Kristin Plante

Certified Veterinary Technician/Organic Farmer/Homeschooling Mother/Author

We began farming on my husband's family's farm land in 2005, shortly after our daughter was born. I didn't agree with the way livestock was commercially raised and processed and I had adopted a vegetarian diet in my teens but that had to change when I suffered a post-partum hemorrhage which nearly killed me. Iron supplements weren't fixing the problem so we decided to raise animals for meat in a way that we knew and trusted. I left my career as a certified veterinary technician shortly after that when our daughter was injured by her childhood vaccines. I took over an established pet-sitting business which I grew to include pet-grooming and this allowed me to work from home while caring for our daughter. Eventually she became school-aged and I became a homeschooling parent-teacher and as the years went on there was little time for much beyond the farming and homeschooling so I sold my business. My husband had left his job in lumber sales and purchased a property maintenance business. As that grew, the farming morphed into smaller scale livestock that I could manage independently. We sold off the beef herd and the breeding stock of pigs, and in their place we got Alpine goats. Our daughter and I would make goat milk fudge to sell at the local farmers' markets and craft fairs. I also raised several hundred Cornish meat chickens and Broad Breasted turkeys on pasture. We had a decent flock of Muscovy ducks. We had a very lucrative business, but not a very sustainable one. My motto has always been, "Know your farmer. Know your food." I wanted to get organic, pasture raised meat into people's hands at an affordable price and hoped that business would allow us to put meat into our own freezer at cost. I wanted to build relationships within our community. I believe we accomplished all of that, but we didn't account for things that would need to be replaced over time, like mobile poultry tractors and other infrastructure. I didn't price our products with that in mind. It was hard enough getting someone who wanted organic chicken to pay our price when Costco (as an example) is offering organic chicken at such a lower rate. I would spend hours explaining to customers that our meat tastes differently and better because the poultry is raised on pasture and moved to fresh grass twice daily, that the animals are slaughtered humanely on-farm, the luxury of knowing their farmer, that we couldn't buy grain in bulk to save money like commercial producers. Recently I decided to be finished with raising meat for other people. There were several factors that led to this decision including the polarization that seemed to magnify during covid, & several health challenges within our family related to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Lyme Disease. I down-sized gradually. I had been farming for almost two decades and letting go of what didn't serve me well felt like failure at first. I was, after all, choosing not to farm during a time when it is more crucial than even to know our farmers and know our food. Our daughter Mallory is grown, but our son Sullivan is in first grade and I am still homeschooling. That, combined with the administrative work for my husband's business, and raising enough food for ourselves is a more than full-time job. I am learning to accept that I am enough even if I am not farming in the truest sense of the word. I published my first e-book earlier this year, A Guide to Bringing Dairy Goats to the Homestead, so I guess I am an author now. I plan to release two more e-books soon and my vision is to utilize these publications as a modality to still connect with community in a way that encourages them to grow their own food and provides the resources for them to do that successfully.