GETTING HER GOATS JAN KAISER, BOONE COUNTY
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ou hear them before you see them. Then a door swings open and a jumble of knee-high, squirming, bleating beasts do their best to clamber up gates to get to her: the woman with the milk. Jan Kaiser has been a goat farmer for less than two years, but she has taken to it like mother to babe. Jan points to a white board on the wall of the old barn. It documents all the births, a whirlwind of 60 babies born in the spring; 27 of them in just 30 days. Each baby is listed by name along with lineage, birth weight and feeding habits. “It’s a lot more work than we bargained for,” she says. Jan and her sister Sharon Hoskinson own a farm in Boone County. The land has been in their family since 1864, one of the rare farmsteads that has been passed down through generations of women. Jan’s great-grandfather died in the Civil War, leaving behind a wife with three children she couldn’t raise alone. Two of the children were sent to an orphanage, not uncommon in those days. The youngest, Florilla, was given to neighbors along with the land her mother had inherited. When Florilla was 16, she was married to a relative of her adoptive parents, and the land, 100 acres, was given to the couple as a wedding gift. Florilla and her man were fertile as the land, and one of the nine born to the union was Jan Kaiser’s maternal grandmother, Iva. Jan’s parents, Vern and Melva, eventually took over the farm, and it has now gone to Jan and her sister, as there were no brothers. Jan and Sharon cash rent their property, and Jan and her husband LIVING DETAILS | 17