At 5:00 am on a Friday morning, most of the world is still asleep, but on 20 scrubby acres in pastoral Genesee County, a long hard day of work has already begun. The wash system for the milking lines
is roaring, and its noise has awakened the herd, who are ready for breakfast and the morning milking. Nubian dairy goats are famously loud and expressive. Luckily, there are no neighbors nearby who might complain. Trystan walks through the long, narrow, custom-built goat milking parlor, arms full of milking inflations. He slaps them into place, hooking the cups on a horizontal stainless steel bar, plugging the vacuum lines into ports underneath the waisthigh platform, and expertly inserting the milking lines into their own ports. “Alright, girls, we’re ready for you!” A pulley is yanked, a sliding door opens, and suddenly a cluster of eager ruminants bursts into the parlor and quickly sort themselves into order, 12 at a time.
Max fills a small plastic squeeze bottle with a green liquid (teat dip). “Hi Puzzle. Morning, Mayhem.” He turns, explaining: “It’s the same order, every day, twice a day. If not exactly, then very close.” The goats are creatures of habit, and in many ways, as the machine pops then starts to hum, and the first task of the day begins in earnest, so are the Sandvoss brothers.They knew what they were getting into. Though they grew in a suburb of New York City and attended prestigious colleges, in their twenties, they separately left promising careers and lit out for the territory. For them, this meant apprenticing at a small farm in Washington State, where they learned and honed the skills they are demonstrating right now, as the sun starts to come up over Western New York.
You have to be a morning person if you’re a farmer. You also have to be an evening person. And during kidding season, when the farm’s population doubles or triples (several of the goats gave birth to quads this season), you’d better count on being a middle-of-the-night person too. “We work hard. A lot of people work hard, not just farmers. But there’s a satisfying rhythm to this lifestyle. Of course, it’s the goats doing most of the work. But we turn what they make into delicious food, which is extremely rewarding,” Trystan says.
Why goats?
Max volunteers: “Our mom found some pictures of us from when we were little kids. We were at a summer camp that was on an old farm where we learned how to take careof animals feeding, mucking out stalls. I don’t think that’s what did it, but it’s interesting to see that the germ of it all, in a way.”
Trystan offers, “I like goats. They’re manageable, in terms of their size. They’re expressive and they have unique personalities.” Just as he says it, a cacophony of cries explodes from the barn. “Hungry babies,” he says,
then turns to Max. “You want to feed kids or clean?”
First Light Farm is on an L-shaped plot of land that was a pear orchard in the 1920s. Much of their corner of Genesee County was pears then, and most of it is dairy country now including their stepdad’s Lor-Rob Dairy, the next farm up the road from First Light.
It was he who brought them to Western NY. Their mom, Joyce, married him in 2007, and together they began a quiet but earnest campaign to bring them back from the West Coast.
It wasn’t difficult to do. The land here is perfect for dairying a relatively temperate climate with fertile soil, the wide expanses of gently rolling fields though there tend to be more cows than goats.