Meet Andrea Holladay, one of the three founding Trustees of NJ Fibershed. Along with running her farm and fiber business, Dancing Waters Farm, Andrea is our web administrator, membership coordinator, and is currently gathering feedback to form working groups. Andrea has been raising animals in Hampton, NJ, since 1999, and I asked her to share a little of her farming journey.

What animals have you raised?

Ducks (Cayuga, Runners), chickens (Black Araucanas, Chantecler, Delaware, Dominique, Easter Eggers, Favorelle, True Blue Whiting), sheep (Shetland, and crosses), Border Leicester, Blue Faced Leicester), Angora goats (White and Colored).

What are you raising now?

Angora goats (white and colored), chickens (Black Araucanas, Delaware, Dominique, Easter Eggers, True Blue Whiting).

Why do you raise animals?
I’ve always loved animals, preferring them to people! It just took me a long time to work out how to embrace that passion in a practical way. I wanted to be a large animal vet, but when I was applying for graduate school women weren’t allowed to be large animal vets! Bought a horse and boarded her when I was in high school but had to work all the time to pay her board and thus no time to spend with her. Not how I wanted things to be. After I finished school, I moved to NJ for my first professional job in the winter of 1986. I finally saved up enough money to buy a 10 acre property in NJ on Halloween 1997. I turned the property into my lifelong dream, Dancing Waters Farm.

What experience from your life–educational, or professional–have you been able to draw from to guide your life on the farm?
Making do – being creative in using what you can scrounge up to solve a problem (budget cuts every year!). Creative problem solving is always an asset.
Working in the biomedical sciences gave me a wealth of knowledge in the areas of toxicology, veterinary sciences, environmental health/ ecotoxicology and human health, as well as the best sources for researching issues in these areas.

What has been one of the biggest surprises about raising animals?
How similar people and animals are. People are supposedly more intelligent than other species, but my observation is that our behavior is driven by the exact same things. So much of our behavior is hard wired and a great deal of the rest is biology.

What do you wish you’d known before you started?
How hard it would be to get male animals to fit into the rest of farm life.

What are 3 things you’d like new farmers to know about raising animals?

• They require a significant investment of time and they’re your responsibility for their lifetime. Start slow and be careful not to get too many or you’ll stop enjoying them. The more animals you have the harder it is to notice there’s a problem and the more problems you’ll have. Most animals hide their problems so always pay attention to behavior for any (even small) differences from their status quo.
• You’ll have to decide how you’re going to deal with male animals. Intact males are generally disruptive of farm life. This is the dark side of farming…most go to slaughter, or live their lives cooped up in small confined spaces as it is very hard to find homes for them and more than one is generally a problem. Castration is an option if you’re not going to breed them, but it is either expensive or cheap but painful for the animal. Not everyone is equipped to deal with these issues.
• It’s a lot of work, a LOT of cleaning and fixing things, but it’s so rewarding! In our highly technology driven lives there aren’t many experiences where you get the same sense of satisfaction – it’s easy to see and treasure what you’ve done/created with your own hands.