Labor Day of the hoof
The Ozarks Homesteading Expo returns Labor Day weekend with more than forty sessions and a vendor midway that looks like a hardware store married a farmers market and they invited every cousin who owns a Dutch oven.
Official topics include hogs, chickens, cheesemaking, canning, bread, solar, gardening, foraging, medicinal and culinary herbs. Unofficial topics, according to barn gossip collected by Scoop, include:
- Whether your Nigerian Dwarfs are “enough goat” or you need a Saanen for the winter milk check
- How many people in one county can sell goat-milk soap before the hills smell like lavender permanently (see also: Whiskey Throttle Farm, Marshfield, and The Bath Parlor on the square)
- The correct way to explain Mini Nubians to a relative who only knows Nubians from a state-fair poster
- Whether goat yoga (yes, Area 95 Farms is out there offering goat yoga and forest hikes and a Bigfoot Rescue punchline) is a legitimate wellness practice or a petting zoo with better marketing
Professor Gruff’s recommended itinerary, should any reader insist on leaving the farm:
- Cheesemaking before noon. Your hands should smell like culture by lunch. If they do not, you went to the wrong tent.
- Livestock talk after the heat breaks. Listen for the person who says “we hand-milk” without making it a personality.
- Foraging walk if your knees allow. Do not eat anything Button points at.
- Vendor row last. You will buy soap. You will tell yourself it is research. This is how Marshfield wins.
DeLapp Mountain Ranch of Hartville — Colorado Rockies transplants now raising ADGA Nigerian Dwarfs and plotting lavender — is the sort of operation the Expo was built to encourage: small herd, value-added products, new to the hills and already talking like they mean to stay.
Ticket math from the organizers: about fifty dollars for the two days if you skip the VIP extras. A single off-site butchering class can cost that much alone. The Expo is, in other words, a bargain if you actually go to the sessions and a very expensive way to buy soap if you do not.
The crew will be there in spirit. Professor Gruff will be there in a hat. If you see an elderly gentleman goat-shaped editor judging the distance between a solar talk and a cheese table, do not offer him kale. Offer him the schedule.
Labor Day in the Ozarks used to mean the last swim and the first hint of fescue. Now it also means: learn to make the cheese, then go home and milk the goat that makes it possible.
We approve.