Both Nathan and Sara are US Air Force veterans. StotesMcGoats's story starts in Mountain Home, Idaho where we lived for 9 years as we were both stationed there at the time. As it typically goes in the military, you find your family away from family within the area you work. You work together, often on long shifts, deploy together, spend your holidays together and hangout together like a bunch of close nit siblings. Just how it is, your brothers in the military are often just as close to you, if not more in some cases, than your family. We call this group "Framily"...friend + family =...you get it.  After we got married in 2010, we rented a little trailer house on a 5-acre horse lot. After awhile we found that it was difficult working full time and keeping 5-acres mowed so, we searched Craigslist and got our very first goat, named Bobo. I think there is an entire blog on here that explains how we got into goats and all the trouble we went through learning about goats, so if you're interested in that story make sure to check it out. Our last name is Stotesbery, Stotes for short, one of those nights while sitting around the fire, hanging out with our crew, they started calling us StotesMcGoats and it stuck, so this is how StotesMcGoats got it's name. We eventually bought a house just outside of Mountain Home where we were able to build the correct fences for our herd of goats as the land lord of the doublewide didn't want us to build the fences needed to keep our furry friends contained. From there we got chickens, turkeys, ducks, pigs, a garden and, eventually in 2013, a kid. After many years, Sara was coming up on the end of an enlistment and had to make a choice of whether or not to push through to retirement or separate. There were a few injuries that were affecting how she was doing her job and was off and on profiles that affected her physical fitness tests and to those who've been there, you know it's a bit of hit on your pride to be the broken guy/gal. At the same time we had a family event in which we tried to get a humanitarian assignment to the area, but she wasn't allowed to cross train from her current career field for it to work. The farm here in Iowa (previously owned by Sara's mom and known as Pandora's Farm) was offered to us and it gave us the opportunity to be closer to family and follow a dream. So, in 2017, we chose to separate from the military on a positive note and here we are; StotesMcGoats Farmstead & StotesMcgoats, LLC (soap) in Iowa. The story doesn't end there, but the author's ability to sit still will!

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