By Matt Skoufalos
Growing up in Remsen, New York, Jennifer Copperwheat remembers a childhood of seemingly limitless discovery on her family farm. The property was alive with domesticated animals and wildlife, and Jennifer was invested in all of it.
She had an Irish setter, a bunch of cats, a rabbit; even her own cow. The family property extended to a little slate rock waterfall that she and her sisters called “the pretty land,” and the little menagerie would trail behind her to see it, too.
When the veterinarian visited to attend the herd, she would tag along and ask questions. She learned how to deliver calves; how to give shots to the cats with distemper that were left at the end of her quarter-mile driveway, the last stop on her elementary school bus route.
“I just had such a love for animals,” Jennifer said. “I told my father that I hate that when the cow doesn’t give milk you sell it and it gets slaughtered. We had chickens that we’d have to kill for dinner … needless to say, I don’t eat meat anymore.”
“I always told my father, ‘One day I’m going to have a farm, and I’m going to save animals.’” she said.
Jennifer worked as a commercial designer in New England until the early 2000s, when the family moved to South Carolina. She followed her curiosity into a healthcare career with Spartanburg, S.C., (Mary Black Health System at that time), and volunteered to travel to Greenville Memorial Hospital for additional training in advanced ultrasound techniques. Jennifer marveled at the way the imaging modality unlocked her understanding of the body.
“I got really very interested in going through all the different areas of pediatric ultrasound – brains, lungs – things they didn’t do back then,” she said. “I was floored at how many things you could see, and how you could see it live.”
Life in South Carolina was good, until one day, Jennifer got a call from her father that he was feeling poorly. She ran down his symptoms with him over the phone, and advised him to go in for testing. When physicians diagnosed her father with pancreatic cancer, Jennifer took a leave of absence from work, and drove to New York to take over his chores on the family farm. Suddenly, she was once again milking the cows twice a day and stacking hay in the barn while tending to her dad.
“My husband Marcus had to take on our three kids that summer,” Jennifer said. “They came up and learned a little work ethic – but they didn’t have to chase the headless chicken around the peony bush for dinner.”
A surgeon in Albany extended her father’s life by another seven years via a Whipple procedure. That time was spent with the family, who moved up from South Carolina to be together with him. Jennifer started working at Oswego Health in 2017, and has been a cardiovascular sonographer with the institution ever since. Her family purchased a 14-acre former flower farm nearby, and when her father did pass, she used some of the money he’d left her to install a barn on the property.
That barn helped Jennifer make good on her childhood oath: today, it is a haven for rescue animals that otherwise wouldn’t be candidates for rehabilitation. There’s Duncan, the Scottish Highland cow, Freya, another cow, and Cooper, the rescue dog who serves as their companion. Two pigs, Sheamus and Ferguson, were saved from a feeder lot. Jennifer also cares for two horses, including one with dwarfism, a couple of retired goats who no longer gives milk or bears kids, and two other goats, Remington and Benjamin, who survived a barn fire near Binghamton, New York.
“We have a good time out here,” Jennifer said. “We have a lot of people with kids who could use a place to go pet a goat.”
The farm serves mostly as open space for the animals to wander in and out of the barn, and graze the fields. Jennifer gardens there, and whatever she plants seems to take root because “the soil here is magical.” However, as much as the property supports her agricultural curiosity and affords livestock an opportunity to age in place, it also facilitates community gatherings that Jennifer enjoys hosting every April.
“We have an Earth Day party every year, play goofy games, host a lot of bands and serve food,” she said. “We don’t charge money for anything we do. We just want to bring people together because I think it’s important for people to gather and have fun.”
“I love having family around me, and being able to come together,” she said. “I love having gatherings here in the farm; anything to have everybody come over. It’s so much fun to embrace life and have friends and everybody around you.”
The farm hosted her son’s wedding, for which Jennifer planted 240 feet of sunflowers and built an arbor using woodworking skills learned in childhood from her old bus driver. Today, that arbor marks the entrance to her garden.
Jennifer’s newest ambition, aside from travel, is to perfect her sourdough bread recipe, for which she’s already begun grinding her own wheatberries to make flour.
“If I’m interested in something, I immerse myself,” Jennifer said. “That’s the best way to get a taste of life in every area you’re interested in. I get bored easily, so I just keep going and learning other things.”
Being returned in her later years to the life in which she grew up has helped underscore not just Jennifer’s love of animals and farming, but the variety of experiences that come with building community.
“I never say no to an adventure,” she said. “We get this one life. Are you really going to spend it wondering just what it would have been?”
