A Visit to e-i-e-i-o acres, Where the Stud Goat is Named "Lucky"

At e-i-e-i-o acres, a small hobby farm owned by Susan and Matt Warnecke, in Berger, Mo, near Hermann, rock music can be heard in the kitchen, but country music plays in the chicken coop. “They love it,” Susan said.  “With rock ‘n roll, we never get any eggs,” Matt added. 

One chef who must be glad the Warneckes’ hens listen to country music is Sidney Street Café’s Kevin Nashan. For the past five years, Susan’s been delivering eggs (chicken, duck, and turkey) to Nashan, along with rabbit, goat, and lamb meat. I recently spent an afternoon at the farm, where I had the pleasure to dine with the farmers and meet the animals (like Trixie the goat, above).

An amazing spread of food was waiting for me when I arrived. Using many of her own fruits, vegetables, eggs, and meat, Susan prepared corn spoon bread, turkey soup, candied bacon, and broccoli quiche and country bread (both below),

as well as fried chicken (soaked in buttermilk and hot sauce), and lamb sliders (both below), which Matt had grilled to perfection.

For dessert, there was chocolate pudding (made with turkey eggs), plus strawberry hand pies and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (both below). Everything was amazing, both because of ingredients as local as it gets, and Susan’s serious culinary skills. Currently working on a cookbook, she plans to include recipes for a number of the dishes, like the bread and fried chicken.

Most of the animals at the farm live, eat, and play together. Miniature donkeys, goats, sheep, roosters, ducks, geese, plus one turkey and one peacock mix and mingle in the barn and pastures. The stud goat (Lucky) and ram (Bill) are kept separate until their services are needed, as are the egg-layer hens who have their own coop, and the rabbits.   

All that idyllic togetherness—the inspiration for the farm’s name—can be dangerous, with all due respect to Old MacDonald. The couple had a cow (Penny) at one time who liked to lie down and cuddle with the other animals. One morning, after Penny got up, they found Tuttles, the male turkey, had been crushed underneath her. These days, the remaining turkey, Tilley, seems to hold her own among the ruminants. And Penny no longer lives there.

At the time of my visit, there were about 60 animals in the barnyard, and Susan and Matt shared funny stories and interesting facts about many of them. Donkeys, for example (below), make great guards since their bray is supposed to scare coyotes, and if that doesn’t work, their kick can be deadly. When goats or sheep are on antibiotics, they’re fed yogurt because, as in humans, the good microbes in their stomachs can be wiped out by the antibiotics, making them more susceptible to infections. The probiotics in the yogurt help to replenish the good bugs, and one wonders why no one’s yet created Activia for Goats, pimped by Jamie Lee Curtis.

Among the 60 animals were adorable goats and sheep that had been born in the spring. Soon to be weaned, those kids and lambs will stay at the farm until the fall, when they’ll go off to slaughter. Like so many other farmers, Susan doesn’t usually name the babies with the exception of those she nurses back to health. I asked her if it’s difficult to let them go, and she said, “By the time we sell them, we’ve got two months before new babies come in,” articulating the cyclical reality of farm life.

While Matt processes the rabbits and fowl himself, he takes the goats and sheep to American Halal Meat, where they’re slaughtered by having their throats slit but only after a captive bolt gun is used. The Warneckes prefer that method so that the animals die as humanely as possible. One of them will then pick up the meat and deliver it to the restaurants. 

Susan recalled a time when she transported a carcass, wrapped in plastic, in her Beetle. With little trunk room, she secured the carcass next to her with the seat belt, and if there weren’t so many farmers around the area, she might have raised more than one eyebrow as she made a quick stop at the bank. 

When I first met the animals, the pasture erupted into a cacophony of sounds: the donkeys, who love attention, brayed as they made their way to the fence, sheep baahed, goats bleated, roosters crowed, and Johnny the peacock (right) cawed. “There’s always somebody talking,” Susan laughed. While I was flattered that they seemed so excited to meet me, I soon learned that all the commotion was really about their impending dinner.

Up at the barnyard, Matt filled the troughs or “bunks” with a corn-grain mixture, and everyone jockeyed for a spot (below), with only the occasional flat ear pointing backwards from a donkey to signal irritation among the animals. A couple of the goats even stood in the troughs while their kith and kin munched around them. Hanging back, the geese, ducks, roosters, and Tilley waited their turn.

“Curiosity killed the cat, the goat, and the hog,” Matt joked, and the goats lived up to the revised adage on my visit. More social and inquisitive than the sheep, they followed us around, nibbling on our pant legs and far-flung branches. The donkeys were the only other animals who approached me. That is until Susan pulled out a bag of cinnamon treats. “You might want to get behind that gate or behind me,” Matt advised as the sheep became wise to why all the goats were rushing towards us. 

“They have a good life,” Susan said, adding, “We like to come out here—bring a glass of wine—and just play with them.” That statement plus the fun I was having feeding treats to the animals with playful names like Hillary and Monica (sheep), Paco and Mary Jane (donkeys), and Mocha Joe the goat (at left), had me fantasizing about my own farm. 

But the stories Matt and Susan told about what barber pole worms can do to goats (they attach to the stomach and, like vampires, live off the animals’ blood), how Susan recently saved a goat’s triplets born in the cold, wet spring by warming them with a hair dryer, and even the idea of becoming attached to the babies before sending them off to slaughter had me thinking twice.

And, as many know, farming is not the most lucrative of professions. Both Susan and Matt work in agriculture outside the farm, and Matt chops and sells wood in the winter to supplement their income and buy hay for the animals. They could breed their sheep and goats (like Miss Piggy with kid, at right) more frequently, but they don’t because it’s harder on the animals.

Charging a modest 25 cents over market price for meat, and delivering the product themselves to the restaurants, the couple appears to be in the business for more than simple profit. Susan likes to see the meat go to chefs, like Nashan and, beginning this fall, Nick Miller at Harvest, because they’re “artists” who “create something awesome out of it.”

Yet, even with all of the considerations above, it was difficult not to entertain farming fantasies as I sat under the covered gazebo on the deck, eating chocolate pudding, while tired labs (Inky, Girly, and Pooh) panted nearby, and cats (Chuck and Charlie) snuggled up to my side. All the farm animals were quiet then—even Johnny, who previously spent a great deal of time cawing and displaying his brilliant feathers to the roosters, who, unsurprisingly, were uninterested in his courting ritual (below)—with only the sound of water from Susan’s homemade creek lulling me deeper into pastoral peace.