Milking Dreams
At 10 years old, Adeliah Curry is running a full-fledged goat business, using her profits to lift up others
At just 10 years old, Adeliah Curry (pronounced A-dee-lee-ah) is already proving that business savvy doesn’t have an age requirement. Among her herd of dairy goats, she moves with quiet confidence, understanding the quirks of each one of her animals. There’s Junee, the drama queen, Daytona, the wannabe house pet (she loves to sit on Adeliah’s lap) and Galaxy, the adorable goat with ears twice the normal size. This might look like a backyard hobby, but it’s not. It’s a budding enterprise.
“This is Mazzie. She’s a tan buckskin and this is her second freshening,” Adeliah says as she walks down the line of goats. “Freshening means how many times she’s had kids.”
Adeliah got her first two goats — Mazzie and Daytona — in May of last year. By the time August and MontanaFair rolled around, Mazzy had given birth to a buck and Adeliah ended up taking home more than a half-dozen awards with her goats, earning the titles of Overall Supreme Champion Doe and Overall Supreme Champion Buck.
“I remember saying, ‘Oh my gosh. I just won the MontanaFair!’” she says. “That’s huge. It’s the biggest show in Billings.”
But that’s just a sliver of her story. Along the way, she’s also raising her goats to help other children.
Adeliah operates Kidz for Kids, an online shop where she sells not only her goats but goat milk soap and Kidz for Kids merchandise. The proceeds are used to help other children. In the fall, she helps buy school supplies for youngsters in need. Last Christmas, she made a coloring book to hand out at the holiday parade, and she regularly stocks local food pantries with her handmade soaps.
“It makes me happy to help others,” Adeliah says. She points to the 4-H pledge as her inspiration, which urges members to use their hands for larger service. “4-H teaches you how to start a business to care for the community,” she says.
When Adeliah first began with the service group, her mom thought she’d show sheep. Not only did her daughter not want sheep, she wanted dairy goats. And not just any dairy goat, a Nigerian Dwarf goat.
“She had been watching ‘Weed ‘Em and Reap’ videos on YouTube. It’s a lady in Arizona who raises dairy goats,” Katie Curry shares. The videos chronicle the lives of DaNelle and Kevin Wolford, who raise and breed Nigerian Dwarf goats. “She watched those videos for a year.” Katie remembers telling Adeliah, “Okay. Let’s find a goat breeder.”
A simple Google search brought up a dairy goat farm called Coyote Kidz in Livingston, owned by Lorelei Hallock.
“We walked right into the best mentor you could ever find,” Katie says.
Lorelei spent time answering questions and trying to see if the Currys would be a good fit for her goats. As a licensed judge serving on different committees within the American Dairy Goat Association, Lorelei also knew what it would take for Adeliah to show these goats.
“It was luck that I got hooked up with a really good kid who had a lot of motivation,” Lorelei says. “She just kept coming back with more questions.”
This past July, Lorelei took Adeliah and her mom with her to participate in the American Dairy Goat Association National Show in Grand Island, Nebraska.
“We showed up at the biggest goat show in the United States. They had a hospitality room with leather chairs and hors d'oeuvres overlooking the arena,” Katie says, adding that Adeliah and her goats would be competing alongside 4,000 other goats.
“I showed my goat, Junee,” Adeliah says, adding it was the first time she had entered a showmanship class with this goat.
In a showmanship competition, a judge looks at the way the animal is shown, the attention span of the showman as well as the disposition of the goat. “There’s posture, elegance and grace,” Katie says. Each exhibitor has to be able to share all elements of a goat’s physical structure and answer any and all questions about the animal.
“For two hours nonstop, she had that goat set up and watched the judge. It was huge,” Katie says.
In the end, Adeliah walked away with third place.
“She was competing against kids who are generational big time dairy goat farmers. That was a pretty amazing accomplishment,” Lorelei says. “It was a big stage with a lot of really intense competition.”
Just a few hours into the ride home, Adeliah “was already gibbering away about her plans for next year,” Lorelei says. The young girl talked about her breeding plans and the animal she hoped to show.
“She already has a five-to-ten-year plan on where she wants to take her herd,” Lorelei says. “That’s pretty spectacular motivation.”
These days, Adeliah is simply focused on the hard work of running a successful herd. If she’s not up by 7 or 8 in the morning, Adeliah laughs, “My goats are just screaming at me.” She has nine of them now.
“She milks them three times a day,” Katie says. “There’s no sleeping in and it doesn’t bother her in the least.”
Each pail of milk is liquid gold.
“When we first got goats, we got to thinking. We should make goat milk soap and sell it. So, we went back to our breeder and she taught us,” Adeliah says. She’s learned to create this creamy soap in scents like cactus blossom, lavender and sandalwood. She sells out when she hits vendor shows and her mother says there’s a customer in Oregon who special orders her lavender scent.
If you ask Adeliah about her history, she’ll point to her great-great-great-grandma, Guadalupe Brannin. She, her husband and their 11 children left New Mexico bound for Montana in 1895. The couple not only moved 360 head of horses, but 90 burros and 900 Angora goats along with them. Five generations later, goats are back in the family. Adeliah uses the Bar Lazy Heart 6 brand created by her great-great-grandfather.
Her ancestors would, no doubt, be proud to know she’s honing her craft to help others.
Adeliah says the message behind Kidz for Kids is rather simple. “I have a poster that says, ‘one girl, a few goats and a mission to help kids.’”
