For lack of a better title. I know most homesteaders used animals for food, eventually (layers, milkers, etc) but we won't. I have heard of folks being veg and raising a farm as such.

I googled but couldn't find any resources: books, blogs, websites, anything.

Anyone come across families or businesses on the web they can share?

I have many friends who I talk to regularly that have farms/homesteads but they all use the culls, the bucks the unneeded or wanted as food for themselves or for their animals. Before we find land I would like to have a game plan at least somewhat thought out before purchasing animals and what we would like to have them do on our farm.

Silly ramblings from a vegetarian farmer ;).

The owners of Fias Co Farm are vegetarian and raise dairy goats. Not sure what else they have or do but I've been reading their site the past few days.

thanks, I remember that now but I don't remember them going into detail or sharing any books of interest. Did you happen to see any?

Molly's Herbals - Books (http://fiascofarm.com/herbs/books.htm)

This is the list from her herb site - not sure if anything is helpful. Contact her. She is really nice and helpful.

Will check that out for sure. I remember contacting her a long time ago when I had cheese-making q's and she was very helpful.

Thanks again, Heather

well i wouldn't say we have a "farm" but we do raise farm animals and are vegetarian. We have chickens and eat their eggs but we also have sheep, goats, ducks, and alpacas. they're mostly just furry friends! If and when we move somewhere with more space, we'd eventually like to get a couple cows.

a book that was pretty helpful to us was the "back to basics" reader's digest book from like the 70's. It's pretty old but it's a wonderful resource (not necessarily super veg friendly but still has some great info in there!).
another great magazine that we get once in a while is "hobby farms". AWESOME resource! Love it!

We had hens and were ovo-lacto at that point. I have no problems eatig the eggs of coddled and pampered pets.

We are learning to eat eggs but it has been 15 years for me and has been a bit of a challenge. The kids are skeptical too. My oldest (15) won't even consider it.
They will, however, let me put them into things, so I do that instead. Dh loves a good omelette and has missed having those since we married, 10 years ago (he was a total carnivore until we met and married and now rarely eats meat).

I think what I am most concerned with is getting too large with our animals. What then? I wouldn't think of putting any down or selling them off as meat. What do you guys do about that? Do you have willing buyers?
Like I said, we are just in the dreaming phase as we still live in the city limits and i may be way over thinking things here but I like to have a sortof plan.
Thanks for all input, and Marlena, I will look for that book. Also, I take Hobby Farms and LOVE IT too, also Grit and Mother Earth News (although not so much aimed at the animal aspect as the green living).... Oh and Backwoods HOme, I get on occasion. Most of these are Christmas gift subscriptions from my MIL ;).

I think if you go the veggie route with animals, you're right - getting too large is what you'll have to worry about most. And you'll have to be willing to pay for feed for older, nonproducing animals until they die. Also give some thought to whether you could put down an animal (have a vet do it I mean) if it became ill or just elderly/infirm and unable to function well. Just think about those end-of-life scenarios and what you're comfortable with.

I don't see why it would be an issue as long as you started really small. The problem would come when the first set of animals stopped producing milk/eggs and you wanted more. But I think you'll figure it out as you go along...it really depends on how much space you have, etc. Our layers are 2 yo and we now have 17 of them plus 21 new ones and we'll keep most of them, so it can be done. We did need to double the size of the coop.

We're ovo-lacto vegetarians and have hens and will soon have ducks. What Mamabear mentioned is definitely something to take into consideration re: the getting more birds to lay eggs when you still have old ones hanging around. 2 of our hens are 4yrs old. One still lays pretty frequently (1-2 eggs every 3 days) but the other one hardly ever lays. That might be an issue if we had more of them. If you don't eat eggs then that wouldn't be a problem.
I think that really to be an ovo-lacto veg you have to be able to accept the fact that some people are going to eat meat, because one can't reasonable be able to keep dairy or egg animals without some of the males (and often "worn out" females) being food.
If you don't want them for food production, you could get some that aren't productive for whatever reason and that would otherwise probably be slaughtered. For instance, we have a retired show chicken, a retired show breeder, and one that was an accidental cross of 2 different breed show breeders. There are always a ton of (mostly male) farm animals looking for homes on petfinder.com.

lauren and Thea, thank you for your very insightful and thoughtful responses. I truly appreciate it!
yes, the old age issue is one we must take into consideration and I do believe that we have already come to the decision that old-timers will be kept around til they pass.
Our goal is to have enough land to house not only my immediate family but also my MIL, my mother and my father (they are not married and haven't been for about 30 years) in seperate dwellings. They would be more than willing to help to differing degrees with chores, etc. My MIL wants donkeys as pets... so she can be in charge of all geriatric inhabitants ;).