An 18-year-old Minnesota girl who’s been raising goats since she was just a kid herself is gaining notoriety as a model young business owner of her very own farm, Aubrey Acres.
She’s still not even old enough to legally drink, but Lauren Aubrey Schifsky has been breeding Nigerian Dwarf goats on her family’s 10-acre hobby farm for seven years already, reports MSNBC. She got her first goat when she was six and by the time she was 11, she was already selling goats she’d raised herself.
Now, as a senior at Academy for Sciences and Agriculture, Shifsky has to balance a demanding academic schedule with the very adult responsibilities of running a business. She starts her day by spending an hour tending to her dozens of goats and ends it exactly the same way, after putting in a full day at school.
Schifsky’s efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. Recently she won a $1,000 scholarship through the Girls Going Places Entrepreneurship Contest sponsored by Guardian Life Insurance Co. and at a recent goat show in Little Falls, Minn., four of her goats took top honors.
“I had three grand champions and one reserve champion,” she told MSNBC. “It’s kind of cool, because I stamped my own breeding on it. I didn’t go out and buy bucks and take other genetics. I stamped my own name on my herd.”
Schifsky now has so many goats that she’s lost count. One thing she hasn’t lost count of, however, are the 28 new kids she has to care for this spring, including a set of quadruplets. She’ll get about $200 for every doe and $25 to $50 for every wether (castrated male) she sells.
Caring for the animals requires a baffling amount of knowledge and discipline. Not only does Schifsky have to be in the barn feeding her goats at 5:30 a.m. every day, but she has to clean up after them, groom them and milk them (some of them anyway!) Schiftsky also has to stay on top of her goats’ health, administering shots and antibiotics, worming them, and bathing them with anti-fungal shampoo, among other things. She even helps deliver the kids, and covers all the expenses herself from the fencing to the vet bills when a doe needs a C-section.
“Any time I have a sick goat, I know what to give it,” she told MSNB. “And if one has a wound, I know how to clean it out [ ... ] If they act a little sick, I will give them vitamins, electrolytes or a little baking soda — the baking soda neutralizes their stomach, so I always provide that.”
Schifsky does all of her own bookkeeping, sales and marketing. She created and maintains her own website — aubreysacres.webs.com — and plans to expand her business this summer by making and selling handmade goat milk soap. Any money she makes goes into her savings account or the business. “I’m really tight with my money,” she told MSNBC. “I don’t like spending money.”
This fall, Schifsky will head to the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, where she plans to study dairy science. She’s active in Future Farmers of America and hopes to own her own farm one day.
“I would rather be at a goat show or the county fair than at the movies,” she told MSNBC.
Now that’s something you won’t hear from your average teen.
Photo by cliff1066 via Flickr.