This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories. Up next, you'll meet Genevieve Church.

Genevieve runs a very unique business in San Francisco, that is, city grazing. City grazing is a sustainable land

management organization powered by goats. Here's Genevieve to tell us about how the business

came to be, and also the history of goats

in San Francisco, beginning with Estelle West, the first goat lady.

Goats in San Francisco have a long history, and women raising goats in San Francisco, there

is a long history.

Estelle West was raising goats, and she was at a time when having livestock for

meat, for milk, was relatively common still in the Bay Area.

But she was one of the last people who was actually in San Francisco proper raising her

animals and making her living from them. San Francisco was busily becoming a city and didn't want livestock within city limits anymore.

Estelle West was quite a character apparently and loved to flout authority

and she just wanted to keep raising goats the way her family had been.

And so she was a mild criminal, shall we say, in keeping her goats in places where the city didn't really want goats kept.

After her, this very sweet woman that I met who was the second goat lady of San Francisco,

she had been raising goats on Petraro Hill, which was a little bit less of a settled area in San Francisco.

When she was a kid, her family had about five or six goats, sometimes as many as 15.

They didn't have as large of a herd and

they were not dependent on them for their income, but they were a part of their family's income

stream. And when the city was laying the first sidewalks in Petrero Hill, her goats got out

and ran across the newly laid cement and left goat hoof marks in San

...