Paul Hopkins: As far as goats at the Fryeburg Fair go, we've been here since 1983. The first year that goats were here at the fairgrounds, we had just an exhibit, in half of this barn; since then we've had a sanctioned show and an exhibit. So this was our twentieth annual sanctioned show. As far as my own association with goats, we, my wife and I, were house parents at a home for boys in Limerick in the early seventies. On a farm situation, they had cattle and pigs and chickens and so forth and so on. I'd done a little bit of reading about goats, and I looked around to try to find some of them in the area. We visited a lady down in Scarborough who had a Grade A dairy for many years, her name was Lois Concannon, and we went to visit her and look at her situation. She sold milk at the health food store in the Maine mall, so she was one of the big names in the goat world in Southern Maine at that time. She didn't have any kids for sale, so she said, well you should go over and see the Allens in West Goram, so we went over there and they had just had a set of quadruplets, Nubian quadruplets. Nubian kids are all ears and legs, basically, on springs, (laughs) and we were hooked. We opened the barn door and they just kind of came tumbling out. We wound up buying two of the quadruplets and that was our start.


That was about 1975, I'd say. And we went back to them later for one milking doe, and then we just kind of had them at the farm and were milking the one and raising the other two to an age where they could be bred and so forth and so on. We found out that the national dairy goat show was at the Ohio State Fair. We'd never been to a goat show, and so we...went to the Ohio State Fair and watched a day of the judging of the national show and got even more hooked (laughs). We met some people from Virginia by the name of Sandy and Helen Muir, and they had a farm called Muir Hill, and they had some does who were in the aged doe class, that's everything over 5. And I think a five or six year old won the class, but they had like the next two or three does in line, at the national show, and those does were ten or twelve years old. That was what I was really interested in, because my theory, and I think it's borne out over time, is that if you have a goat that produces a respectable amount of milk over a long life span, that's a more economical animal than an animal that milks like a house o' fire for two or three years and then burns itself out. So longevity was one of the things that we looked for, and for longevity you need just really strong feet and legs, for one thing, because if the underpinnings don't hold up, then nothing else will. And then all the rest of the things that are on the hundred point score card. We wound up buying one doe from them, and that was the end of our goat buying, ever, while we were at it. And we bred from that and we used their bloodlines. There were about a half a dozen of their bucks available in New England at the time, and so we went to those, we took does to those bucks to be bred here and there. We traveled everywhere from Vermont to Connecticut to a couple that were here in Maine.

Not anymore, no, we did it for thirteen years, and then there was a point in time when we ended up selling the farm. We were in Waterborough at the time and moved over to Baldwin. When we sold the farm, we also sold the herd.

I work for the Spurwink School now. I work with adults with autism and other developmental challenges, and I've been with them for about eighteen years.

Well, it just means you take care of running a show. You hire a judge and take in the entries from the farms that enter, and also make sure that we have a good looking display and a barn full of healthy animals. Fortunately we also have a group of people that work really well together and it's a team effort, so it's my job to keep the team happy (laughter), so that's pretty much it. During the first three years that we've had goats on these fairgrounds, I had my herd here and we did milking demonstrations and kind of helped to manage the barn, and then after we sold the herd, I continued to come back every year to do the announcing at the goat show and also the announcing at the hog show, which I've done every year since '83, and that's one of the ways I've kept my hand in. I've been superintendent here since '98.


We had sixteen farms entered in the show this year. Last year maybe twenty-two, but we had too many goats last year, so we had to do some things to limit the size of the show this year.

Well, I think we had 289 in the show last year, and 202 in the show this year, which is still a very full day, but it's much more manageable.

The quality of the livestock has really improved enormously. Just, that's taken a quantum leap. There are not too many folks who make a living off of goat farming in Maine. We don't have, for instance, a strong cheese industry around which there's a strong network of co-ops or anything like what they do over in Vermont. So people have to fend for themselves. Fortunately Maine's good for that. There's a lot of really independent people who've got some pluck and entrepreneurship. Helen Ramsdell, who has the stalls of animals just on the other side of this wall here, makes soft cheeses and sells them all over the local area here. She's just in Denmark, so that goes to farmer's markets, farm stands, gourmet restaurants, and so forth and so on.


I know that she's licensed to sell the cheese, so there's some inspection involved. Because of the process, there's not the sort of heavy regulation that there would be for selling grade A milk, for instance. Then you're talking about a lot of concrete and stainless steel, and that starts to get expensive. So, we have a number of people making soaps to sell, Helen's daughter Vicki does that and there's some folks up on Verona Island who do that. And there are a few other folks here and there, some of them I just kind of stumble across now and then. So you have a number of little pockets. They don't all bump into each other because you have some people who really enjoy showing in fairs and so forth, and you've got some people who really don't want to leave their farm with their animals at all, and just do their thing there, which is just fine, too. I kind of enjoy the mix and mingle. It's fun to see some of the same people each year, and see how they're doing with their breeding program, and what else is going on in their lives.


