The following post is an archive of our GoFundMe campaign which began in 2020.
Hello everyone,
This is just a quick and short update to give you a little heads-up for the reopening of the farm. We’ve been extremely busy getting the farm ready and putting the best precautions into place that will hopefully allow a safe and enjoyable time for everyone. And then there was also this current heat wave that put the breaks on most our work as we really had to concentrate on keeping our animals – and all the staff – as cool, well and hydrated as possible. I’m relieved to say that most of animals seemed to deal quite well with the heat, they looked a little exhausted but they all made it through alright. Many of them rested much more that usually and they were really more moody. We provided lots of water, some frozen buckets too and they were all allowed to stay out longer into the evening to give the barns a chance to cool down as much as possible. Still we are are very relieved that the temperatures have dropped down a little and we don’t constantly have to worry about the animals overheating.
We’ve planned to align our reopening date with the beginning of phase 3 of BC’s Restart Plan, however we’ve decided now that we would really like to try out if all our carefully made plans are actually working in real farm life. That’s why the farm is opening for the first time again tomorrow (Wednesday, June 30th) – whenever we are finally ready: we’ll just take up our positions and open the gate. We will not announce this “soft opening” publicly – since we currently have a limited occupancy of 50 people inside the farm and we don’t want our visitors to be disappointed about possibly very long lineups outside the gate. But we all feel very strongly that we like all of you – who have supported us during this long time and who have taken such an interest in our journey – to have a chance to visit first. That’s why we agreed to send out this little update just as a special Thank you and invitation to you.
Please be prepared that there will be changes inside the farm yard that will impact your visit: visitors will currently not have access to the buildings or any of the animals enclosures – including the petting area. To further avoid crowing there will also not be a public goat stampede for now. Visitors will be able to walk around designated public pathways and watch and admire the animals over the fence.
We know that these are difficult times for everyone and that all of our visitors have been waiting a long time for a chance to visit the farm again. We are looking forward to welcome all of you back and are really happy to share our life and work with the animals much more closely again. However, in order to keep animals and humans safe we elected to do so slowly and with precautions in place.
That’s all from me tonight. I hope tomorrow and all the following days will go well. Just opening the farm again – what seemed so normal 16 months ago – has become this really big step that we’ve worked so long and hard to master. But now, we are here again and I think we are all excited (as well as exhausted) to being able to finally say: “Welcome back to the farm!”
I hope to see you all soon – please be kind and patient with each other and the staff, this is a very new possibly stressful situation but we are all doing our best.
Stay safe,
Claudia
