RIVERSIDE

“These guys are nice,” Sarah Leonard tells me as we stand outside the goat pen, letting a couple of Nubian males lick and nuzzle our hands. “We’ve had some bucks in the past that have been mean. One of the bucks that we had wasn’t rude, he was awful. We finally had to get rid of him because he was just kind of scary.”

They sold him off, she says.

“There is actually a market for angry goats?” I ask.

“He produced really nice kids,” she explains. “We liked what he produced, but we just got tired of dealing with him.”

Keeping a goat flock isn’t something Leonard was born into; the Missouri-native grew up in a military family, and the only ag bona fide she can offer is, “I had a friend who had a dairy farm.” Yet here she is, raising three does, all pregnant at the moment, and two bucks, talking about feeding them from her family’s hay fields and turning their milk into yogurt, ice cream, and fertilizer for the garden.

And also soap, which is where this story is headed.

Leonard first arrived in this part of Iowa in 2011 when her husband, a pastor, started a church here. They started out living in West Chester, where Leonard connected with the proprietor of Sweet Doe, a soapmaker who used milk from her goats in her formula. Soon Leonard had a goat of her own; then she became the soapmaker’s apprentice. Today she owns the business, which she runs from her home in rural Riverside.

That path wasn’t as easy as it sounds.

“When we first got our goats, I was like, I should make soap. We have all of this extra milk,” Leonard says. “The first three batches I had to dump out in the driveway because it was such a disaster. I didn’t even get to the stage where you can let it set. That was really discouraging.”

Fortunately, her friend from Sweet Doe “asked if I wanted to kind of join her and help her out.” So for about four years, Leonard learned recipes and processes, and when her friend was ready to sell, she purchased the company and now makes and sells soap and body care products like the pro she has become.

Which doesn’t mean she doesn’t continue to experiment and try new things, which don’t always work out on the first try. She tells the story of her Acne and Detox bar, which is a mix of activated charcoal and purple Brazillian clay; the first batch “looked like a child just kind of threw stuff out.” She shows me the last bar from that batch, which her family has been trying to use up; it looks like a black lump of coal.

“You learn a lot in your failures,” Leonard says.

Her second batch, it must be noted, turned out beautifully, with a lovely black swirl through the bar.

People seek out goat milk soap, and Leonard has plenty of regular customers at her Kalona Farmers Market stand in the summer, and at JK Creative and Kalona Creamery, where her products are also available. Some 30% of her sales come from her website, sweetdoe.com.

What exactly makes goat milk soap special? It’s gentle, moisturizing, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, exfoliating and balances skin.

“Goat milk contains alpha hydroxy acids,” she explains, getting into the science. “Lactic acid helps remove dead skin cells from the surface of your skin, leaving new cells on the surface that are smooth. [It’s] high in Vitamin A, which helps repair damaged skin tissue, reducing lines and wrinkles and helps control acne. [It] contains the mineral selenium, which helps prevent sun damage to your skin.”

Using the milk of Nubian goats specifically is also a plus; their milk has a higher percentage of butterfat – 5% on average – which makes for an extra moisturizing soap.

“If you have issues like eczema or psoriasis or anything like that, then [goat milk soap] helps to soothe and calm the skin,” Leonard says. “I know my mother-in-law, after she does dishes, she’ll just wash her hands with the goat milk soap, because the dish soap irritates her hands, because she has psoriasis. So she’ll wash with the goat milk soap and it just calms it down.”

She gives another example of a Vietnam vet suffering from Agent Orange exposure, whom she gave some product.

“His wife reached out to me a week later, and she’s like, ‘Your soap is like magic,’” Leonard says. The places on his skin that burned and itched were starting to clear up, he reported.

“I kind of have a soft spot for military, just because I come from a military family, and my husband does too, and my oldest son is in the military,” she says. As a result, she has a stack of soap bars she hands out to veterans when she can identify them, perhaps by the hat they are wearing.

Soap bars aren’t the only products Leonard sells under the Sweet Doe moniker, although they are the only ones made with goat milk. Body butters, sugar scrubs, lotion bars and lip balms are part of her line, as are bug and lice repellants. She even has products for dogs, like shampoo and paw balm.

“I try to keep it as natural as possible,” she says.

Leonard is always looking to add new products; “We always test it out on ourselves or friends or other family members just to see if it’s going to work or what they think before we decide to give it to the public,” she says.

“Oftentimes things are born out of desperation,” she adds. “If we can’t find what we want somewhere, then ok, let’s just make it.”

Leonard says she spends about 10-15 hours a week on her business; it’s a side-hustle for the Pathway second grade teacher and 5th & 6th grade girls basketball coach. And while you might be thinking Sweet Doe equals ‘sweet dough,’ as in $$$, Leonard says she’s happy not scaling up to that level as this point.

“I love teaching too. I love the other stuff that I do, and so this is kind of to do on the side,” she says. “It’s enough for now.”

But she does leave the door open a sliver to the possibility she could become the millionaire next door.

“I don’t know,” she says. “We’ll see.”

Find Sweet Doe soap and body products, including those for dogs, at the JK Creative in rural Kalona, Kalona Creamery on Highway 1, and the Kalona Farmers Market this summer. Purchase online at sweetdoe.com.