OWANECO - A bad day at home with goats is still better than most days on the road with explosives.

Such has been the experience of Vicki Boliard, who runs the aptly named "Afterthought Farms" with her partner, Thomas Vavrik, in the sticks near the bustling burg of Owaneco.

Actually, there aren't really any bad days with the goats, which are designer French Alpine models that strut about in smoky brown coats offset by subtle shades of black and white. Life with them is peaceful and serene, and Boliard doesn't miss her stressful 20-year career as a truck driver when she often hauled explosives destined for Operation Desert Shield and the Gulf War.

She hasn't quite managed to beat her truck tires into plowshares but, in slipping out of the fast lane to seek a calming escape back to nature, Afterthought turned out to be pretty close to an ideal destination.

"Sometimes, I think my entire life is an afterthought," she said, as the 16-strong goat herd bleats a background chorus. "I don't preplan anything, I fly by the seat of my pants, and it seems to work."

Vavrik, meanwhile, is a city boy from Chicago who had to learn to adapt to the Owaneco pulse, or rather the lack of it. But he's come to revel in 15 acres of bucolic restfulness, where a beverage on the back porch is a nice way to spend an evening.

"We're not going to get rich, but we're happy," said Boliard, 42.

Opting out of regular work to raise goats for a living takes more than a little afterthought, however, and the goats didn't come first. The opening venture in 2005 was a dog grooming operation, which Boliard had learned as a child, and that has since morphed into a kennel facility, too. Owners came to trust Afterthrought and wanted them to look after their precious pooches.

Being lactose intolerant was to later open up the pathway to the goats, the milk of which she can drink because of something complicated about the way the fat globules are arranged. She started breeding them for milk production, admits to getting a little "carried away" and now has a farm yielding 8 gallons of the rich and creamy stuff a day. What to do with it all?

More afterthought has led to a thriving line in goat cheese, soaps made from goat milk and goat milk-based lotions good for soothing buns that feel like they've been butted by a billy goat gruff. "And the lotion is also really, really great for dry skin," said Vavrik, who swears by it.

A former meat-cutter, he also sees gold in them there goat contours, but selling goats for meat is still under lively discussion at Afterthought. Boliard, who names the animals and talks to them, isn't sure she's ready for that.

"I said, 'If you bring customers here to buy them for meat, you'd have to tell 'em to lie to me about what they're buying them for; then they can have one of my goats.' "

She doesn't have similar qualms about the farm's free-range chickens, which, admittedly, are as dumb as a sack of feed but look so glowing with health and vitality they might be extras in a nostalgic Disney movie about life on the vanished American farm. Afterthought raises meat chickens, as well as chickens that pop out sumptuous free-range eggs at the rate of 40 a day.

"You ever had a free-range egg?" asks Boliard. "They taste better, and the texture is better. My chickens look so good because they're happy."

In season, you can add organically grown veggies to the sales mix along with handsome Irish Dexter cattle, which only grow to about half the size of regular cattle. They've got Dexters Brutus and Sophie so far, with Sophie expecting and more cattle coming from outside to join them. Despite being named and no doubt spoken to, future Dexters will be gracing customer's tables when the time is right because, ultimately, the farm has to make a living.

"My goal when I started this is that I would like someone else to pay for my food," said Boliard. "I take half the cow and sell the other half to someone else."

The sales advantage is that all this stuff is organically reared, no drugs and chemicals, and Afterthought sells you the same food the owners feed themselves. Customers are welcome to come and browse and see the quality of the animals and their surroundings in person. Everything is available for inspection.

Boliard and Vavrik also are keen supporters of the "Buy Fresh, Buy Local" movement, a program of the Illinois Stewardship Alliance, which seeks to promote the efforts of local growers and producers. "You hear of these salmonella outbreaks and things, and it's always with those big corporations," adds Vavrik.

"It's all coming from big operations that don't, or won't, spend the time necessary to make sure their product is safe for everybody. You never hear of cases like that with small farmers, farmers who also eat what they raise."

So, there you have it: Good, clean, wholesome food grown by people using nothing but sunshine and enthusiasm down on a farm that looks like the set of a made-for-TV movie. Well, most of it does. There is the peculiar case of Riki the goat who, if not milked promptly, is happy to do the job herself.

"She, er, sucks on her own teats," said Vavrik, who looks a little embarrassed. Boliard smiles brightly. "Kind of like she's carrying her own lunch," she adds. "Sort of a never-ending cycle, really."

treid@herald-review.com|421-7977

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Afterthought Farms: 565-0381, or vicki@afterthought.farm