A little about us...
Mtn Mist is a farm in northern
Arkansas run by Louis and Rose Marie Brandt.
Through the years, they have had more than abit of help from their children-Nathan (the oldest), Angela (the person responsible for this website), and their youngest daughter Nikki (who joined our family after Nathan and I went off to college). You can see Rose Marie and Lou at Silver Dollar City in the picture above with Nikki sneaking her face in the picture. We moved to the Ozarks in 1983 and to our current home in 1986. Rose Marie and her family raised dairy goats for close to thirty years and operated a dairy (affiliated with Jackson-Mitchell) for many of those years.
After I left for college in 1996 the dairy closed permanently; however, we are still keeping a few Boer-cross goats for pasture management and supplemental income. We raised several commercial heifers with our extra goat milk and those
heifers were the foundation to a small beef cattle herd. Between the goats and cows, we have always needed an extra hand to help out on the farm. For many years that help came in the form of our Australian shepherds. Rose Marie bought her first aussie, Panda Bear, over twenty years ago from the first litter she could find in Arkansas. Panda Bear
and later Shep and Sadie were amazing work dogs. They were extremely intelligent, loyal, and had tremendous herding instinct. Eventually
our four-footed friends grew old and passed away. We purchased other aussies to replace these first dogs and found that not all aussies could really work livestock anymore. Therefore, we purchased two puppies
from Pincie Creek around 2000 and have worked to maintain our own line of working aussies since then starting with those two. During most of the time we were managing our dairy and increasing our farming skills at our current home, Rose Marie and Lou were serving as teachers for the local schools. Last year, they made the hard decision to retire from teaching to open a small country store that they built from the ground up. The store should open in the beginning of May 2010 and is our next great adventure.
