Margaret Hathaway’s new book, The Year of the Goat, tells the story of the 40,000 miles she and her partner (now husband), Karl Schatz, traveled in search of the perfect goat cheese - and a new way of life.

Before embarking on their year-long journey, Hathaway was a freelance writer who managed Magnolia Bakery in New York City, and Schatz worked as a photo editor for Time Magazine’s website. Together, they lived in Brooklyn, shopped at the Greenmarkets, and generally enjoyed city life - but they craved something more than the five boroughs could offer. So, they set off on a year-long journey to discover if farming - and particularly working with goats - held the secrets of the next chapter of their lives.

Along the way, Hathaway and Schatz met what they call, a “vivid cast of characters,” including a myriad of goat cheese and meat enthusiasts, a Texas-born Muslim living in Maine and helping the local Somali community in Lewiston acquire fitting goats for their religious festivals, and a Messianic Jew who keeps Shabbat as well as a herd of goats.

I spoke with Margaret and Karl last week about goats (naturally), their adventures in homesteading, the connection between farming and Jewish tradition, and their upcoming event in NYC, the Goatstravaganza (Nov. 8).

Interview continues below the jump…

Leah: The Year of the Goat, in a sense, ends at the beginning - your year of travel and exploration is over, but your new life as farmers in Maine awaits you. I’d love for you to catch me up on what you’ve been up to since you moved to Maine.

Karl: I don’t think I’d call us farmers, because what we’re doing is closer to homesteading. We’re trying to grow as much food for ourselves as possible and start by feeding our family. We’ve had some successes and some failures in the last two years since we’ve been on the farm, but overall it’s been incredibly rewarding. There’s no better feeling than eating an entire meal that you grew yourself with eggs that came from your chickens, or a chicken you raised and slaughtered.

Margaret: Yeah, I think it really is about feeling connected to where our food comes from. When we make a meal that has apples from our orchard and squash from the backyard, it’s pretty magical.

Leah: Where do the goats fit into your new lifestyle?

Margaret: We tried to breed them last year and it didn’t take, so we’re trying to breed them again this year. [Karl and I are] expecting our second baby – so we’re really embarrassingly fertile, but the goats are not. We trying to get the goats pregnant for the spring, but until we master that, we won’t get any milk, so we can’t start on the cheese.

Leah: How many goats do you currently have?

Margaret: We have four goats, two boys that we are training to pack, and two girls. One of the girls is all Alpine. The other we fell in love with the day she was born but didn’t realize she’s half Boer goat, which means she’s very stocky. We don’t know if she’ll give much milk at all.

Karl: We came at this whole [project] from the goats. It really stated as a fantasy, and we had no idea what it would entail or what kind of lifestyle it would lead us to. As we traveled and met different people, different pieces of the puzzle fell into place. With every new encounter we made, we learned some new thing that we are now applying to our lives.

Margaret: It’s funny that the whole localvore movement is so hot right now, because that’s what we’ve ended up doing by default. For us, eating very locally and seasonally seems to be the goal in day-to-day life. But ultimately, in 10-15 years, we’d love to be doing cheese on a commercial scale. Many of the people we met along the way started making cheese later in life, or as a retirement project, so it doesn’t feel like if we don’t master it in our thirties we’ll never get there.

Leah: In The Year of the Goat, Margaret writes about the Back to the Land movement of the 1960s and 70s – do you consider yourself to be following that model, or doing something different?

Margaret: I think what we’re doing is closer to the turn of the century model than the 1970s movement, because we’re not trying to “tune in and drop out.” This is just how people lived at the turn of the century.

Karl: Right, a lot of the 1970s Back to the Land movement was about pulling out of society. For us, it’s about being a part of society with this lifestyle and trying to educate other people. I think unfortunately, the organics movement and the Slow Food movement have been pegged with a “high cuisine / not affordable for the masses” stigma. But the fact is, anyone can really grow their own lettuce or carrots, or herbs - even in the city in a window box. We still grow stuff in window boxes even though we have 10 acres.

Margaret: We grow these little Italian radishes that are the shape of carrots. They grow perfectly in window boxes.

Leah: It seems like a lot of the people you met on your journey were older than you two. Have you come across any other young people who are doing a similar thing?

