Meet the PMJS Board
Lorinda Barnes, PMJS Founder & Registrar
North Woods Homestead, Idaho
Lorinda and her husband, Lance, own North Woods Homestead, in Idaho. Wanting to know where their food was coming from, they bought two bred Jersey cows in 2012 and dreamt of Spring calves and fresh Raw Milk for their family. The dream expanded into a passion for pure little Jerseys.
Lorinda and her family homestead on 60 acres in the northern Rocky Mountains. They produce grass hay for their growing herd of Purebred Mini Jerseys. She’s a Master Gardener, cans their harvest, breeds rare Salmon Faverolles chickens, and of course, makes lots of dairy products.
Lorinda is the Fundraising Chairperson on the Board of Directors for the non-profit, National Ladies Homestead Gathering. She’s the founder of PMJS and a leading voice in utilizing genomics and DNA for breeding Purebred Mini Jerseys.
PMJS Board of Directors 2024
Ashley Shupe
Shupe Family Farms, Indiana
Ashley Shupe and her husband, Jordon, reside in Indiana on their third-generation family farm. She hasn’t always been driving tractors and milking cows in rural America. Ashley was born and raised in the coastal metropolis of Miami, FL. Searching for a slower pace and more organic lifestyle she landed in the Midwest in 2017. Seeing the sprawling landscape fed her fascination with farming and grew into learning more about modern food production. Rather than ease into producing food with a small garden that expands over time, she jumped into dairy cattle full force. Her focus is on Midsize Jerseys that produce A2/A2 milk. She’s taken courses on bovine artificial insemination, farm management, dairy processing, and production. She’s also expanding her Ag knowledge by working in the family farm’s freezer beef and grain production.
Miranda Johnson, Treasurer
Crooked Smile Acre, Idaho
Miranda Johnson knows homesteaders! In her Executive Staff volunteer position for the not-for-profit, National Ladies Homestead Gathering, she’s tasked with establishing chapters. Miranda talks to women across the United States about their journey that led to the desire to connect with other homesteaders. She’s mastered building community and many of the tech resources available for that purpose. She spent countless hours on her grandparents’ homestead where they raised beef and chickens alongside a Jersey family cow. Now, Miranda lives with her husband and son in the original log cabin on a historical homestead in North Idaho.
Tracy Howe, Canadian Liason Director
Mother Howe’s Little Cows, Ontario, Canada
Tracy Howe is the oldest of three children and grew up in Saskatchewan on a mixed farming operation. Of all the family farm endeavors, cattle were always her passion. She worked in the cattle industry in many capacities, including commercial livestock hauling, on feedlots, in auction barns, and as a veterinarian assistant while raising her children. In 2010 Tracy and her husband, Wally, returned to cattle ownership. He runs a small beef herd. The dairy and Miniature cattle are “her thing” and she operates Mother Howe’s Little Cows. She’s been instrumental in starting the Canadian Miniature Jersey Association.
Wally and Tracy recently relocated to Northwestern Ontario where they make hay for their cattle, garden, and do almost everything as a team. Tracy is also known for her amazing baking skills, especially pies and large batches of bread from scratch. She’s skilled at cheesemaking and utilizing the gallons of milk supplied by her herd.
Sarah Milcetic, Director of Web Services
Better With Thyme Farm, West Virginia
Sarah Milcetic and her husband, Peter, started Better With Thyme, a holistic farm located in Shepherdstown, WV, after relocating from NYC to the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. As a young couple in the city, neither imagined they would become farmers (he was an accountant and she was a website developer). The journey to farming began with their first child, whose reactions to the food they were eating made them want to distance themselves from the industrial food system. After realizing their child could safely eat chicken eggs from their backyard hens, they began to wonder about adding milk back to their diet. After several failed trials with milk from local farms and more reactions in their second baby, the idea went to the back burner and 8 years went by with a dairy-free family diet.
After moving to West Virginia, the children asked to pull over every time they passed a cow pasture. When they saw Mini Jersey cows in person at a fair they never looked back. Their first heifer came home in 2018, and since the whole family thrives on their cows’ raw A2A2 milk the growing herd has become an integral part of the farm.
Better with Thyme focuses on homesteading holistically and helping others to do the same by providing holistically raised livestock, guardian puppies, and education – if a couple from the city with no livestock experience can do it, so can you!
Sarah Burton, Community Outreach Director
Sabbaticus Farm, Tennessee
Sarah is the herd manager on their newly established A2/A2 micro-dairy, Sabbaticus Farm, in McMinnville, TN. Her husband and farm manager, Matt, along with their two young children, are all about raw milk, real food, and making use of God’s bounty for medicinal purposes. Their priority is to farm sustainably while regenerating the land through rotational grazing.
Growing up as the oldest of eight children, Sarah’s family didn’t have the resources to have livestock but they lived a quarter mile from a horse stable. Her love for horses could not be contained, so she came up with the idea to volunteer to muck stalls in return for riding lessons. Those lessons horses taught Sarah about how to be around large animals, including what they’re saying with their body language. From that point forward, she was obsessed with horses and spent every second on or around them.
She eventually became a Registered Nurse, started working in that field, raising babies, and eventually earned a Master’s degree in Nursing Informatics. Through all this, the love of all things farming never left her heart. Nowadays, she runs the public-facing aspect of the family farm business and handles most of the animal husbandry decisions.
