(clanging) (rumbling) (relaxing music) - [Cunningham] Being a
goose farmer in Mid-Missouri was never in my bucket list. Ever. (laughs) I was a landscape designer in Chicago, and I had become very urbanized and very comfortable with that lifestyle. My mom, so she bought this
place about 25 years ago. It was just a hunting cabin. We'd had this type of
property in our family before, and it was a way of
getting everybody together and really enjoying it. And this was kind of a
dream come true for her. (relaxing music) About 10 years ago, she had
been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, so I moved in, and thinking it was going to be maybe a short stay, but then she was diagnosed with cancer, pretty much right on the
heels of my coming here, and given six months to live. It was lung cancer. She'd refused treatment, she
wanted a quality of life, and instead of six
months it was four years. We went from never hugging each other, telling we loved each other at all, to it was perfectly
normal to sit on the couch and hold hands and watch a movie. (laughs) Which was, I don't know, that's soul-nourishing, right there. So, yes, it's been a very
fortunate experience. After my mom died,
because she was an artist, and it's hard for people
to understand this who don't have artists in their lives, she only liked living in white, so this entire cottage was white. She had painted the wood beams, she painted the floors white. So, it was really starting from scratch, and I don't think there's
an inch of this cottage I haven't touched several
times with paintbrushes. It was bringing the wood tones back to the floors in fake wood, just striaeing some color on it, giving the timbers a
faux wood finish as well, really warming it back up and bringing in some design elements that were charming. When I was designing the interior, I knew I wanted things like cubby beds, because that's a very specific Swedish, North-European thing, 'cause they're warm and cozy, and I couldn't figure
out where to find it, then a friend of mine in
Alabama told me about Houzz, and she said, "You can go there, "it's just like, you put somethin' in, "and you get, like, a bazillion pictures." And it was perfect. It helped so much in
trying to visualize things. One of the first things I did when I decided to do the bed and breakfast was I researched every bed
and breakfast in the area to see exactly what they
had, what was missing, what they had that was
great, what I could build on, what I could improve upon. I know I hit it, because people
come in and they go, "Ah." (laughs) They suddenly relax a little bit. It seemed like a good place
to park all of my collections and sell them if people wanted them. But I'm having a problem with that, because nobody wants to buy anything, 'cause they like it here, the way it is, and sometimes they even
bring me things to add to it. (laughs) which is really wrong. But they do it anyway, and it's
very loving and very sweet, but then I have more things to sell that people aren't buying. (laughs) I certainly was not
figuring it to go that way. (honking)
Geese, come on! Come on, geese, come on. My sister, my brother,
we started a goose farm because we needed to
bring in some extra income just to pay taxes and
cover expenses down here, and we looked into cattle, but it was me, I had to deal with them, and they were too big and dangerous. I looked into goats, and
they were still too big and dangerous, and we kept
getting smaller and smaller, and then we realized that
a goose would be good. A goose is a grazing animal, it's literally like a
small, feathered cow. We started off with 35,
just to see how it went, what they ate, how much they
ate, how much mess they made, how I would have to take
care of them in the future, and then it immediately
expanded in next year to 200, and then the next year it was 400. So, as the business grew,
we kept throwing in more and more geese to the mix. About 400 is about where I can handle it. (honking) Well, the hardest thing, really, is how attached you get to them, because it's an animal
that's known to bond onto whatever it sees when it hatches, so the first two years it
was extremely traumatic, because they treat you like their mom. They follow you. I can have 200 geese following
me around the pastures, and then I realized that they
could bond onto the dogs, (laughs) and my life would be a lot less upsetting in the end. So, the livestock guardian
dogs, the big Pyrenees, are in with the babies when
they're just a few days old, and so they start bonding onto
this big, white, fluffy dog, so wherever the big,
white, fluffy dog goes, that's where all the geese go. It's a constant state of gratitude. It's almost exhausting to
be this grateful to be here. (honking) (birds chirping) The skies are beautiful every day. I've taken more photographs
of skies since I moved here (chuckles) than I know what to do with. I dunno, there seems
like a sanity to be had in caring for a farm and animals. It's the same day in, day out, it's very kind of comforting, and at first it really kind
of rubbed me the wrong way that I wasn't doing anything creative, I was just doing the same
thing over and over again, and then it became kind of soothing, and you kinda fall into this, and you kind of work with the seasons, and you're out there experiencing all the seasons with the animals, and I can't explain it beyond that. It's a very, it's a sane way to live. (serene music)
