The sun is still rising at Sage and Willow Farm when its owner, 51-year-old Roni Ryan, slugs a coffee and heads through the pasture gates behind her house to tend to animals.
The five-acre farmstead just outside of Poulsbo, Wash., hosts a small orchard, and pastures home to goats, sheep, chickens, and turkeys.
As Ryan nears the barns, sounds of those animals grow louder. She speaks to each by name.
“Didi! Didi, you wanna come in here?” Ryan calls. Didi, a goat, is taking her time. Ryan calls her again. “Didi, you have to get breakfast.”
Ryan talks to the dozens of other farm animals with the familiarity of an exasperated neighbor. There’s Chuancey, a male sheep born without eyes, who’s “a real jerk.”
“He can't see me, but boy, he can smash the s--- outta me,” Ryan quips.
Neither this, nor the fact that Chauncey is destined for “freezer camp,” as Ryan puts it, keeps her from leaning over and kissing the fluffy brown sheep on the face. There’s also Olive the barn cat, Baby Ruth the sheep, and goats Patsy, Brunhilda, and Orlina.
Making her morning rounds, Ryan fills buckets with grain and feeders with hay. She milks the goats. She scrubs feeder buckets.
The work seems to never end. When it’s not feeding, it’s cleaning. When it’s not cleaning, it’s fixing a gate or farm equipment. When it’s not fixing, it’s tending to a wounded animal, or gearing up for sheep shearing, or meat harvests, or farm visits.
It’s not an easy life.
Ryan first started farming over a decade ago, as an outdoorsy, mostly vegan woman in her 30s, after helping a friend with his small farm. Ryan is still outdoorsy, but she now eats meat — which she grows on her farm.
Ryan remembered she thought it was “rad” to watch handfuls of tiny seeds grow into full gardens. She was amazed by the difference in taste between what she grew and store-bought produce. The experience cultivated her passion for small, local agriculture.
“You're feeding your friends and neighbors,” she said. “We really need so many more people than what we have right now to feed our communities wholly and well.”
When Ryan started helping her friend with farming 15 years ago, she was learning everything from scratch. Her grandfather, Orlin Schanz, had been a North Dakota cattleman and commodity grain grower, she said, but she never got the chance to learn from him.
“He wouldn't let women work,” she said. “He regretted that much later in life, especially when I had my own farm.”
Ryan felt compelled to farm. For the past decade, it’s been all farming, all the time. Ryan jokes that seed catalogs are “farmer porn.”
“You nourish the land and the land nourishes you,” Ryan said. “Once you actually have that cycle happening, when you're growing all your own food… Like, when I used to grow vegetables, I felt so amazing.”
But in practice, Ryan said, it’s been too overwhelming to keep up with growing and selling vegetables as a one-woman show. Instead, she’s tried to keep the farm going by selling meat, dairy goats and dipping into agritourism: farm tours and something more unique – goat yoga and goat cuddle sessions.
Ryan started her goat yoga classes in 2019 as a way to socialize the animals. But for several years, it’s also been a major source of income. In fact, she said most of her income the past few years has centered on her goats, goat yoga, and those cuddle sessions.
“I'd say it's almost a hundred percent,” she said. “I do have farm tours, but not a whole lot.”
As the morning progresses in what’s turning into a clear, blue-sky day, Ryan finishes feeding her animals and circles back for her own breakfast. Then, she’s headed back out for the first yoga class of the day. She offers three seasonal goat yoga classes on Saturdays, along with private bookings throughout the week.
Over the course of the next hour, Ryan leads a group of people through a series of stretches and poses, though that instruction is frequently drowned out by peels of laughter as baby goats, or “kids,” climb on top of visitors. One starts nibbling on a pant leg.
“Yoga can be difficult,” said Kate Morris, an attendee. “But the goats are great.”
Another visitor, Loni Storrs, spends the majority of class holding, petting and cooing at a small army of the kids that bleat and climb over the class.
“I like animals more than people,” Storrs said. “And I like people a lot.”
Even with adorable baby goats, the fact remains that turning a profit for small farmers is hard. Last year, Ryan said she made less than half of what she expected, and she said the financial situation hasn’t gotten better.
Ryan isn’t the only one who struggles. According to a report by the United States Department of Agriculture, between half and 85% of small family farms in America are considered to have “high-risk” profit margins.
The government shutdown also didn’t help, Ryan said, when many people in her county work for the government. She’s considering selling her farm.
It’s an especially tight squeeze in an already-challenging market for farmers, generally. As NWPB reported in October, around 3,700 farms in Washington closed in the span of just five years.
When Ryan finishes her last yoga class of the day, around 3 p.m., she heads back to the house for water and a cigarette. She’ll have a few hours to herself before she starts the evening chores.
Ryan said for now, she’s working to close out this season of goat yoga. She’s not sure what next year will bring, or if she’ll still be offering classes. But she knows she wants this life to be more accessible for her, and for the other people who want to grow food for their community.
“The number one thing that I hear people say to me all the time is, ‘You know … you're living my dream,'" Ryan said. "And I tell them, 'It is a good dream. It is a very good dream.'”
