Help Shelter Wildwood Goats - our GOATFundMe
Wildwood Farm is a small 3 acre semi-urban farm in Williamsburg, VA ran by husband & wife team, James & Paige Ewell. We began it with our marriage & the dream to live more self-sufficiently in late 2015. It all started with some chickens and a couple goats. Our farm has now expanded to a large flock of egg laying chickens, about 20 Nigerian Dwarf dairy goats, a few honeybee hives, and a couple adorable African sulcata tortoises. We open to the public during certain hours for farm tours, which include goat visits and a seasonal sunflower field. We also produce natural products such as goat milk soaps, beeswax lip balms/body balms/beard balms, herbal scrubs, seasonal jams, goat milk caramel, & other farm goods.
2020 was going to be a great, profitable year that fulfilled many of our goals and plans for Wildwood Farm. Our goat herd was expanding, so in January we built a big, new shelter. It was tall enough to allow plenty of air flow and wide enough to give the goats plenty of space to spread out under the covered protection from rain or sun. However, winter is rarely a profitable time of year for any business much less a farm, but that doesn’t stop the goats from needing more space.
We installed the rafters & posts, then rolled out a large repurposed vinyl billboard as a temporary roof. The idea was to buy and install proper roofing (the most costly part of the project) later in the year when all of our spring/summer events & festivals kicked off, which would fund the new roofing. This way, the goats would have the sheltered space they needed ASAP.
However, 2020 had a different plan. As we all know, COVID-19 struck and mid-March saw businesses shutting down and large group activities in Virginia being cancelled (such as Art & Music Festivals, which are our main source of income for the farm).
We figured the temporary billboard roofing would just have to hold up until we could save the money for permanent roofing materials. And it did... until mid-June when a freak hale storm struck the Five Forks area of Williamsburg (where we are located). The marble-sized hale pelted little holes all throughout our billboard roof, which now resembles a starry night scene with all the sunlight beaming through the dark billboard. Still, during a hot summer with occasional rain, the temporary roofing held up and provided the shade our girls needed.
Fast forward two months later, bringing us to the present. Williamsburg has been experiencing tons of rain/flooding for days in a row and our damaged roofing has not held up. We’ve done what we can to supply alternative shelter for the goats, but it’s much smaller and not ideal. Still struggling to save any money (what little revenue we’ve made this year has paid our necessary bills) paired with the inability to qualify for most of the small business relief loans/grants (most require you have a certain amount of employees, whereas our farm is ran only by the two of us), we don’t have the funds we need to buy the materials to build the permanent goat shelter roof, which is becoming increasingly more pressing.
So here we are asking for YOUR HELP to fund the materials necessary to build the roofing our girls need to stay dry and healthy ASAP.
The first $1,000 will go towards the roof. Everything extra will go towards other 2020 goals we had for the farm including: our honeybee observatory, a lavender patch, new raised goat decks (goats like to sleep/rest on raised, hard surfaces).
Please help us keep Wildwood goats sheltered - dry, shaded & happy, which in turn will help us continue farming & producing fresh natural products for everyone. Thank YOU for any help you can provide! We (and the goats) are eternally grateful!
For every:
$10 donation, we’ll send you a free Wildwood Farm sticker!
$25 donation, we’ll send you a free Wildwood Farm beeswax lip stuff!
$50 donation, we’ll send you a free Wildwood Farm goat milk soap!
$100 donation, we’ll send you a free Wildwood Farm T-shirt!
www.wildwoodwilliamsburg.com 
