“I traded my lucrative career as a mortgage broker to shepherd goats. Now I plan to have herds across the country”

I was born in Clarendon, Jamaica, and spent the first 25 years of my life there. Goats are a regular part of life on the island. Most households have as many animals as their land allows, and often you’ll see goats grazing in someone’s yard or wandering down the street.

When I was seven, my grandmother took me to visit a property our family owned that farmed sugar cane and mangoes. It also held a huge herd of goats, and as soon as I laid eyes on them, I begged my grandmother to let me take one home. I was amazed by the way they all moved as one big unit without crushing one another. She said no, that this was where they lived. I started crying, so she came up with a challenge: if she put me in the middle of the goat pen and I could hold on to a goat for long enough, she would let me keep it.

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She lifted me up over to the other side of the fence, and sure enough, the goats started stampeding around. I was able to cling to a brown female goat, and I held fast until the herd stopped moving. My grandmother stayed true to her word, and I was able to bring the goat home. I named her Brownie, and she was my pet for the next 10 years.

Eventually I left home for Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, to study on a scholarship. I was good with numbers and wanted a stable career, so I chose accounting. By this time, I was more interested in hanging out with girls than herding goats. I started working as an accountant after I graduated. I had family in Canada already: my father had moved in 1966, and he ran a business in Orangeville called Roy’s Upholstery. In 1990, when I was 25, I received a transfer to the Deloitte Touche office in Mississauga. I moved with my then-girlfriend, whom I married in 1991, a year after arriving.

Related: “I left Toronto, found the love of my life and bought 14 goats”

When I got here, Deloitte called me up into their office at Square One and told me, “We know you were supposed to transfer here, but we actually have to lay people off, so we’re sorry, but we don’t have a position for you.” I panicked and started contacting small companies, offering to do their accounting for half the price. I wasn’t making much money—I was barely able to afford the accounting software I needed to do the job—but I got 13 clients that way. Over the next few years, I was able to find more stable work.

After about a decade, I started to crave more freedom and the ability to be my own boss, so I decided to become a mortgage broker. I enrolled in courses, and after a year I was fully licensed. I had the financial background and was good with people, so it was an easy transition for me. The work went well, and I was able to afford a cushy lifestyle for my family. My wife and I had two daughters after moving to Canada, and they both went to private school. We all vacationed back home in Jamaica every year.

Related: “I gave up my fast-paced life as a Toronto film executive to raise a herd of Nigerian dwarf goats”

Meanwhile, my dad had come to miss raising animals and practising the kind of subsistence farming he had grown up with in Jamaica. In 2018, he moved to Amaranth, Ontario, rented a farm and purchased a herd of goats. But, when I visited him in 2019, I noticed that the hay was piled very high on the ground of the barn. He was in his late 70s and couldn’t muck out the stalls as frequently as he used to. I could see that he needed help.

I started coming every weekend to spend time with the goats and help him clean out the barn. I remembered how much I’d enjoyed being around them as a kid. Each one has a different personality, and they aren’t shy about showing it off. Almost every herd has an older, wiser female goat that the others follow, because she knows where all the good food is. I started giving them names—Wipeout, Munchkin, Blizzard—and began to think about how I could turn this herd into a third career.

I did some research and discovered that, in Europe and Asia, herds of goats were being used to control invasive plants. In the US, goat grazing was being used as a way to prevent wildfires. I linked up with a group called Goats on the Go, which had over 12 years of experience in what’s called targeted goat landscaping, to figure out how to do it on my own.

My dad had received a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2013, and during the pandemic, we learned it had metastasized into bone cancer. He had to move back to Orangeville to be closer to medical care, so it fell on me to take care of the goats. I was also raising my two daughters solo—in 2015, my wife had a brain aneurysm and moved into a nursing home. Now, as the sole caregiver for both the herd and my family, my whole life changed. I wasn’t able to respond to my brokerage clients at the drop of a hat the way I needed to. I had to get serious about making a living from the goats.

In 2020, I got a call from Cheryl Post, a natural environment specialist at the City of Toronto. She explained that she’d been looking for someone who offered targeted grazing services for the past three years and had come across my business, Goats in the City, on the Goats on the Go website. We started to talk about working together.

Meanwhile, I had nowhere to put my goats. I wasn’t able to rent the farm my dad had lived on because it already had another renter, and an arrangement to put a barn on the next-door neighbour’s property fell through. In the spring of 2021, I brought the whole 120-goat herd out to a forested property owned by a friend of a friend in New Lowell, Ontario. The land was covered in goldenrods and very high bush, and by August, the goats had completely cleared it. But I was allowed to keep the goats there only until the first snow, so every day was stressful while I tried to figure out what to do next.

I was living in East Gwillimbury at the time, so I had to travel an hour and a half each way to see the goats every single day. I was doing janitorial work to make a living—it was all I could make time for between taking care of my daughters, herding the goats and driving around to do both. I cleaned two libraries in King City and a church in North York, making approximately $1,200 a month. But, all the while, I was in talks with the City of Toronto about a pilot project using goats to do targeted grazing. That kept the dream alive.

Still, in the meantime, I didn’t know where to turn, so one night I came home and drafted an email to every single mayor and councillor in York region. I explained the concept of goat grazing and asked for help getting my business off the ground. To my surprise, every mayor responded, and a King City employee gave me what I needed most: somewhere to put my goats. They connected me with someone who owned a property with a horse barn on it, who offered to let me keep the goats there.

Covid delayed the City of Toronto project by a few years, but in 2024 we were finally ready to get to work. I brought the goats out to Evergreen Brick Works to eat all the buckthorn, an invasive species, on the property for three days and two nights in June. I slept in a trailer on the property to make sure the goats didn’t get out.

On our first walkthrough of the Brickworks property, I noticed a duck flying around and saw that it was protecting a nest filled with eggs. We put a flag there to make sure we wouldn’t step on it. The goats completely avoided the nest, and we left without any damage done. If the city had treated the property with pesticides, it might have displaced the bird or damaged the eggs. But, when we used nature instead, it worked out beautifully. In 2025, we came back and did it all over again on another section of the meadow.

Ever since that first project wrapped up, Goats in the City has been booked solid. We’ve done golf courses and private properties, and we’re on contract with the City of Mississauga for the next two years. We’ll be servicing 10 different parks all over the city at least twice each season. Often, people don’t know what to expect when it comes to goats—they’re known to be stubborn, escape artists, difficult to take care of—but once our clients see the impact the animals have, our contracts typically get extended. We’ve even been contacted by Emcon, the company that does maintenance for Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation, to bid on a project maintaining certain government-owned properties attached to the highways.

The eventual goal is to turn Goats in the City into a franchise. At the moment, we have two employees, and of course my daughters help me out when they’re not in school. We’ve had to turn down calls from places as far away as Vancouver Island, Calgary and Ottawa. I’m only one person, and I can’t travel that much. My long-term plan is to see the targeted grazing industry grow across Canada, until there are at least 3 million goats doing prescribed grazing country-wide in the next 30 years. That would mean a tenfold increase in the number of goats in Canada, but I believe it’s possible.

What I love the most about this work is my connection with the animals. People often comment on my bond with the goats: they follow me around and answer with their voices when I call out to them. I’ve spent time connecting with them one on one, observing their social patterns and establishing my leadership among them. The goats taught me what they like to eat and the order in which they prefer to eat those things—something I wouldn’t have been able to start my business without. Every day, I’m in a kind of zen situation, awed by the power of nature. And with goats, there’s never a dull moment.