Thieves arrived at midnight with wire cutters, tore down fences and trampled the stinging nettle brush. Their goal? A pen of goats, some of them pregnant and some who had just given birth.
“They took the tamest, best goats that would come to them,” said Dan Drake, owner of Drake Family Farms in Ontario. The joint was scouted well before the thieves carried out their heist on the night of April 15, when they robbed 12 of her farm’s 500 goats – including her children’s beloved pet Nova .
Drake’s goats were easy marks. Goats cannot do much harm by biting (they do not have incisors on their upper jaw), and the goats that were at Drake’s Farm had their horns burned off to prevent them from growing. Lacking natural weapons of their own, their domesticated goats depended on two Great Pyrenees dogs for protection from hungry predators. But the cunning robbers somehow knew that the dogs could not reach the part of the farm they were breaking into.
“They took one of my favorite goats, which I would never sell even for $12,000,” he said, crying over the phone. Drake suspects that a goat that was suffering from pregnancy toxemia was long dead because it did not receive the medicine it needed the next morning.
The Drakes filed a report with the Ontario Police Department and are offering a $3,500 reward in the hopes that the goats will still be found. However, so far, efforts have been in vain.
Some people sent photos of goats roaming in their neighborhoods, thinking they had found the stolen animals. ‘But they’re not drakes,’ Dan’s wife, Kim, said, explaining that their animals are well kept and clean. “I knew right away they weren’t our goats…they weren’t shaggy,” he said.
Nor have the goats reached any local dairy or slaughterhouse, Det. Michael Williams, who is investigating this suspected case of grand theft.
This is the latest chapter of a long time uphill battle Drake has struggled to keep his dairy farm in the Inland Empire afloat since 2010. Drake cares for about 200 dairy cows a day through his veterinarian practice, and over the years he has spent thousands of dollars from his job making what he claims is the best goat cheese in the country.
“He will tell you he is addicted to (goats),” said Kim, who works as a nurse practitioner when she is not caring for her three children. “He’s (Drake) calling, I got caught up in it.” Kim Drake estimates that her husband works about 120 hours a week to manage two businesses at once.
Dan Drake, whose skin is sun-red from working outside for long hours, gets dreamy-eyed whenever he talks about his devotion to the goats. He’s part of a shrinking population of Americans who still call farming a profession. His family has been ranching for generations in Salt Lake County, Utah, since the 1880s, where their original farm still exists.
He was only 13 years old when he registered his first goat with the American Dairy Goat Association. – and he was immediately attracted. “Understand I’m kind of a cat lady, that’s just me, but I have goats,” said Drake, who knows almost every one of his 500 goats by name.
Drake’s business is one of 42 remaining goat farms authorized by the California Department of Food and Agriculture to produce dairy products, and the theft last week has put it in an even more financially precarious position.
Eventually his business went into darkness Mendocino Farms partners with Drax To create an entree called “Save Drake Farms Salad” that paid off all his debts, but the pandemic turned his fortunes around.
“COVID killed us,” Drake said. “Most of our cheese was sold to high-end restaurants, and they were all closed for months.”
After COVID, Mendocino Farms ended its partnership with Drax to save money, he said, and he struggled to find a new partner, Sweetgreen. Facing imminent closure, Drake cannot turn down his passion project, even though it takes him about $600,000 a year to run his farmstead and Sweetgreen can only afford $400,000.
The Drakes try to make up for the rest by selling cheese at farmers markets and on their farms, where they also offer tours of goat herding, cheese tasting, and more. Drake also sells male goats to families to eat, but he does not slaughter any animals himself.
The key to making great cheese for drakes is simple: keep your goats happy and clean. “There’s some pretty bad-tasting goat cheese in the world,” Drake said while visiting a milking station.
Goats, like cows, need to be milked twice a day, but Drake said most places don’t follow the same strict schedule as his business. “There is no cleaning… no checking, you just get what you get. And that’s why cheese tastes bad,” he said.
He spends about $16,000 per month on 50 tons of high-quality alfalfa hay for his animals. “When we take on a lot of extra time and we double our expenses and labor … it comes back to us as a quality product,” said Drake, who noted that his farm is certified. Have human status. Given how much labor he puts in on the farm, it is sometimes unclear whether Drake is working for the goats or whether they are working for him.
But recent setbacks haven’t stopped him from dreaming. “I want to create a regenerative farm that actually enhances the environment, not destroys it,” he said.
He will soon be moving to a much larger plot of land in Riverside County, where he hopes to cut costs by installing batteries or solar panels that can help offset Edison’s summer rising prices for electricity. And he’s realizing he can harness the agritourism industry’s dollars by offering more educational tours of farms.
Drake said he has faced many difficult times in business when the logical thing to do would have been to close it down. But he never had the courage to pull the plug.
He and his wife also see the farm as a public service. According to Kim Drake, people who visit the farm feel more deeply connected to nature as the source of their food.
At Drake’s Petting Zoo, families and children are all around the goats, who wander from person to person in search of snacks and attention. Jennifer Sleeper, a trauma therapist, was recently caressing a newborn goat, one of dozens her mother was giving birth to.
“(This) is the happiest I’ve been in a long time,” said Sleeper, as one orphan baby lay peacefully in her lap and another baby was hungry for milk and sucking her finger.
Sleeper is a pescatarian, but cheese from Drake Family Farms is one she will eat because she sees ethical sourcing in it. “I think it’s really nice to support places like this,” said the Venice resident of the farm, which is one of only two goat dairy operations in Southern California, the other being in San Luis Obispo County. She hopes to still volunteer if Farmstead moves to Riverside County.
“The cheese,” he added, “is very tasty.”