I don't know really anything about that. I haven't run into them, but I think that any sorts of things like that where people can cooperate and share education, share promotion, are positive steps to take. A number of the folks here have raised goats for a good long time, and in turn have sold breeding stock to people getting their start, the Cassette family in Saco, Maine for example.[They were] some of the first people that we met. Wonderful folks, and they sell a little milk at the farm, but they don't produce milk products, they raise breeding stock. That's their thing. But, in turn, their breeding stock has provided the basis for a number of other farms to get their start. The way I look at it is that all those little bits and pieces fit together in some way, but not all of the bits and pieces know about each other (laughter). That's life, I guess.

There are more and more. For the last three years, we've had at least one pen of meat goats in the barn. And I specifically asked for that. One of my dairy goat exhibitors also raises Boers, and since she did, I asked if rather than leaving one of her other breeds here, she'd just bring a pen of Boers for the week so we'd have the variety in the barn. It's gaining some popularity, and there's more and more of an ethnic market. Certainly in Maine it's not developing in quite the same ways that it always has around major cities: Boston, New York, Washington. There's an enormous demand for goat meat in the Washington area; we've talked with people who have big farms down there and they've converted everything to meat because that's where the money is. Unfortunately at this point in Maine, much of the demand is among a group of people who don't have an awful lot of money to spend on it. And so the economies haven't come together in such a way that they make for the best, mutually advantaged fit yet. That will probably happen over time, but it's not there yet.

Well I'm really interested to hear how it goes. What I hear through the grapevine is that dairy goat people have mixed feelings about that because they don't see the money there yet to make it worthwhile and they already have some established markets for cull kids in the spring that are based around Greek Easter and so forth and so on. And that's something that has been in place for at least decades and maybe longer, a pretty standard set of buyers, some in state and some out of state, and some markets organized around that. Some of the best situations, I think, are places where you can set up individual arrangements with people who live in your area. We raised Nubians, but we sold meat kids to a family in Sanford at one time that ran a local restaurant. They always wanted a goat at Easter time and whenever they had a big group of family and friends; that was part of their culture. That was kind of my own individual niche market at the time and those sorts of things I think are the best things to rely on, the individual things if you can find them.


Well, I think I have to answer that in two different ways. I think that my favorite thing about goats, as far as raising them, is just the personality of goats. It's in a class by itself. They're very very bright, they're a little too bright for their own good at times. And they become family members, especially in a small dairy herd situation where you're handling them at least twice a day. That and the aspect of having a regular set of things to do, twice, there's a certain amount of therapy in that, if you're willing to look at it that way, if it's not all drudgery for you. Why would you do it if it was? So there's that aspect, and then the other aspect is just the people. There's some terrific goat people in the state of Maine, all over the state. They're almost uniformly a really intelligent, creative crowd, and funny. We have a very good time, even show days. Our judge the other days was here from Minnesota, Doug Thompson from Clearbrook, Minnesota, and he commented a couple of times during the day on just how friendly the exhibitors were with each other. They're in competition with each other, and you know how competition is, sometimes people can be really kind of uptight, but I've rarely found that to be the case around Maine folks who do the fair circuit, anyway. It's a pretty loose bunch, and a lot of good natured banter in the ring, and so forth and so on, and just some really great people.

Oh Lord. I have friends and people I know in all of the different commodity groups around the fairgrounds like this. But this is the group that I've spent more time with and so I don't even know if I want to get into the business of making comparisons about one group with another. (laughter) I think I'll just leave it that my own personal experience has been very very positive in that regard. And of course the other thing that the judge said was that the spirit of the exhibitors was really good, but also this context, this fair, is kind of in a class by itself. And he said, as far as the fair goes, whatever you've got going here, figure out what it is and keep it going, because he's all over the country judging, and he hasn't seen anything quite like this. Which is true. It's a neat mix here, you'll see more working steers and oxen here than you'll see maybe anywhere else in the world. It's unique in that aspect, and it's really homey, traditional. Everything's still on kind of a human scale, the little one and two story buildings everywhere, you don't have a lot of bricks and concrete. I've been to some fairs out in the midwest, in Indiana and Ohio, and they're terrific, there's a lot to see there, but it doesn't have this kind of country feel to it.

Yeah, the ambiance is a little better here. I like it.