Goats galore: Family turns son's project into thriving dairy farm

In 1880, the first electric streetlight was installed in Wabash, Ind., Thomas Edison tested his electric railway in Menlo Park, N.J., and Helen Keller was born.

Far away, in what would become West Jordan, Utah, Edward Drake quietly bought 20 acres of farmland. More than a century later, as the city thickens and quickens and swells around it, Drake Family Farms stands as one of the Salt Lake Valley's few remaining dairies and has emerged as a premier local provider of goat's milk products like gourmet cheeses, milk and soaps.

Nestled among subdivisions, apartment complexes and an elementary school, Drake Family Farms stands with one foot planted firmly on the principles on which it was founded — family, hard work, stewardship — and the other on the newer ground called business.

"I think a farm is an ideal place to raise children," said Jeanette Drake, farm co-owner. "There are natural laws and consequences. Children learn how to work on a farm, whereas I think people who live in subdivisions and cities sometimes have to look for opportunities to teach those things."

Drake Family Farms, 1856 W. Drake Lane (7400 South), has produced alfalfa, corn, sugar beets and other crops. It has hosted sheep and cattle, chickens and hogs. Then, 22 years ago, a little mixed-breed goat named Glacier set the Drake family, and its farm, on a new adventure.

"My son Daniel, he raised a few calves, but they pulled him around too much," said Ron Drake, co-owner of the farm, great-great-grandson of Edward Drake and husband to Jeanette Drake. "He decided to go with a smaller animal, so he bought that one goat, Glacier."

One goat led to a handful of goats, and soon Daniel's siblings were raising goats, and the goats were producing milk that could be used and sold.

"The 'goat project' went through our family, from Daniel on down," Ron Drake recalled. "Our daughters and our sons, they did all the work — they got up in the morning and milked the goats, fed the goats, went to school, came home, milked the goats and fed the goats. They did it all. I didn't have to tell them anything."

But when the children grew up and went off to college — there are eight, in total, though not all were involved in the goat project — Ron and Jeanette Drake were left with a herd of goats and nary a plan for what to do.

"We either had to sell them, or go commercial," Ron Drake said. "So as a family, we put our heads together and decided to go commercial. That was six years ago."

That first year, Drake Family Farms had 25 goats. The second year, there were 45, and 65 the year after that. Last year there were 120 goats, and today there are about 150 milking goats (250 goats total).

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