Get Your Goat
By Greeley Tribune, Colo.
Jan. 28–Jennifer Zindel is out to save the world one homeopathic, hormone-free, bio-secure goat at a time.
“We’re very interested in making a positive difference on the human condition and in alleviating human suffering,” Zindel said. “What we’re doing is so simple but so profoundly important.”
But first the tractor needs to be fixed. The past few weeks have been tough for Destiny Dairy in Eaton, which Zindel owns with her husband, Scott Miller. The cold and snow mean that newborn goats will freeze to death if they are not brought into the barn within a few minutes of being born. The hay supply was running low, too, before some was finally delivered from Montana. And then the wheel on the 25-year-old tractor started falling off.
“Ace Hardware had the part we needed, believe it or not. I guess they know we all have ancient tractors,” Zindel said as she watched Miller successfully reattach the wheel. She sighed in approval: “Don’t you love seeing a guy try to fix something and actually fix it?”
Destiny Dairy, which sits on 70 acres on the corner of Weld County roads 74 and 55, gained USDA organic certification in mid-January and produces milk, yogurt, cheese and ice cream. Its organic products, all of which come from the 250 or so adult goats on the farm, are sold at Whole Foods Market, Wild Oats and Vitamin Cottage stores in the Rocky Mountain region, and they seem to be quite popular with consumers.
“It’s definitely one of our most popular goat milks in the store. A lot of people seem to prefer Destiny Dairy products because of the taste,” said Kim Mueller, marketing director at Whole Foods Market in Fort Collins. “I know that, as both a retailer and a consumer, I appreciate the fact that (Zindel) takes good care of her goats. It’s an all-natural product.”
Zindel and Miller conceived the idea for the dairy over a plate of goat milk pumpkin flan while on a date in Denver. They started talking about how good the flan was, and Scott, an executive chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., said he thought he could probably make it.
Zindel replied that, as a veterinarian specializing in small ruminants, she could probably get him the goat milk.
“It’s destiny,” Miller said. And so the dairy got a name.
“I don’t know how much we chose this as much as it chose us,” Zindel said of the dairy. “We went from Highlands Ranch to rural agriculture in a cold-turkey manner. That’s the way you have to do it, or you get too scared.”
When the couple learned that their daughter, Michayla, was sensitive to cow’s milk, it strengthened their resolve to provide a healthy alternative.
According to Zindel, there are two issues to consider when making decisions about milk consumption. The first thing to consider is the source of the milk. Goat’s milk is more highly digestible than cow’s milk and is more nutrient-dense, said Zindel, so you get “more bang for your buck.”
According to the American Dairy Goat Association, goat’s milk contains equal amounts of protein and calories as cow’s milk, slightly more fat, less cholesterol, and more vitamin A, vitamin B1, Riboflavin and phosphorus. It also has more easily-digestible fat and protein content than cow’s milk.
Destiny Dairy is the only grade-A certified goat milk processing plant in Colorado and is inspected monthly — that means the dairy is guaranteed to be free of any pathogens, Zindel said.
Also, since Destiny Dairy uses a low-temperature, long-time pasteurization process, its milk is healthier than ultrapasturized and homogenized cow’s milk and other commercial goat’s milk that is sold at grocery stores.
“Raw is the best way to eat anything,” Zindel said.
Destiny Dairy’s original business plan was to produce cheese, but Zindel said she had customers “begging for fluid milk” for infants and children sensitive to cow’s milk who worried about the estrogen levels in soy milk.
Other customers, many of whom have Crohn’s Disease or other digestive disorders, wanted pro-biotic products, such as yogurt.
Ice cream was Zindel’s idea, “Our people need ice cream,” she said matter-of-factly. This year, Whole Foods also has requested that the dairy produce 2 percent and chocolate milk.
Zindel sees the future of agriculture in small, niche farming as opposed to their larger, mass-producing counterparts. She sees her vision of a more natural breed of food-production as essential to this future.
“From the beginning, we built an organic-capable herd by using preventative medicine and bio-security measures. Because of that, we have a sturdy herd, with no real signs of disease issues.”
Destiny Dairy’s goats are treated with essential oils and herbal remedies when they are sick. Zindel has been training in homeopathic medicine for the past two years and cycled into fertility using a light-cycling system instead of hormones, as part of a more natural dairy operation.
“As a vet, it’s so hard to not be able to reach for my bottle of pills, but we rely on drugs way too heavily in our society, which leads to resistance.”
