows exactly what's in there, it kind of cuts down on production costs, because these bags aren't cheap. And if you want to have to make one specific bag for each specific variety of treat, it can obviously get pretty costly.

Carly Brown  30:37  
Yeah. What we learned because we consider our like the chicken heads, our raw goat milk, the yogurt treats like these things we do consider a premium product, right? Like these are not mass produced in big ag agricultural operations where the animals are treated carelessly. You know, this is the chicken heads. We get them from our friend's farm up the road, and he is moving those chickens every day so they get the fresh pasture. They're eating non-GMO food. These birds have one really bad day, and every other day of their life, they are rocking it out there as chickens. And the same goes for my goats. You know, I'm pretty proud of the way that I've caring for my goats, of course. So it's a premium product. And what we just found was people didn't want to look at a chicken head. 

Carly Brown  31:46  
They want to feed their pets the premium product, but it just wasn't attractive. A freeze-dried chicken head is ugly. It's not something that people like to look at. So Shawn did spend hours designing this bag. And the thing is, if anybody is looking at the examples that will be shown in the show notes or something like that, don't follow our example and get 1000 bags made before you start running through your local health or agriculture department, depending on who manages that, because the requirements are going to be different from state to state and sometimes even from locality to locality. So if you're going down the packaging journey, don't get anything made until you run it by your local Extension agent or whoever is in charge of that in your state.

Shawn Phillips  32:09  
Yeah, and, and it will be blossomed, because, I mean all of your listeners, I'm sure they have their farm, but they also have friends that have farms, that farm different things. And part of the driving factor for the chicken heads and for the goat yogurt and all that were all these unsellable pieces of these animals that you know are serving us. They did a lot of good stuff for us, and we eat them, and that's great, but we don't want to waste anything. It's not nice. And so my farmer friends do cows and pigs and chickens, and they have a lot of organ meat, specifically, that isn't always consumed and sometimes is wasted. And so by going the dog treat route, I give us a way to physically benefit from their product, but also they get an opportunity to not waste any part of their animal, which is a good thing. It's important to us. I mean, not everyone. It's important, but it's important to us.

Carly Brown  33:04  
It's true, Shawn is the Kill Guy on the chicken harvest day. So we are very aware, you know, when you eat meat, and we all love it, something did have to die for that. And we do like knowing that we're making sure, we're helping to make sure that it doesn't go to waste.

Deborah Niemann  33:20  
Yeah, that totally makes sense. So with the packaging, I know. I think one of the things that people might not realize is because they're probably wondering like, Well, why don't you have the bag printed that says chicken heads and another bag printed that says yogurt bites and stuff like that? Why did you have just a generic front on your bag?

Shawn Phillips  33:39  
It's a quantity discount. I mean, it's it's all about economic I can buy 1000 for $2 a bag, or I can buy 10,000 for $1 a bag. And you know, you buy a whole bunch, and then you can just reuse them and or use them for different purposes, not reuse. We don't reuse our bags.

Carly Brown  33:59  
I have that if we got into a bulk situation, but people don't want to just come get chicken heads out of a bucket, so we're not reusing bags. 

Deborah Niemann  34:10  
So what are your plans for next year? 

Carly Brown  34:13  
Fewer landscaping herds. Right now? Well, okay, so I've got my herd here at the house, right? I've got seven goats at the house. I have my buck, his wether friend, and I've got five does. I have got three landscaping herds. So I have got my very small herd at the park doing little teeny corners of it on that embankment. I have got another group of eight or so out in King George, and then I've got another group at a residence on Lafayette Boulevard. And I know nobody knows where that is, but trust me, it's crazy that Shawn and I have done this to ourselves because we have to take care of these goats at home, and then we have to take care of three landscaping herds, and then we have to go to our regular jobs. 

Carly Brown  34:54  
I'm an SEO customer service person, and Shawn manages the farmers market, and you wouldn't believe how that's a full time job and spots over any county. But we have regular jobs too. Next year, I'm not doing that. I'm going to have one or two large landscaping herds. We're going to charge a little bit more, but it's going to be the same amount per job, but we're going to turn them over quicker, as opposed to spreading ourselves so thin. The goats at the park, I cannot throw a ton of goats there, because we're right next to the river, and I'm very sensitive to adding a bunch of nitrogen sourced from manure, right? 

