Why & How I Started A Valais Sheep Farm

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hey everyone, this is Julie. Welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today's episode is going to be a little bit more of a personal one. I've had a lot of people ask, why are you starting a farm? and I thought I would answer that question, talk about the business of farming, why we decided to do it and what we've been doing. And it is a little out of left field, sorta. If you know me well at all, you know that I've been an animal lover my entire life. My mom tells the story of when I was 2 years old, I wouldn't, you know, we'd go to a fair and I wouldn't get on any of the rides, but I was not afraid of any of the animals. And in 2024, when I married my husband, AC, found out that he is also a diehard animal lover. I didn't find out on our wedding day. I knew this from day one. Anyway, we've been accumulating animals, and when I started to dig deep into what do the next few years look like with the disruption of AI, I had a really strong intuition that I needed to do two things. I needed to dive deep into AI and get as much leverage as possible in my existing businesses. and I also needed to do something that was completely protected from AI. And that was my feeling, and I actually did an entire podcast episode called "You Must Love and Hate AI at the Same Time." It was back in December, and that was really the final straw that made me say, "Okay, we need to do something, just a side quest that is AI-proof." And as we were exploring what to do, it came, it became pretty obvious that if I don't leverage the property that I have purchased, then why am I on it? And you know, back in 2021, I bought this house. It is on 15 acres. It has 2 barns. It has extensive fencing. I mean, we're talking $300,000 to $350,000 worth of infrastructure for farming. And the old owners used it as an alpaca farm. and if I wasn't going to farm it and AC wasn't going to farm it, then why were we here? We're paying over $3,000 a month in just property taxes alone. It's about 20 hours of mowing and weed whacking a week. The leaf clean— I mean, it's just, it's just an insane amount of work. And I thought, okay, well, the world is getting more and more digital, which means there's also this whole market and industry of people who are homesteading and farming and wanting to get back to, you know, real life analog type. And what if we did something similar? And that began the quest of a niche. Like, what are we going to do? We going to, we going to, you know, raise chickens? We're going to do eggs. We're going to do a farm stand. We're going to do horses, pigs. What are we going to do? And what was interesting is that our first idea was kind of around like mini animals and like hobby farms. And that was our original idea because I know there's a lot of money in like the agritourism industry and, you know, people love the like minis. And we said, okay, maybe we'll do that. We talked about a mini cow, we talked about mini pigs, all that kind of stuff. And what happened was I said, well, we need something that's like expensive. And this is a business lesson that I've learned over the years is if you are going to be a small enterprise, you have no business trying to be the cheapest or the biggest volume. You have to be premium. I mean, that's just the way you have to go. And so I said, well, we need, we need an animal that's premium. So we did some research and the Valais Blacknose sheep got on our radar and I did some research and of course they are adorable. And I found out that they act more like dogs than they do sheep. I found so many advantages. There were some disadvantages, but manageable. And I thought, okay, these are the animal that we want to start with. We want to start with our premium offer first, our highest ticket offer first. Again, in business, this is what I tell people. It doesn't make sense to try to grow a business on a $9 offer. You should try to grow a business on a $3,000 offer. And every lamb that you have that's a purebred of the Valais sheep can be sold for anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000. So that was sort of the big aha moment, and then it was only confirmed and validated by the fact that the breed really thrives. They come from Switzerland, and they thrive in the Alps, and the Alps is very rocky, it's cold, and our property is rocky and it's cold, and we had nearly the perfect setup for Valais sheep because the previous owners raised alpaca, which is a very similar type animal, a grazing animal. And so we have this gorgeous post and beam barn that's a run-in. The valet would absolutely love it. We have lots of rocks that helps with their hooves. It became really obvious. I was like, okay, this is a good animal to start with. And as we got into it, we realized, okay, this is— we just need to focus on this animal. We need to not spread our energies too thin because every single animal has different needs, different infrastructure, different food. Again, like to make the case that the more offers you put out there, the more complex it gets. And so we decided, you know what, we're not going to worry about the mini animals in the hobby farm, we're just gonna go straight for Valais sheep. Then we began to do all of the preliminary research around the actual sheep, and that started with joining the registry of, uh, the, the Society of Valais Blacknose Sheep. We did that first. We