Making All-Natural Soap with Goat Milk

Martha and Becky are sisters who started an all-natural soap company from their family farm. Their organic soap is made with the milk from the goats on their farm, which were once seen as a financial liability. Now all the money they make from soap sales goes right back into their family farm.

Becky shares, “Not everything needs to come from Walmart or Kroger’s. You can help a farmer out — a small farmer like us — by buying their product.”

Video Transcript

Meet Martha Enriquez & Becky Jones: soap makers

Becky: All the money we make goes back into the farm. It saved the family farm.

(goats follow Martha as she puts out a bucket of food)

Martha and Becky make all-natural soap using goat milk.

(Martha shows off the goats in the barn)

Martha: These are all the mothers that — all their other babies have been weaned. So these are the six that we’re milking right now.

Becky: About 12 years ago, is that right?

Martha: Yeah.

Becky: Our mother — we had had dairy goats for years, and our children showed them at the county fair, and they just ate a lot of food and were very expensive and not terribly productive, other than going to the fair every year.

I’d let you guys try this, but then I’d have to hold the camera.

So our mother decided — she asked us, could we make a batch of soap, which we’d never done before, for her little old lady friends at church. She wanted to give them soap for Christmas. So we’re like, good dutiful daughters. So we said, “Sure, Mom! Whatever.” So we did. And it was really good, and they really liked it, and they wanted more.

(Martha walks over to a wall filled with boxes of bars of soap)

They now sell about 14,000 bars of soap each year.

(Martha makes soap in the kitchen)

Martha: So, in these measuring cups, I have already measured the frozen goat’s milk — it was actually yesterday’s milk — and it has the exact perfect amount of lye in it.

Old-fashioned soap is made with three main ingredients: a liquid — which we use the goat milk — lye, and oils. 

(mixing the ingredients with a hand-held electric mixer)

Most commercial soaps are gonna have detergents and preservatives and chemicals in them, which do dry your skin out. And this is an all-natural kind of an old-fashioned lye soap with nothing in it but the oils that we use and the goat milk and some fragrance.

They hold open houses and host students to share their agricultural expertise.

Becky: There’s an incredible amount of people that, especially children, that don’t really realize where their food is coming from. And I think, to be able to know where your food comes from, know where your products come from, know that the animals that you’re using to make those products are well taken care of, it should be important to people.

(Martha beckons for the goats to follow her)

Martha: Come on, everyone.

Becky: And not everything needs to come from Walmart or Kroger’s. You can help a farmer out, a small farmer like us, by buying their product.

(Martha and Becky milk a goat together)