Zindel also advocates goat milk products for overall health reasons.
“Our culture has gotten so far away from our food sources, they haven’t been exposed to the natural organisms in food for 50 years. We have a naive population,” she said. “Being exposed to these organisms would be like getting influenza every year, you build up a tolerance.”
Zindel’s goals for the future are as lofty as her ideals of natural, local eating: “Pie in the sky idea would be cookie-cutter-ing our business plan for other regions. Because these products have to be local and fresh, the plan has to be regional, not national.”
In general, Zindel also hopes to provide education and research concerning the goat dairy industry. “You can count the number of organic goat dairies in the U.S. on one hand. It’s such a new industry, we’ve really had to invent, innovate and create on our feet.”
Indeed, goat dairying is such a new business that each farm is “pretty much unique,” said Steve LeValley, a faculty member in Colorado State University’s Department of Animal Science. “Cow dairies and goat dairies, you’re really comparing apples and oranges.”
Although LeValley said he knows of people who drink goat’s milk for immune system reasons or who feed it to their infants, he said that “if it really is so much better for you, I suspect that a lot more people would be drinking it.”
Also in the works are plans connected to the dairy’s philanthropic arm, the Destiny Foundation. Goals of the foundation include developing goat dairy infrastructure in the developing world, marketing their “goat dairy in a box” product that can be shipped overseas, and developing dairies for AIDS orphanages in Africa so that the children can feed themselves and have an industry to be involved in.
“Goats thrive in adverse conditions better than cattle. Our (biological) systems evolved with goats because they’ve been domesticated for so long. … I’d pick a goat over a sheep or a cow for production any day.”
Of all the entrepreneurial characteristics that Zindel embodies, perhaps the most striking is her passion for her work.
“We are truly a service-oriented business. We either do this right or we just do it to collect a paycheck, you do what you can live with. Milk sensitivity is such an enormous issue, and we had the skills, talents and abilities to solve the problem for a lot of people. … There’s gotta be something greater than the almighty dollar. You gotta love what you’re doing.”
On a more global level, Zindel said, “I’m concerned for our culture, I think we’re moving in a self-serving direction. Encroachment, urban sprawl, it’s all causing our farmers to abandon their farms. I worry that the more food we import, the more likely it is that the next war will be about food, not oil.”
And so Zindel returns to her goats, doing her own little part in the struggle to save us from ourselves.
ENTREPRENEUR ADVICE
NAME: Jennifer Zindel
AGE: 49
FAMILY: Husband Scott Miller, 37; Children Kaitlin, 14, Nick, 11, Michayla, 9, and Logan, 6.
RESIDENCE: 27367 Weld County Road 74, Eaton, CO 80615
How did you get started?
We found out that Michayla had a sensitivity to cow milk and realized that this niche of goat’s milk was not filled, nobody was making it. Then we realized that’s because doing this is so much work, but by then it was too late… The level of effort is akin to climbing K2. We went from Highlands Ranch to rural agriculture in a cold turkey manner. That’s the way you have to do it, or you get too scared.
Advice for the Entrepreneur?
Perfection and complete self-sufficiency just are not possible; you have to outsource some things. But being as vertically integrated as possible will help guard against market fluctuations.
Trust is the biggest issue in business. I would like to live in a space of trust, but I’ve learned in business not to trust verbal contracts. I still trust people, but you need to have a backup. You’ve got to protect yourself.
Zindel quotes advice from Bill Gates:
–Be at the right place at the right time.
«You have to have a vision.
–You have to have passion.
–You have to be able to act. …Sometimes you just have to be able to make a decision.
Zindel also recalled something that Donald Trump once said. “I don’t believe in Donald Trump, I think you can be that successful without being quite so stuck-up. But he said, ‘When you quit, the game’s over.’ You just can’t quit.”
Best business decision:
Absolutely the best decision was going organic. Last year, we were on the road two to three days a week making personal deliveries to 40 or 50 stores. Now we have the logistics for distribution. By going organic, we’ve really raised the bar on goats to a level that it will take competitors at least two years to catch up.
Worst business decision:
We’ve made some hellacious ones. I hate to admit this, but I would say pulling our bulk milk from Haystack (Mountain Goat Dairy, a goat dairy near Boulder). We pulled our bulk milk to market by ourselves before we went organic and lost a lot of profit because of it.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Greeley Tribune, Colo.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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