Graduate fields
Animal Breeding, Dairy Science, International Agriculture
Areas of interest
Small ruminant management/marketing, small farms, youth extension
Outreach and Extension Focus
Dr. Tatiana L. Stanton is the primary organizer of the Cornell Goat Program which is outlined below. She also helped develop and co-chairs the New York Small Farm Livestock Processing Issues Work Team funded and supported by the Cornell Small Farms Program. The work team provides resources on marketing and processing livestock. The team also works with regulatory groups (NYSDAM and USDA FSIS), farmers and processors to educate people about regulatory policies involving livestock processing and marketing and, when applicable, participates in discussions to interpret and/or modify regulations.
Description of Cornell Goat Extension Program
Goats are an important part of New York agriculture. New York ranks fifth in the nation for dairy goat numbers. Our goat dairies provide an active cottage industry to meet the strong demand for gourmet goat cheeses and dairy products in New York City and other urban centers. The demand for goat meat is also centered in the Northeast U.S where more than half the goats in the United States are slaughtered. Small ruminants such as goats and sheep are very important to the preservation of green space in New York.
The Cornell Goat Program interacts with a diverse group of goat enthusiasts from hobbyists to commercial producers and from youth to adults. It is a part-time program funded primarily through grants. Activities vary depending upon funding and issues that seem most critical for goat farmers. In 2004 much of the time was spent helping farmers with marketing projects and completing a website at http://www.sheepgoatmarketing.info that includes a searchable directory of lamb and goat buyers and processors, later hosted by the University of Maryland extension program due to funding constraints. Funding for our goat program from 2005 to 2008 was primarily through a NESARE Research and Extension Grant to improve the viability of meat goat farms by:
- developing a kidding season mentoring curriculum to help new farmers through their initial kidding seasons (30 formal mentoring teams participated);
- developing sample budget spreadsheets and farm business summaries based on real farm information (16 farms participated) to provide more accurate financial comparisons for new and experienced farmers;
- creating fact sheets based on observations from real farms to familiarize farmers with several management practices to improve herd productivity or year round production; and
- offering a series of market readiness and advanced grading workshops (122 participants) to help farmers better evaluate the suitability of their goats for targeted markets and to improve the grading skills of farmers acting as marketing coordinators or livestock dealers. In 2007 we also established a goat extension website.
Our observations based 56 on-farm studies centered on creep feeding, dewormer resistance, flushing, out of season breeding, and pasture management to reduce worm loads. Although the numerous participating farms increased their knowledge base, the fact sheets for four topics became available only recently. Results from the study on pasture management to reduce worm loads were incorporated into a series of workshops on integrated parasite and pasture management. Herd profile summaries indicated that farms are adopting the beneficial practices identified in this study and are also more successful at out of season breeding than they were at the initiation of the project.
In December 2008 we started working on a 3 year long program looking at methods to reduce labor, feed and financial inputs at kidding and lambing without sacrificing animal health and productivity.
The Cornell Goat Program works directly with both adults and youth because most goat farms tend to be family run operations. Our primary goat outreach events are the Cornell Sheep & Goat Symposium and Caprine Outing, a 3-day workshop series geared towards families, 4-H groups and commercial producers. The family formatted event gets excellent evaluations. We also manage a youth goat extension website. In addition, the Cornell Goat Program is responsible for coordinating youth goat activities at the New York State Fair with assistance from Dr. Tro Bui and the Cornell Youth Goat Advisory Committee.
List servers and work teams
Dr. Tatiana Stanton also helps moderate several list-servers for farmers and processors hosted by the Cornell Goat and Sheep Programs, including two well established list-servers: small ruminant marketing (srmarketing-l [at] cornell.edu, 320 subscribers), and livestock processing issues (LivestockProcessing-l [at] cornell.edu, 255 subscribers).