Margaret: One of the reasons we decided to settle here in Maine is that there’s such a young and welcoming agricultural community. There are so many people who have made the life choice to farm, and there are a lot of people, including the midwife that delivered our daughter, who came from urban backgrounds and decided they wanted to grow their own food.

Karl: Everyone always talks about how farmers are all getting old and dying. But a statistic just came out this year that, for the first time in 30-40 years, the average age of the farmer has gone down in the state of Maine.

When you go to the farmers’ market in Portland, the majority of people selling there are in their 20s and 30s. And the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners association has this amazing apprenticeship and journeymen program where you can apprentice yourself on an organic farm. Last year’s journeyman has now started his own CSA.

Leah: This sounds like the Adamah program at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. I don’t know the statistic, but a good handful of Adamah fellows go on to be farmers.

Karl: That’s another thing that’s different today. Back in the 1970s, there wasn’t an infrastructure for Back to the Landers – they learned it all on their own. It’s really encouraging that today there is this support system for young people who decide. ‘hey, we want to grow our own food, or grow for other people, or live closer to the land.’

Margaret: Even if they’re not making the choice for their entire lives, there’s an opportunity to experiment and try it out for a couple of years. Maybe they decide to go back to law school, or maybe they decide to be farmers.

Leah: And not only is there an infrastructure for them to test the lifestyle out - if they do decide to have a go at farming, there are markets and people who want to buy their food.

Margaret: That’s another thing that started because of the Back to the Land movement. The majority of farmers markets in the United States are really only about 30 years old – that was when so many started up.

Leah: Karl, when you first contacted Hazon, you mentioned an interest in bringing your passion for goat farming together with Jewish tradition. What do those connections look like for you?

Karl: Judaism has such amazing traditions around food, and once you have a closer relationship to growing your food, the change of the seasons and the harvest, they mean something completely different. You’re not just going to the store to buy gourds to hang in your sukkah – you’re using things you pulled from the garden. And the roof of your sukkah is the corn stalks…

Margaret: …that you use because you just finished off your corn.

Karl: Right, and at Passover, you’re thinking about renewal right when you’re planning your garden and you have seedlings growing in the living room. All of a sudden there’s just this completely new dimension to the way you think and feel about some of these holidays and traditions.

Margaret: The rhythms of Jewish life also make so much more sense when you look at them in relation to the rhythms of agricultural life. Not just the calendar and holidays, but the need for a day of rest because you’re so exhausted from taking care of your animals.

Karl: We’re trying to figure out a way to make a closer connection between our food – I don’t know if I’d call it activism, but activity – and our Jewish identity. So it was a revelation to discover Hazon and what you’re doing. Also, our rabbi just leant me the book Down to Earth Judaism by Arthur Waskow. It’s amazing to me that this stuff has been out there. Sometimes it takes a fortuitous series of events to put these things in front of your eyes.

Leah: Well, we’re thrilled that you’re coming to Hazon’s Food Conference this December and look forward to furthering those connections. Just one more question, on a slightly different note. Is there anything that you miss about your life in New York City?

Margaret: When we’re in New York, I always say to Karl, ‘I wish we had two more days here.’ And he says, ‘I wish we left two days ago.’ There are a lot of things I miss, especially the multiplicity of experiences and backgrounds you encounter walking down the street in New York. I miss the diversity of the city – the people and food and clothing and music, and the snippets of things you hear walking down the street. There’s always going to be part of me that loves New York and wants to get there…at least four times a year.

Karl: These days I’m a bit averse to cities in general, but that said, I’ll agree with Margaret. I certainly have no regrets about the time I spent in New York. I think if anything it prepared me in different ways for this current lifestyle. We both worked in the media, and having that kind of experience is going to make us better farmers. One of the biggest challenges small farmers face these days is the many hats that you have to wear. You have to be a farmer and a marketer and a sales person and a business man. Coming to farming with a little bit of savviness that we learned interacting with all kinds of people in New York, is going to serve us well as we make this next step.

We also still have a lot of friends in New York, and we’re really excited about the Goatstravaganza [which includes a reading of The Year of the Goat, book signing, wine, goat cheese samples, and a special goat meat tasting]. It’s great to have our friends come visit us, but it’s also great to bring a little bit of our new lives back to the city.

For full details about the Goatstravaganza and The Year of The Goat, Thursday, November 8, 2007, click here.

To purchase The Year of the Goat click here.

All photos by Karl Schatz.