A Better Way Farm & Goat Dairy

Ever wonder if you could leave it all behind and live a more natural, more connected life? Thats exactly what I did and have never looked back! I live on the side of a mountain, with 65 goats and 4 dogs. I make 100% of my living from my homestead and I do it 100% by myself without employees or other help (by choice). My purpose is to "Inspire, Encourage & Empower". Once upon a time (ha, yeah, I'm going to start my story like that), I worked for corporate America, making really decent money as a programmer. The last 5 years of my career was spent working from home, so people thought I was extra crazy for giving up such a good paying job where I could work from home. Programming is very sedentary work though, and I felt like it was slowly killing me. I actually didn't mind the programming itself. I enjoyed the mental challenge of it but I didn't enjoy sitting in front of a computer all day, inside. On my breaks, I would always go outside and it was always so hard to make myself go back in. It was when I started gardening, I think, that I really started having a harder and harder time forcing myself to come back in. When I was in the garden, any bit of stress I had just melted away. There, I was in my zen zone. I felt connected to nature, growing my own food. I yearned to live a more natural, more connected life and it was around this time I started dreaming about making a living from my homestead. It was just a dream at that point though. It was when my kids grew up and left the nest (I had been a young mom), that I finally felt free to really live how I want. I minimized and simplified and soon started realizing hey, I really don't need to make all this money anymore! I started wondering, what is the minimum amount of money that I could live on. I started thinking about every possible way I could think of to reduce my cost of living. I knew that the smaller the amount I needed to live on, the more freedom I would have to do what I wanted to do with my life. I made it a self-challenge to see how much I could reduce my cost of living. I kept a spreadsheet, for a year, recording every penny I spent. Every. Single. Penny. Sure, there was money spent on things that weren't absolute necessities, but those things went into a separate column so I could easily keep track of what was bare essentials and what wasn't. After a year, I had my answer. I had the figure I knew I had to make per year to pay my bills and live. During that year I had been expanding my gardening and dreaming of being a market gardener, but quickly realized that would be impossible to do on a large enough scale to make a living without employees which I definitely did not want. It was also that year that I bought three adorable baby goats, just to have. I thought maybe they'd help keep the grass mowed (they didn't, ha). Throughout that year I fell absolutely in love with the goats and had added a few more, including a pregnant momma goat. At that time I was getting raw cow's milk through a herd share from a local farmer. Their prices kept going up and up. Every several months, they'd announce a price increase and after the pregnant momma goat I bought had her babies, they raised the price of my milk again, so I became determined to learn how to milk my goat. It wasn't easy at first! ha. I was pretty bad at it! But I persevered and made myself learn. Once I was finally getting a good supply of milk for myself, it kind of clicked... hey, I could do herd shares to sell milk... I'd just need MORE GOATS!!! Which put a huge smile on my face! It was definitely an "ah, ha" moment. I started doing the math and it started really looking like a life with goats, which I loved doing more than anything, was feasible. During that year, I lived minimally and put my salary away in savings which actually ended up giving