Sherry Siebenaler with one of her 16 Morgan horses, “Island Cha Cha,” at her farm in North Hero. She came up with the name because of its funny foot movements. Her herd reflects her interest in genetics and passionate pursuit of a specific Morgan horse bloodline. (Photo by Andrew Nemethy) H igh up in the Lake Champlain Islands, Sherry Siebenaler is living the life of Old MacDonald, updated with a 21st-century twist and sung at a tempo that will leave you breathless.

You remember him, the farmer with the chicks and the cow and the geese and the whole E-I-E-I-O thing. She’s added a “heritage” here and a “heri­tage” there to the old nursery rhyme, and everywhere a Labrador—plus a passel of friendly barn cats, a farm heri­tage if there ever was one.

Then there’s a few verses that likely would have Old MacDonald scratching the matted hair under his straw hat in bafflement. How she went to Brazil to study the esoteric science of equine embryo transfer. How she went west in a determined effort to corral specific Morgan horse blood­lines, and to Colo­rado to learn how to handle and freeze equine semen.

All eyes are on Sherry Siebenaler as she holds out a treat. Her five AKC Eng­lish Labradors follow her wherever she goes on the farm. (Photo by Andrew Nemethy) And more recently, to Tennessee to dive headfirst and heart-deep into the preservation of rare endangered faint­ing goats, a flock she’s now built up to 19.

It doesn’t take long listening to Sherry Siebenaler to sense that she’s a woman on the go. This is nothing new – she finished high school in three years because, as she puts it, “I wanted to get going.”

She’s been going ever since. She’s won the Morgan Mile race in Randolph (it recreates the original race won by Justin Morgan in 1796), trained a world champion Morgan reining horse, as­sembled a distinct genetic branch of the Morgans and qualified her farm as a USDA facility for producing equine embryos, a rare top-level designation that will allow her to sell them over­seas. And she’s not even a vet.

The goats at Morgan Hill Farm in North Hero are curious and friendly. On the left is a fainting goat, on the right a handsome, larger goat named Cleo. (Photo by Andrew Nemethy) Could Be Crazy?

“My husband thinks I’m crazy,” she says with a laugh, something that breaks out often on her square face, which is surrounded by shoulder- length brown hair and looks more youthful than her 48 years.

Her husband Roger, a mech­anical whiz handy on the farm, is no strang­er to passionate pursuits himself. He races Formula Vee sports cars, and has won three national champion­ships. “We’re both very active people,” she says, a shared trait that helps their hec­tic marriage.

To understand her drive, it helps to tour around her farm in North Hero, because without this 75-acre parcel all that energy may have gone in very dif­ferent directions.

On this morning, she’s walking hat­less around the neat pens that hold her genetically distinctive Morgan horses and unusual Tennessee fainting goats, the north wind delivering arctic air with all the subtlety of a sledgeham­mer. She’s followed by an inquisitive, amusing, and ever-present entourage: five black and golden English Labrador retrievers who shadow her every move.

“They want to be with you so much,” she says, looking at their attentive faces.

Her parents started dairying in the 1960s in North Hero and she helped out with her brother and sister raising chickens, Shetland ponies, and goats. “I grew up on the farm, so it was always in my blood,” she says.

Selling the Farm

But in the late 1970s, the farm busi­ness started to go south. Walking into the clean, long Quonset-roofed barn, her voice takes on a hint of bitterness as she points to the two concrete bases where blue silos once stood. The cost of building them helped squeeze the farm out of business, she says.

“When the place went through bank­ruptcy, I watched how it literally tore the family apart,” she says. “I told my mother I’d like to try and save it, and she told me I couldn’t do it, because I was a woman, and that gave me the kick in the butt to do it.”

It must have been a heck of a kick. Working a second job driving a bus in Burlington, which she does to this day, she saved and bought back 40 acres and a “rickety mobile home.”

Then she bought the remaining acres, no small feat in this pastoral summer tourist idyll, where tiny house parcels litter what were once farm fields, reflecting the ascendance of lake recreation over agriculture. Her parents jokingly – and admiringly as well – now call her the “land baron.”

“My mother is totally blown away,” she says.

Getting back the family farm, whose spacious fields are ringed by small cot­tages and homes, gave her a place to raise her Morgans (she has 16 now.) But that was only a first step.

Her Own Path

Giving up an apprenticeship at the University of Vermont Morgan Horse farm in Weybridge, she forged her own educational path and a career track that reflects her passion for preserving vanishing heritage bloodlines.

Today, vets come to her to learn about “flushing embryos,” “vitrifying tanks” and “semen straws” in liquid ni­trogen storage.

“My goal in life – not that anybody else will ever care – is to preserve the original Morgan horse like they used to be,” she says.

A Morgan Obsession

Vermont’s famed horse evolved in three bloodlines, whose story Siebena­ler can relate at length, involving the government and Lippitt lines and one tied to horseman J.C. Brunk. The long and short of it – and size plays a big role in her genetic interest – was that she could not “find the Morgan horse I grew up with.”

That would be a well-built horse smaller of stature, very people-orient­ed, one you can “work ‘em all day, drive ‘em all day, then take them to the horse show… they don’t care,” she says.

That’s what she has now in the hand­some black stallion and bays and chest­nut horses that roam the paddocks and training ring at Morgan Hill Farm, calmly looking on in their shaggy win­ter coats as she goes by.

Her genetic interests also brought her to breeding the stocky AKC Eng­lish Labs. They’re smaller and more mellow than their American cousins – she jokingly calls them “Lapadors” be­cause they think they’re small enough to crawl on your lap.

Pups from her litters are always spoken for. Her well-known dogs have ended up in ads for Vermont’s Small Dog Electronics (the Apple store) and have gone to a family as far away as Colorado.

The goats are a more recent addi­tion, with a genetic double twist right up her alley. Hefty (“like a bacon pig with a goat head”) and incredibly cute, they’re raised for meat and are not only a rare breed but have a rare genetic defect called myotonia, which makes them “freeze” up (she compares it to a cramp) and fall over when startled. They’ve attracted the positive interest of several chefs, and should bring in some money to help the farm do more than break.

If all goes well, she hopes to retire from the bus driving and focus on the farm, the “amazing circle” of people she’s met in her genetic explorations, and a new career writing children’s and adult books about her Old MacDonald farm life.

“The biggest remark from everybody who visits here is, ‘I can’t believe how everybody gets along,’ and I tell them, that’s because they’re all happy.”

(In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places. Andrew Ne­methy is a veteran journalist and writer from Calais.)