joined a bunch of groups. I started doing some research, reached out to a bunch of different breeders started to ask, and I think this was a God thing, but the very first person who responded to me was so, so kind and generous and put me in contact with someone who is now the person who we're buying their flock from. And that was just serendipitous. I also ran into a woman named Tammy from Wing and a Prayer Farm, and she offered to mentor us. She's also selling us one of her rams, and it was providence. I mean, I put out a lot of emails and a lot of messages, and the the ones that came back turned out to be awesome. I guess that's another business lesson. You got to put yourself out there and you got to see what comes back to you. And pretty soon, within a couple weeks, we had a plan for how many sheep we were going to have. And we went up in early December to see Tammy's farm and the sheep and just confirm the fact that this was exactly what we wanted to do. We were so excited. We loved the sheep and it really like lit a fire under us. And from there, we began to heavily use ChatGPT to help us figure out what it is we needed. Tammy also sent us an amazing list of what we needed, and for the last basically 2 months, that's what we've been doing. We have been preparing. We, from a business side, we submitted an LLC, we opened a business bank account, we got QuickBooks, we got the business credit card because we knew we were going to be spending a whole bunch of money. We put a big chunk of change into an account, and that was our seed money. That was like our, like, hey, this is how we're going to build this farm. We know that we're not actually going to make money for an entire year because we are getting the sheep now and it's early 2026, and we don't breed them until fall of 2026, which means they won't be born until spring of 2027. And that feels like a really long time to put money in and not get money out. Another reason why farming is probably not the best idea if you're cash-strapped. But we had cash available, and we don't have to make this make money super quickly, and that's an advantage in business. If you can play the long game, you tend to win over time. And that is why, you know, I don't think this business model is right for people who don't have farmland or don't have $300,000 of barn infrastructure. You know, there were just a whole bunch of pieces that lined up that made this feasible for us. We put some deposits down on the sheep, and then we began with the fencing and sourcing hay, sourcing straw, and then it was the It was a little stressful trying to find all the experts that we needed, and again, business lesson, so much easier if you have a coach or a consultant who can give you all of that. We thankfully, we do. We have Tammy as a mentor, but she's all the way up in Vermont, and we needed professionals that were here in Connecticut, so that took a long time. That was a huge source of anxiety because I needed to find a good source of hay and grain and minerals because we're buying them at, you know, in volume because we're going to have about 15 sheep. I had to figure out who could come and shear the sheep and also someone who could come trim hooves because I have no idea how to do that and I need to learn. And then we also had to find a large animal vet. All of those things, super stressful because, you know, I had to make a lot of calls. So that was a lot of research, but now we've got that all locked in. I feel so much better. I I have that expert team around me because, you know, the investment of these animals is not cheap and you don't want to make a mistake. We have watched so many videos trying to figure out what is the best setup, how do we do our fencing, do we need electric fencing, what kind of guardian animals, you know. And it's, it's like any business endeavor, once you go down the rabbit hole, you're like, oh my goodness, there is so much that I didn't know. Thankfully, again, having a mentor, you know, we talked to Tammy and she said you really want to do llamas because because, uh, livestock guardian dogs are amazing, but they are also going to be, um, a lot of work, right? You're gonna have to train them and all of that. And she said donkeys are fine, but they tend to bond to each other because you need two, and then that's two different types, you know, a different type of animal and more feed and more this and that. And llamas are almost exactly like sheep in their diet and in their care, and they can just live right amongst the sheep. So we learned that. She also gave us the name of someone who was able to sell us a llama. Anyway, that is all the behind the scenes. I did our profit and loss statement for January, so I've got QuickBooks. I haven't hired a bookkeeper yet, I'm doing it myself. We spent $12,000 in January preparing for this journey, and I'm telling you, we're going to be spending a lot more because we have to actually— like, we're going to be finalizing all the sale of the sheep, and that's the most expensive part. But it was about $12,000 in infrastructure between fencing and hay and a whole bunch of, uh, like supplies and things like that. Over on the digital side, I knew that if we wanted to sell sheep in 2027, I needed to not waste any time, uh, over the next year building an audience. So we bought two domains. We bought our woolandwonderfarm.com domain, and then I also went and splurged a pretty penny on the domain valleblacknosesheep.com. And