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Paradox Farm, a goat dairy farmstead, raises goats and produces cheese right on their farm in West End, North Carolina. A few years back, to reduce the pressure of kidding season, farm owner Sue Stovall decided to raise babies with their moms.
This decision was a significant shift for the farm (and for the goats). The positives outweighed the negatives, including improved health and wellbeing for mom and baby goats and increased sanity for farm workers. The downsides were reduced milk availability and less friendly baby goats.
To ease the shift, Stovall developed her first goat cuddling program in an effort to socialize the baby goats. This way, the goats would become friendly and eventually be adopted by families as pets.
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The first few years of the program were chaotic as the team recruited and manually scheduled about 30 volunteers for each cuddling session — with sessions up to every day during kidding season. Then Stovall discovered SignUpGenius and was in awe of how efficiently she could schedule volunteers.
"This year, we easily created our sign up and posted it to social media," Stovall says. "All our slots were filled in less than 24 hours!"
SignUpGenius took a labor-intensive process and made it simple and seamless, freeing up time for Sue to spend with her goats, her team and volunteers.
"I love that the program makes it easy to sign up and it sends reminders to our volunteers," says Stovall. "This allows them to reach out to us if they need to. It also allows people to check back in for newly opened slots without me having to keep track. I look at the list once a day to see who is due to arrive. Easy peasy!"
SignUpGenius loves helping advance the mission of Paradox Farm Creamery with our tool! (And we might even look into a goat cuddling company outing...)
