Episode 17: Gina Spadafori is a micro-rancher

Gina Spadafori lives within what feels like spitting distance from California’s capitol city, Sacramento, but it’s also really rural right around here. It’s kind of the perfect spot for a politics-following writer and editor who decided to raise animals in her yard. 

But this yearning for living close to animals and on a stretch of land didn’t come from her happily urban and suburban family. 

“My maternal grandmother used to tell me, the best day of her life after World War II was when they were able to get anything they wanted at the supermarket,” Gina says, “and she didn’t have to have a victory garden, she didn’t have to can, she didn’t have to have chickens, and that was … the happiest day of her life.” 

It started with horses and goats. But the horses were tough work on a solo micro-ranch. (“The first winter I was here, the entire pasture was under a good 10 inches of water,” she says.) Most recent head count? Seven goats, including two kids; nine chickens; one barn cat; and four dogs, who are the family members of her farm. 

Find out the philosophy behind her relationship with the food animals she raises (“The chickens don’t have names,” she says, if she’s eating them), how micro farm vlogging transitioned from social media fun to just getting things done on the property, and what joys all this work brings. 

P.S. I blow it at the very end and call Gina a “micro-farmer.” Gina sees that as a business farming, where farmers sell at least some of that produce. Makes sense. Gina’s got more, y’know, a ranch. 

 

WANT TO KNOW MORE? 

> Check out this video of the Pasadena, California, urban homestead that inspired Gina. (Check ‘em out on Facebook.) 

> Interested in small farming vs. big farming? Gina’s not a fan of big-ag's poop lagoons. See a Vice story on them here. She also questions mono crops and massive fertilizer use. Better is the work of Joel Salatin, the sustainable agriculture in Gina’s own county and Sacramento’s own farm-to-fork rep. 

> Gina travels in the veterinary medicine world, and her friend, Dr. Patty Khuly, was on the chicken and goat kick before her. Dr. Khuly warned Gina that her first backyard animals, chickens, were a “gateway livestock.” And it proved true. Dr. Khuly talks up goats here. 

> Intrigued by the mention of Bernadette the Weather Duck? You’re welcome.