SCHOHARIE COUNTY — Shannon Hayes loves her family, which centers her life, and uses her household as a laboratory to test her theories on sustainable living.

This is much the same way as her father, Jim Hayes, an animal science professor, uses his Sap Bush Hollow Farm as a laboratory to test his hypotheses — first experimenting with the best ways for finishing livestock on grass.

“My father and I both have a passion for walking our walk,” said Shannon Hayes. “If a theory is going to work, it has to work not just on paper but in real life.”

Shannon grew up in the hills of Schoharie County at a time, she said, when many farmers were getting “forced off the fields.”

“I went to school in the valley, in Cobleskill, where they were trying to move kids to college and careers.” She describes this as a “double life.”

Hayes decided the best way to preserve the kind of life she was raised in and valued was to study sustainable agriculture.

“I was very good at academics,” she said. “I threw myself into it with my full heart.”

Hayes has a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Binghamton University and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in sustainable agriculture and community development from Cornell.

She taught in Japan and circled the globe twice, she says, to prove to herself that she could succeed anywhere before settling down just a few miles from where she was raised.

She describes herself as a farmer but not “in the traditional sense of the word.”

“You can run a farm from the field or from the kitchen,” said Hayes. “I help with my storytelling and with writing cookbooks.”

Hayes has a partner in her family experiments, her husband, Bob Hooper.

She describes the way she met Hooper, as “a family joke” and launches into the story with relish.

“I went through a lot of dates,” she said. “My father said he’d never have grandchildren, I was so picky. I used to say I’d order a man from L.L. Bean and, if I didn’t like him, I’d send him back.”

And then one day, when she walked into L.L. Bean, she saw Hooper, a registered Maine guide, and fell immediately in love.  “There was the man of my dreams. I had sweaty palms,” she recalled. “It was love at first site. We’ve been together ever  since.”

The couple have two daughters — Saoirse, with an Irish name, who is now 13, and Ula, with a Viking name, who is 9. The girls are home-schooled.

Hayes not only teaches her daughters at home, she also blogs about her experiences raising them.

“Radical Homemakers”

When Saoirse was a kindergartner and Ula was a toddler, they accompanied their parents on a cross-country trek as Hayes did research for her book, “Radical Homemakers” which came out in 2010.

The genesis for the book was rooted in the local-food movement. Hayes’s family raises and sells grass-fed beef. “There was constant pressure to find a wealthy community since our product’s so expensive. I heard it over and over,” Hayes said. “I was doing most of our sales and there was not a rich person among our clientele.”

Hayes and her husband noticed an inverse correlation between the amount of expensive jewelry a person wore and his or her “willingness to pay for our product.”

Hayes’s clientele was made up of “people who knew how to cook and had domestic skills.” She went on, “A lot didn’t have high incomes; they appreciated the value of hard work.”

Instead of a family supported by two wage-earners, Hayes observed a model where one member of a couple had domestic skills — like being able to fix a car, paint a house, or grow and preserve food.

Hayes and her family traveled across the country to meet families who lived on one income or less. