MATTHEW BURNETTEStaff Writer

What do you do with a horse who’s resting up from a pretty severe injury and has to be placed on stall rest away from its companions?

You get it a friend to keep him company.

At least that’s what Nicky Purvis aimed to do when she bought her first Nigerian Dwarf back in 2016.

Unfortunately, the horse ended up not liking the goat, so in order to keep the goat from getting lonely, she got a second goat to keep the original one company. Skip ahead to 2025, Purvis now owns Budderball Farms and around 40 goats of varying breeds.

Purvis says that she’s always been an animal lover and has had horses since she was a kid. She explained that she went all in on the decision to raise goats.

“I kind of just jumped into the goats feet first,” she said. “I’ve always been one of those that picks up something and obsesses over it. I want to do all of my research before I get into it.”

Despite all the research she did beforehand and now being nearly a decade into it, she says that she is learning something new about the animal every day, whether it’s from reading, consulting with friends or vets who have experience with the animals or just trial and error.

“My vet calls the goats ‘second class citizens’ because there’s not nearly as much research into them and their medications and their treatments as there are something like cattle or horses because there’s so much more money in that industry which is kind of odd because worldwide goat milk and goat meat is consumed much more than any other, but in America it’s not that way,” Purvis explained.

The main breeds that are raised at Budderball are the aforementioned Nigerian Dwarfs and LaManchas, a larger breed that produces more milk and has both the distinction of being born without ears and being the only milk breed that originates in America.

“They’re adorable and I love them. They’re my favorite,” Purvis said with a laugh. “I feel like in the last couple of years I’ve gotten further away from Nigerians, and it’s nothing against the breed, I just prefer the LaManchas a little bit more. I have Nigerians here that I’ll always keep, and they’ll be retired here, and they’ll be my pets, but I don’t show them.”

Many of the goats at Budderball come from other states like Washington, Ohio, and Oregon in order to bring in different genetics. None of the bucks at the farm come from Tennessee.

All of the goats have names. Purvis sometimes themes the names with the does and their offspring just to add some fun to the process.

For instance, she has a goat named Lollygag whose mother’s name is Hornswoggle and all of her babies have names like Bamboozle, Malarky and Chupacabra,

Purvis shows her goats at anywhere from five to ten local fairs and shows a year and has won a number of ribbons that she displays in the milking room in her barn as a reminder on the wearier days of farming.

She loves it when people come up and ask about the goats, specifically their lack of ears, but cautions the public to be a little kinder when asking.

“If somebody is going to ask about somebody’s goat, dog, horse or whatever, by all means ask about it, but don’t be a jerk about it,” she said. “Don’t ask why they’re so ugly or why they are stupid because if you come at me with that kind of energy, I’m probably going to tell you something ridiculous like we cut them off and fry them.”

Purvis noted that, since COVID, dairy goats are becoming more prevalent at livestock shows as opposed to being primarily focused on meat goats. The Coffee County Fair will be hosting dairy goat judging for the first time this year.

She’s just happy to win rosettes or when her goats become grand or reserve grand champions because it’s a step closer to them getting a permanent mark on their registration papers.

“Every time you win grand champion somewhere, that is a championship towards a permanent champion on your goat,” she explained. “So if your goat wins grand champion three times, they become a permanent champion and that “CH” attaches to the front of their name officially, so on their registration papers it has “CH” in front of their name.”

The goat raising process, as Purvis emphasized, isn’t something that you can do for a year and learn if it’s working, but instead, you have to have a couple of generations to know that they are improving on the generation before.

One of her favorite things is watching the process play out over time.

“We’re at a point now that we’ve got some adult does who carry our herd name, and they’re milking and they’re showing and are successful,” said Purvis. “It’s cool to see that and be like ‘Wow, I planned that. I picked their mom and their dad and made it work.’”

Though there is a lot to enjoy about raising goats, there are some challenges involved as well. The loss of any goat weighs heavy on Purvis’s heart knowing that even after doing everything possible to save them, losing goats is an inevitability.

It also requires an enormous amount of work. In addition to running the farm, Purvis also has a full-time job with a contractor at Arnold Air Force Base. Her boyfriend, Colton Casteel, also has a full-time job and works on the farm.

“It’s not just a thing where you have a goat at home that you go home and milk when you want to. We currently have 12 or 13 does who are in milk, and they have to be milked twice a day,” explained Purvis. “I get weird looks from people who do not understand why we’re doing that. We spend a minimum of two to four or five hours a day just doing chores out in the barn on top of our full-time jobs. It’s not the fact that we do dairy goats, it’s wondering why we do that.”

You can tell that all of the effort comes from a place of love and a desire to make sure the product that comes out of Budderball Farms is of the highest quality.

Purvis hopes to get into doing herd shares eventually. Right now she makes soaps and lotions from the goats’ milk that she sells through her Budderball Farms Facebook page and website budderballfarms.com. She also sells at the Manchester Farm Center and makes gift baskets with her products around Christmas.

2025 is the first year that Budderball has sold the goats’ milk as a product under a pet food license with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. Purvis, intimidated by the process of getting the milk ready to sell, would dump a lot of the excess milk until she talked to some friends about its potential.

“My friends have been like ‘What are you doing? It helps pay the bills,’ so we just started that this year, and I feel like we’ve had a good response,” she explained. “We have three or four customers that come like consistently. We have one or two that come every week and a couple that come every other week. We’re just getting the word out.”

Purvis has a fridge outside where customers can come pick up the milk and pay her digitally. She depends on the honor system to make sure it’s only going to customers.

The biggest misconception about goats’ milk that Purvis has heard is in regard to the taste.

“A lot of people think that goat milk is going to taste like a dirty petting zoo,” she said jokingly.

Casteel recalled an experiment they did with his 14-year-old son Noah and the milk.

“We had my son do a blind taste test, and he couldn’t tell the difference between whole milk and the goat’s milk, so the 14-year-old couldn’t tell the difference between what was from the store and what was from the goats,” he said.

“Your management makes the biggest difference with that,” added Purvis.

The milk is sold raw, and to make sure it is not contaminated with any bacteria, it’s filtered three times, once in the line during the milking process and twice when they bring it in to bottle it.

The bottles then have to be placed in an ice bath for 30 to 40 minutes to bring the temperature down to prevent bacteria from growing because a refrigerator won’t chill it fast enough. Purvis also does monthly milk tests.

“We milk all of our does, and we take a sample of it and send it to a lab and get the results and it will tell me how much butter fat was in their milk, how much protein was in it and their SCC (Somatic cell count) which indicates an infection or something in that utter that could make that milk taste bad or make the doe sick, so we monitor that really closely as well,” she explained.

While it may seem like a lot of effort to somebody on the outside looking in, Purvis gives a simple reason for all of the work that they put in.

“I want them clean, happy, and healthy.”