both of those sites are now live. I've begun indexing them. I was doing some SEO. I've still got some more work to do on that, but I also grabbed the Instagram, the TikTok, and the YouTube handle. I don't know if we're going to do YouTube. I don't know if I have it in me to do YouTube because of the production, but I've been posting on TikTok and Instagram, and I believe on Instagram I have over 100 followers and not quite 100 followers on TikTok, and we started basically in January. I know that I have to keep at that. Now, my next several steps in my business plan, and it's so So funny, even though farming is completely like analog and tactile and tangible, there are so many things that I'm doing differently because of all of the online business experience that I have. I know that I'm going to need to start getting to know people in Facebook groups because I want to become well known, but I'm not doing that yet because I'm not an expert yet. And I also am still learning the ropes, and I'm not trying to be an expert. I'm just trying to be myself. I'm documenting the journey on TikTok and Instagram and I will start posting and commenting in those Facebook groups to become more well-known among the valet community. And I understand that there's a lot of power in getting to know the people because some of the sales won't just be hobby farmers, they'll be breeders. There'll be breeders that want valet with different genetics, and those are going to be some of our customers as well. I've noticed that the people that I have run into in the valet community are absolutely amazing and generous, and I want to do the same. And that is the sort of the energy of that community, and I want to make sure that I am doing my part. One of the things I was thinking was on the valetblacknosheep.com domain, I could make a directory of trustworthy valet farms in different parts. And obviously the society has that already, but I wanted to do my part to feature the farms that, you know, would be beneficial to people who are in different parts of the country. Right now we are at an advantage because Connecticut doesn't really have any premium exclusive black-nosed sheep farms. They have farms with black-nosed sheep, and some people are breeding and doing the breed-up program, but we're going to get to be one of the first, which is, which is really exciting. We're also in the, you know, the tri-state area, so there's a lot of population, and homesteading is just becoming more and more popular over time. I did make a little bit of a calculated risk thinking that Valais sheep are going to become really, really popular just in the same way like the Nigerian dwarf goats. Like, you can see with the explosion of homesteading how popular chickens have gotten, how popular goats have gotten, and I think these sheep also have that potential as well as the market gets a little bit more affordable. I think it hasn't been affordable for hobby farmers because there are so few of a lei. I have to say that I would never have been able to do this business had it not been for AI because there's so much that I am learning that I'm talking to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or what have you, um, to understand, to learn, to send pictures. Right now I'm in the learning the sheep that I have phase. We have a couple more sheep coming, and this is really ultimately a long play. You know, $50,000 to $70,000 a year in revenue is not a ton of revenue, and where you're coming from, the online business world, that doesn't look that remarkable. But if it lowers our taxes, If it gives us animal mowers so that my husband doesn't have to spend 20 hours a week mowing, if it gives us a profit, a small profit, it is a revenue stream that will be supportive long-term. It's going to take a while for us to make our money back, but that is not the goal of this business right now. The goal of this business is legacy. And a little bit of hedging against the future disruption. And I am still full-time and will be full-time Funnel Gorgeous and Digital Insiders, uh, for the foreseeable future. I am not like transitioning out of online business. I know there are a lot of gurus that have done that. They've like literally transitioned off. I am not that person. In fact, there's a whole side of me that wants to really go into the online business side of a farm when it comes to monetizing, you know, audiences and SEO and all this kind of stuff. I am absolutely one leg in digital and one leg in analog, and I don't have to do a lot of the work. I get to do all the fun stuff, like go sit with the sheep and take funny videos. My husband is the one who is managing the actual farm, and I imagine when we go and lamb, so in April, it's going to be pretty stressful and I may need to be a little bit more on. But overall, this is something that I am enjoying while my husband does all the hard work. Anyway, if you are following me on Instagram, you will continue to see lots of talk of animals and farming and then also AI and webinars and funnels and digital marketing, and I have never been very good at staying on a niche, and I'm just proving myself right. Anyway, that is the story, and thank you to the person, Lindsay, who asked me this question this morning. I thought, you know what, I'll do a whole podcast episode explaining the entire thing, and hopefully this was mildly entertaining. I'll talk to you soon.

And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.