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By Will Geschke
The News-Review
MELROSE, Ore. -- Sylvia Smith has been around goats for a long time.
Her parents started raising goats when she was just 5 years old. At a young age, she started raising sheep, but found her true passion in goats, first at the age of 12.
"I felt like sheep were kind of dumb," Sylvia said. "They didn't have as fun of personalities as the goats, and I decided I really, really liked them."
Over the past four and a half years, Sylvia, now 16, has grown her herd into a group of ten Kiko goats -- on top of working a job, taking school classes, participating in FFA and running a YouTube channel to document her journey. Bred for meat production and survivability in the hilly pastoral environments of New Zealand during the mid 1980s, Kiko goats are a rare breed Sylvia chose to raise because of their low maintenance and increased parasite resistance, which allows her to spend more time on schoolwork and at her job.
"They're really good at raising up their kids, their offspring, on their own," Sylvia said. "They're pretty hearty."
Just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Sylvia decided to start a YouTube channel, Silver Pine Kiko Goats, as a way to document her journey raising goats, while educating the public on ways to learn from the experience.
"People can see the good, the bad and the ugly side of farming, and be able to get a really good feel of that" Sylvia said. "I've had people reach out to me and tell me about how they've had similar experiences that are able to learn from me, learn about goats and get a small feel of farming. That was probably one of the coolest things I've done."
Sylvia has a goal to reach 1,000 subscribers on the website. Over the past two and a half, she's accumulated 858 of them, but she hopes to get more as she will continue the channel through high school.
She does most of the work on her own -- a tall order for somebody in high school, working as a farmhand and who will be be the Roseburg FFA chapter president when the school year starts again this fall -- but she gets some help from her siblings as well.