From Wall Street to Dung Heap
By Jenn Balch
To my professional network: I have an important career update. I now use my Excel hands to carry goats. The fingers that once flew across a keyboard, creating 100+ tab spreadsheets in a single night, now scoop under the legs of individual goats who accidentally get separated from my growing herd.
According to my resume, my professional career began with an investment banking analyst position at J.P. Morgan. Off paper, my very first job was as a hand model for Fisher-Price toys, around the same time I started kindergarten. Maybe this is why I think about my professional journey hands-first.
On paper, though, my journey started as predictably as most young professionals on Wall Street. After earning a fancy college degree in finance, the career path is often linear and predictable. It reads almost as fool-proof as the instructions on the back of a pasta box. Get a job at an investment bank. Recruit for a private equity firm just a few months after starting at said investment bank. Survive two years as an associate. Get accepted to a top-tier MBA program. Re-enter an investment fund. Each day repeats until retirement. Drain hot water and serve.
Maybe my move towards professional goat grazing would not surprise my former colleagues, even if they knew me when my career path still aligned, during Steps 1-3. There were hints sprinkled along the way that I might not make it, that I might stop trying to make it. I kept my running shoes under my desk at J.P. Morgan and sprinted 37 blocks home if I left the office before midnight. While at a traditional private equity firm, waiting for comments hours after midnight, I scribbled down a story reimagining corporate life if a llama in a pinstripe suit were hired as the next Vice President. And most of my professional network already knew that five years ago, instead of seeking an elite MBA program, I applied to an investment role focused on sustainable food systems.
The partners at the traditional private equity fund, when I turned down their offer to write MBA recommendation letters, asked why. They had spent their careers at Goldman Sachs, until it went public and paid out enough cash for them to start their own fund. Success was a very familiar flavor from a very familiar recipe.
I don’t remember my explanation. But I do remember the truth.
I missed land. I missed the tangibility I had felt as a farm kid, with hands in mud, smelling the freshly cut grass and playing hide-and-go-seek among sky-high cornstalks. As I wrote from a beige cubicle, I missed connection to
The sun, the moon,
The stars beneath.
The new life created
Under soles of barefeet,
This realization came after a deal assignment for which I worked seven days a week, all summer, without a single day off. I saved the Uber receipts so I would not forget how many hours I spent sitting at a desk crammed into a spare hallway while life happened outside. I promised myself I would never again miss an entire season.
When I left that firm, I thought my departure would be the most dramatic career shift I would ever make. In what seemed like an impossibly radical departure from the fail-safe recipe of high finance, I took on a hybrid role in food-focused venture capital and philanthropy. Instead of building those 100+ tab spreadsheets for 100+ hours a week, I began to dial up socially conscious entrepreneurs and share grass-fed beef grilling duties with regenerative ranchers. My Excel hands were repurposed to build networks and learn about the importance of good soil on our home planet. Even though it was a step off the well-beaten path, it felt like a step in the right direction for me.
Several years later, when COVID hit, a lot of professionals were brought to their knees. They learned the carrying capacity of what they could bear, and what they could never again give up for an entire season, or longer. I had already glimpsed how shaping a life from scratch is different from the precision of following a paint-by-numbers path. But at the time, I was still a professional asset manager logging countless keyboard hours.
Starting in March 2020, I took calls while standing barefoot in a creek, while watching sunsets over a spring meadow, while climbing the hillsides where I grew up. I started a garden to feed my parents fresh food, by layering fallen leaves and doomsday newspaper clippings to physically create new soil with my own two hands. My connection to land grew stronger by the day.
So in May 2021, when I met my current business partner, Donald Arrant, an experienced livestock manager who shared all the same ideas about how we could restore soil health by grazing goats on degraded land, my biggest career move yet appeared as a simple “yes.”
Yes, I would walk away from multiple job offers in sustainable finance; yes, I would leave my old work laptop forever in the closet; and yes, I would sell all my high-heels and buy two pairs of muck boots. Six months ago, over tacos in a town by the Hudson River, our goat business was born.
Today was just another day on the job. I tied several moveable fence lines together and set up new paddocks where our 56 goats will graze a client’s unwanted vegetation (poison ivy, burning bush and mugwort, to name a few). Last week a goat accidentally escaped, and I carried him, with my own two hands, 100 yards across a field and back to the paddock. We helped each other find what it feels like to be home again.
Here, on this side of the fence—outside of LinkedIn, cubicles and spreadsheets—I am starting over. I am Jenn Balch, and I am the co-founder and co-owner of Fat and Sassy Goats, a Hudson Valley-based business replacing chemical herbicides with goat grazing for vegetation management. I used to work in finance, but I’ve forgotten all the Excel shortcuts I once knew. Instead, I’ve retrained my hands to create new life. This might even be my last professional update, at least for a while.
The grass is greener, and the goats are waiting.
Jenn Balch was raised south of Buffalo, NY but now calls New York City home. After spending her early career on Wall Street, she started a custom goat grazing business. During her time at Cornell University, she studied creative writing and French. She has published essays under her maiden name (Jen Werbitsky) in the Stone Canoe and Pidgeonholes.