(My home town) Shelbyville Ind Woman doing well now with goat milk products.
Including Baby's Butt Butter for Cancer Patients.
Within the span of 2½ years, Jana Bass lost her mother, her brother and her father to cancer. Devastated, Bass vowed to help cancer patients the only way she knew how — with goat milk.
Bass, who lives on a farm south of Shelbyville, had a fledgling business, selling lotions and soaps made with milk from her goats. She decided she would donate her product to any cancer patient who wanted it.
That decision has helped business boom. Bass Farms skin-care products can be found in more than 20 stores in Central Indiana, from hospital gift shops to hair salons. She still donates her products, about 25 percent of what she produces.
Her best-seller by far is a salve that Bass drolly named Baby Butt Butter. She concocted it on a bit of a whim one day as she assembled a gift basket full of her goodies for a baby shower. She glanced inside and noticed that the basket contained nothing for the baby, only the mom.
Baby Butt Butter has become popular for infants and for cancer patients, who use it to moisturize skin that can become dry or burned during chemotherapy and radiation.
Indiana University Health West Hospital’s gift shop has carried Baby Butt Butter for about a year. Everyone buys it, from cancer patients, who appreciate the fact it’s all natural and gentle on the skin, to the hospital staff, said Andra Mowery, retail director for the shop.
“Once they have tried it, people come back and get it,” she said. “It makes your skin feel so soft.”
Drive out to Bass’ farm though, and you’d never guess it was the birthplace of luxury skin-care products.
Two large Great Pyrenees guard the site as a colony of farm cats weaves in and out between their legs. A gentle chorus of maaaaas from a herd of about 15 goats and their kids accompanies the dogs’ sentinel barks.
For Bass, 39, it’s pure heaven. She did not set out to start a farm-based business. In fact, other than trips to visit relatives in the country, she had little farm experience.
But she always dreamed of a rural life. About five years ago, she and her husband bought the farm and Bass purchased her first herd of 10 goats — nine females and one buck.
Over the years, Bass raised cows and pigs, but goats have been the constant. From the get-go, the deal with her husband was that she could have as many animals as she wanted as long as she could feed them.
At first, the goats were for fun; Bass’ daughters would show them at fairs, but the goats “really weren’t giving back to us.”
About three years ago, her mother died, and Bass quit her job at a fitness center to help care for her dad, also in poor health, who was living in an apartment in a converted pole barn across from the farmhouse.
To help bring in more money, Bass sold vegetables at a farmers market. Someone mentioned they wanted to add a soap vendor to the mix.
“I’m there, and I have goats. I thought, ‘Why not?’ ” Bass said.
Bass read up about essential oils. She began with soap and branched out into lotions to give people who visited her stand something to sample. Now she has multiple products in 150 scents. Vanilla bean, lemon vanilla and peppermint twist are among the most popular.
Originally, her kitchen doubled as her factory. Then she moved operations to the pole barn where her father had lived. If she finds herself working into the evening, she’s just a few feet away from her husband and their six kids.
Her husband supports her endeavors, but Bass does not have complete buy-in, she said, sweeping her arm out to the expanse of fields beyond the goat corral.
“My husband would rather it looked like a golf course,” she said.
He can’t deny, however, that her business has taken off. Each year she sells products at the Covered Bridge Festival in Parke County. Last year she sold $1,800 worth of products in one day.
The fair price point of her products combined with her reputation for giving back to those in need help market the goods, said Brandy Coomes, who manages the Shelbyville Farmer’s Market .
“She just gets people to try them and people are hooked,” said Coomes, who likes the lotions and that baby butter.
The secret to the baby butter, Bass said, lies in its lanolin base.
Lanolin, a natural water repellent for sheep, helps cure diaper rash or other bottomly woes that babies may suffer. It also serves as a perfect salve for cancer patients. Each batch of her baby butter contains a pound of lanolin.
As for the name? It reflects the product’s origin.
“That’s what it’s used for,” Bass said.
Erin Bollhorst, owner of Imagination Station in Franklin, heard about it from a neighbor who had breast cancer. She decided to try selling it and some of the lotions and lip balms in her store.
Bollhorst also tried it on her 6-year-old son, who has bad eczema on his legs. In one week, the Baby Butt Butter cleared it up entirely, she said.
Now she has a sample out in her store.
“It sells itself,” she said. “It’s a fantastic product.”
Bass herself is all about goats. Don’t expect to find cow milk in her refrigerator. At first, her family balked at drinking goat milk, so Bass surreptitiously poured it into gallon jugs.
Then her family noticed that she was not buying milk at the store. Her husband marked the levels in the jug to check whether she was replenishing the supply without leaving the farm.
Suspicion confirmed, the family refused to drink milk for two weeks, over Bass’ protests: “They had already been using it for a month and didn’t know.”
Then they broke down and tried the stuff. They have never gone back and their digestive systems are better for it, Bass said.
As gung-ho as Bass is about goat milk, however, there’s one product that she does not make — at least not so far, even though demand could be high.
“Everybody says do you make cheese?” she said.
VIDEO Baby Butt Butter: Jana Bass of Bass Farms in Shelbyville discusses one of her most popular products made from goat milk -- Baby Butt Butter.
For more information on Bass Farms product, visit www.bassfarms.com .
