New Kids on the Farm

SHORTLY AFTER SUNRISE inside the Campus Farm’s big red dairy barn, Ayeesha Fadlaoui ’25 thought she’d gotten past the tricky part of her chores once she corralled the two new dairy goats and guided them up on the metal milking stands to eat their grain.

Then she waited. And waited. And waited. The goats ate slowly, perhaps unsure of the platform they were standing on—but luckily, it wasn’t time for actual milking yet. Fadlaoui and the farm crew were just getting them acclimated, a few weeks before they were due to give birth in mid-April.

“The whole semester has been leading up to this, so I’m really excited for bottle feeding and interacting with the kids,” says Fadlaoui, an animal science major.

It’s the start of a new era at the Campus Farm, which has been home to a wide variety of livestock over the decades, including sheep, pigs, chickens, horses and cows but never goats—until now.

“We’re excited to give our students more hands-on experience,” says Monica VanKlompenberg, senior lecturer in the Department of Animal and Avian Sciences. “Having these goats better utilizes our small campus farm. This more closely resembles more of what we see in agriculture in Maryland.”

Fadlaoui is one of 10 students in VanKlompenberg’s new goat management course this spring who worked alongside interns and staff to learn how to care for Sadie, 5 years, and Ariana, 1 year. The mother-daughter pair was donated by 2024 animal science graduate Cheyenne Van Echo’s family, which owns a farm in Rocky Ridge, Md.

UMD’s flock of about two dozen Katahdin sheep are bred for meat and require less handling; the Oberhasli goats offer opportunities for students to provide more direct care, since they can produce milk for up to 10 months.

The goats were on display during Maryland Day (which marked the 100th anniversary of Ag Day, the precursor to UMD’s annual open house), and the class also created trivia games about various breeds and the differences between sheep and goats, as well as displays about goat products and digestion in ruminants.

For the students, it’s been rewarding to have animals that are easier to handle, since goats tend to be more affectionate, using their noses to bump the students and farm crew for pets. But the two Terp goats have occasionally tried to make a break from their pen in the middle of class.

“The stereotypes about goats wanting to escape is definitely true,” says Fadlaoui.