Stargate Valley Farms

Realizing Dreams under the Stars

Holbrook, Arizona · By Roger Clark

To many people in their sixties, retirement means days filled with hitting golf balls, playing bridge with friends, or traveling the world. But Carol Poore and Dennis Swayda had another dream: to own a farm and raise goats.

The couple milk sixteen dairy goats by hand every twelve hours, seven days a week. “I spend four hours milking and six hours making cheese most every day,” says Carol. “Stargate Valley Farms,” Dennis explains, “is just getting started as our retirement business.” That business currently includes raising purebred and American registered Toggenberg dairy goats and producing cheeses and organically grown vegetables that they sell at the farmers market in Holbrook, Arizona.

This energetic couple has worked for much of their lives in nutrition and organic farming. “We were lucky enough to be one of the first distributors for Nature’s Sunshine encapsulated natural herb products,” Dennis says. With business enormously successful, Carol and Dennis were able in 1992 to purchase their farm along the Little Colorado River, near Woodruff Butte seven miles southeast of Holbrook.

But the timing of their “retirement business” has had to be staged to meet competing commitments. They still speak at nutrition conferences, and have had to make the transition from their Phoenix-based home and businesses. “We finally managed to move into a rental home in Holbrook,” Dennis says, “and are planning on building a new home next to the farm where we keep our goats.”

For the past several years, they have produced vegetables in the backyard of their home in town and in a neighbor’s backyard. Located near the center of the small railroad and interstate town, their gardens appear as a verdant oasis amid paved streets and modest cinder-block homes. They produce a surprising amount and variety of vegetables, as well as peaches and apricots, from what amounts to less than a quarter of an acre of land behind the three homes. “I take advantage of the various growing niches created by sun and shade,” Dennis explains. He points to peas, which do best in the partial shade of a fruit tree, and to peppers that thrive against a hot south-facing wall.

Their small greenhouse helps protect plants started from seed until after the last frost in mid-May. Dennis interplants a dense mixture of tomatoes, cilantro, salad greens, beans, carrots, and other vegetables that thrive on soil enriched by goat and rabbit manure. “I’m a vegetarian, so we don’t eat the rabbits,” he adds. Into the soil go red worms and mulch from composted table scraps: “Nothing goes to waste around here.” Drip lines and soaker hoses help to conserve water. Dennis actively rotates crops as they mature, so that a small plot might produce two or more harvests during the 120-day growing season. At peak periods of production, Dennis and Carol take 175 pounds of tomatoes to the weekly farmers market where they and a few other gardeners keep the townsfolk supplied with locally grown produce.

Beneath the shade of a large almond tree on the side of the house is a pen full of young goats, brown- and white-faced kids recently separated from their mothers. Carol explains that to protect the mothers’ udders the kids are not allowed to nurse after birth, although she and Dennis continue to provide the mothers’ milk to them. She releases two from the pen. They immediately vie for her affection, until one finds the vegetable garden of greater interest. “They’re a lot of fun – and smart, making them a handful to manage,” Carol says. After coaxing the young doelings back to their pen, she notes that they only keep a couple of bucks for breeding. Out of earshot of Dennis, she quietly mentions that, in addition to supplying the Turquoise Room Restaurant in Winslow with goat cheese, she recently sold two young males to the chef for a special dinner event.

On the drive out to their farm, Dennis and Carol stop at a small canyon that cuts steeply through the red sandstone plateau on the south edge of their property. History comes alive here. Along the weather-darkened walls are petroglyphs pecked into the rock by people who farmed this valley some 900 years ago. Through binoculars, circular symbols, mountain sheep, and human-like figures are visible on the opposite wall. Sixty feet below is a small pool of water surrounded by the tracks of living animals. At the mouth of the canyon are blocks of sandstone rubble, the remnants of a dam abandoned by the Mormon farmers who settled the area more than a century ago. Carol and Dennis’s property extends to near the base of Woodruff Butte a mile away. They regret that they could not prevent the adjacent landowner from mining gravel from the butte, much to the objection of the Hopi, who regard it as a sacred site.

Below the plateau, a complex of goat corrals, pens, feeding mangers, and milking barn stands next to an eighty-acre field where alfalfa was once grown. The property also came with two wells that fill a two-million-gallon earthen reservoir. Dennis, who is a professional dowser, will locate sites for other wells if necessary. They purchase animal feed made from corn, oats, and barley produced by Mennonite farmers who guarantee that it is free of genetically modified plants. Carol recently returned from her former home in Iowa where she bought a used tractor and manure spreader. “It’s hard to find used farm equipment in the Southwest because most of it winds up on farms south of the border,” she says. Within the next year, they plan to begin growing vegetables and producing alfalfa for the goats here.

Dennis and Carol want to build their home up on the hill, where they will enjoy a view across the entire valley. When the couple had to come up with a name under which to register their goats, Carol says the name “Stargate Valley” came to her when she looked up at the sky during a walk on a moonless night. “I’d never seen so many stars,” she says.

Later she quips, “It took me twenty-six years and two husbands to realize my dream.” Both Carol and Dennis feel they were destined to help restore farming to this ancient land. The only regret, Dennis adds, is “that I didn’t discover this twenty years sooner.”

___________________

This is one of many stories from the Four Corners region that were printed in A New Plateau: Sustaining the Lands and Peoples of Canyon Country, edited by Peter Friederici and Rose Houk. This book was a project of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and Renewing the Countryside, with assistance from the Museum of Northern Arizona. A New Plateau can be purchased at the Renewing the Countryside online bookstore or the Northern Arizona University bookstore, or request it at your local bookstore.