When Shawn and Beth Dougherty bought their farm, The Sow’s Ear, in 1996, they didn’t intend to stay long.
“It was not really the farm that we wanted,” Mr. Dougherty said.
“But,” Mrs. Dougherty said, “if you’re going to buy land and avoid crushing debt, you’re going to have to buy land no one wants.”
The land, deemed unsuitable for agriculture by the state of Ohio, was 16 acres of steep hills overgrown with briars and trees. There was a house on the parcel, but it wasn’t anything to write home about. The upside? It cost only $11,000.
Thinking that they would only be there for a few years, they got to work on the property that eventually changed their entire outlook on farming.
An Old Way to Farm
The couple had come to eastern Ohio by way of Dallas. They met in 1981 as undergraduates at the University of Dallas and married shortly after graduating.
Having both grown up around conventional beef and dairy operations, the two connected over their shared love of farming. They knew that was the life they wanted, but there was a problem. Dallas was out of their price range.
When Mr. Dougherty found work as a theater professor at Franciscan University, a small Catholic college in Steubenville, Ohio, the family made the move. He would teach there for 25 years, supporting his large family of eight children—six boys and two girls—on his small university salary.
Meanwhile, the Doughertys needed to figure out what to do with The Sow’s Ear. They had begun to make their home livable and hack away at their land, but it wasn’t easy.
The land was steep and degraded, with virtually no topsoil or sunlight. They needed to restore it. They weren’t keen on spending money, so expensive equipment and chemical fertilizers were out of the question. They sought out older farming methods that weren’t as costly, but had trouble finding anyone to teach them.
“We would say to our parents, ‘How did you farm?’ They would say, ‘You just can’t do that anymore. It’s all been taken over by the big guy with the big tractors,’” Mr. Dougherty said.
“But we kept having this nagging feeling that our great grandfathers never bought Purina, and that there had to be some other method than what we saw in every extension bulletin and book on how to farm, which said, ‘Do it how the commercial guys do it, only smaller,’” Mrs. Dougherty said.
They were on their own. But the more the Doughertys thought and read about pre-World War II agriculture, the more they realized that the methods of the Ingalls family from “Little House on the Prairie” were more fact than fiction.
“There’s a reason the pioneers always had a dairy cow,” Mrs. Dougherty said. “Most of the food on the planet is inaccessible to us except via ruminants. When human beings have wanted to eat regularly and not seasonally, they’ve had to cooperate with the animals that could convert cellulose in the form of leaves into food people could digest year-round.”
The trick was finding the right ruminant for the landscape.
“If it’s briars and woody stuff, it’s goats. If it’s grass, it’s cows. Sheep can go either direction. Eventually, that woody stuff is going to turn into grass,” Mr. Dougherty said.
Since their hilly hollow was buried under a bed of unyielding briars, the Doughertys bought goats. They tethered and rotated the goats around the property, where they ate the briars and sapling undergrowth while producing drinkable milk for the family.
Enter the Dairy Cow
They bought their first cow, a Jersey heifer, in 1998. The cow calved in 2001 and began producing 3 to 6 gallons of milk—every single day.“We weren’t accustomed to that, so it took us a little while to realize what we were looking at was fuel,” Mrs. Dougherty said. With little refrigerator space, they fed the milk to their laying hens, but the birds couldn’t keep up with the volume of milk. They needed yet another animal to share the abundance.
They bought pigs, which took 3 to 4 quarts off their hands. They added kitchen scraps to the pigs’ feed pans and realized that their feed bill had dropped significantly.
“We hated buying sacks of feed, and this cow had given us the means of eliminating all the feed on the farm—except hers,” Mrs. Dougherty said.
With their goats, they had unknowingly experimented with rotational grazing, a pasture management method that mimics a herd’s natural movement from one spot of grass to the next. It improves soil and pasture health and reduces the need for off-farm resources. Attending a talk on the method helped them reap its full benefits. The Doughertys purchased some electric fencing and set their cow up on their fledgling pasture.
“Our grass doesn’t go dormant anymore. We now rotationally graze all year round,” Mr. Dougherty said. This second “aha moment” brought them full circle. They had created a self-sustaining farmstead in the tradition of the pioneers and transformed unusable land into the farm they had always dreamed about.
Another Way to Teach
Buoyed by their success, the Doughertys attended one of the first Mother Earth News conferences in 2010. They hoped to learn more about alternative agriculture. Only a few hours in, they had an epiphany.“We’re 15 years ahead of these people. We could be teaching these classes,” they said.
They could turn what had taken them 25 years to figure out into a teachable methodology and share it with others. They began hosting workshops at their farm and Homesteaders of America conferences on topics including home dairy production, rotational grazing, fencing, stockpiling forage, capturing and moving water, and making the family part of the farm.
A few years into teaching, an attendee yelled from the crowd: “Where’s the book!?”
Mrs. Dougherty, who had been something of a writer in college, put their methods down on paper and sent a proposal off to publishers. The response from their top choice, Chelsea Green, exceeded their wildest dreams.
“You start with the best publisher and expect 20 refusals before someone says yes. We emailed it to them and the next day, they said, ‘We want you to write for us, but we want a bigger book than you’re proposing,’” Mrs. Dougherty said.
What they wanted was a manual.
The Doughertys’ book, “The Independent Farmstead,” was published in 2016.
A Faithful Family
The Doughertys included their eight children in the entire process of farming. Since they were on a budget, they worked together to figure things out themselves.“When we needed to add onto the house, we didn’t hire it in, we did it. When we needed to butcher an animal, we figured out how to do it. We learned as we went. So all of those were developing these incredible skills in our children,” Mr. Dougherty said.
The parents attribute their family’s closeness to their Catholic faith. Rising early, doing farm chores, attending daily Mass, and eating meals together created a pattern that connected their faith directly to what they did with their land.
“We can now say when God put us in a garden, it wasn’t a trick,” Mr. Dougherty said. “We’ve found it to be a fabulous place for a family to grow.”
When a lithium-ion battery exploded and set the house ablaze in 2023, the Dougherty children wasted no time helping their parents rebuild. One son, an architect, designed the new house, while three other sons—a general contractor, mason, and timber framer—are bringing their brother’s design to life. The whole revitalization effort has stayed entirely within the family, much to the Doughertys’ delight.
A Hope for the Future
Though Mr. Dougherty retired from his academic career in 2015, he and Mrs. Dougherty continue to teach their farming methods, on and off their property. He said he feels it is the type of teaching he was always meant to do.“He likes to say, ‘The farm is my stage now,’” Mrs. Dougherty said.
Their success shows that you don’t need to be an agricultural expert to manage a successful farmstead.
“Our best asset was that we had no idea what we were doing. We didn’t go to agriculture school,” Mr. Dougherty said. “Instead, we would try something and say, ‘Wow, that works!’ And many of these are things people say you can’t do. You can’t raise cows on grass? Well, we’ve been doing it for many years—and we’re very glad the cows haven’t read those books that say they can’t.”