Carly Brown  35:32  
So I'll never be able to put a large herd next to the river, but the residential jobs, even in suburbia, I'm going to have the larger herd, and I'm going to turn them over quicker. I'm also going to keep expanding the pet food stuff. So it's not just chicken heads. If you have regenerative farmers, small farmers in your community, and you go talk to them, you will find that things like pork liver don't really sell that great. Beef pancreas, nobody's ever going to ask for it, but those are things that people will buy for their dogs. 

Carly Brown  35:59  
So if you've got a freeze dryer and you can get yourself a pet feed license, go talk to a local farmer, because they probably would be happy to make a deal with you on the costs of those organs. And I'm going to expand that, and I would recommend anybody at least give it a look, because it's a cool thing to do. It's a cool way to take things that might ordinarily be trash, and turn them into not trash, you know, make, make a little bit of money. Make a little bit of goat money. I like to call the pet food money, my milk money. And every time I sell a jar of milk, I go look at Ethel, who's my Oberhasli. She's so sweet. And I say, Ethel, we've got more green money. Look, you know. And it's fun. 

Deborah Niemann  37:52  
Yeah, that is awesome. I love it. What's the biggest lesson that you've learned so far when it comes to putting your goats to work? 

Carly Brown  39:17  
The biggest thing I've learned putting my goats to work is that it probably not going to make me rich, right? Like Shawn and I sometimes when we come home after moving two sets of goat fences, and it's 100 degrees, and I'm a woman of a certain age, so hot flashes are a real thing for me right now. We'd like to look at each other and we say, well, you know, the first million is the hardest. And then we laugh, because we're, we're probably not actually going to ever make a million dollars off of this, but it is. It's legitimately the most rewarding. It's the most rewarding thing that I'm doing right now. It's kind of like my second act. You know, I have had really good experiences as a result of the goat landscaping thing. 

Carly Brown  39:31  
Every day, Shawn and I go care for the goats at the park. I have had little girls come up and somebody will say, Oh, look, and she's a goat farmer. And I really do think that it's important that young ladies see somebody in agriculture that doesn't look like Old McDonald and I do not that was kind of a poignant experience for me when I started realizing that I have had somebody else come up to Shawn and I, when we took our goats to a farm in the park event that the city put on, we took some of our babies there. I got to explain to so many kids why the goats were playing in poison ivy. And I got to explain to them about how we weren't going to have to throw a bunch of chemicals on that poison ivy to kill it, and they would be able to come play in this area next week, because the goats have killed it all. So I get to combine a lot of times my love of ecology. I get to talk to so many people about native plants. 

Carly Brown  39:38  
On the fourth of July, we went to the goats in the park because they were going to be a little closer to the fireworks. So many people stopped, and they asked us what they were doing there. And I got to talk about the native plants. And I got to talk about feeding the baby the caterpillars and feeding the baby birds. I love the education piece of it. I love it that there are so many people in this town that are also interested in cleaning up their poison ivy without using a bunch of chemicals. It kind of gives me a little bit of hope. You know, the Rappahannock River is so important to it's important to the economy here, as well as the environment. People come here to go kayaking, and they spend their tax dollars downtown. You know, we have to take care of it. 

Carly Brown  39:42  
So it makes me happy to think that I'm I'm somehow having an effect, because there's less chemicals running into the water, right? And I know that sounds nerdy as heck, but it's just who I am. I really do like that part of it. I have also probably talked a few people out of getting goats that didn't really need to get goats. And I told one woman that her goat had a fishtail because he probably needed a copper bolus, but she should check with the vet just to be safe, because I hadn't actually laid eyes on him. So I felt like I helped somebody too. I've turned a lot of people onto your podcast, and goats in general, they're just so rewarding. They're just so rewarding. And I'm so glad that my husband brought those two goats home. When he first said, we're gonna get a couple goats, I said, Oh, that's a great idea, but I just didn't think it would happen. And then he did, and it was awesome. Like, I'm obsessed with my goats. As you can tell I'm obsessed with them.

Deborah Niemann  39:46  
Thank you so much for joining us today. Carly, it has been so much fun talking about everything that you're doing, and I love the fact that you're in goats 365 because I know I'm going to get to hear all of the fantastic updates as they happen.

Carly Brown  39:59  
Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. We're still very new in this journey. Please, Deborah, ask me to come back in a year from now so everybody can see how I've grown and how much smarter I am and how much more well spoken I'll be about the subject. I am still work in progress, and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about it.

Deborah Niemann  40:18  
Yeah definitely. 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 or the love of goats.com and you can follow us on www.facebook.com/LoveGoatsPodcast/.  See you again next time. Bye for now you.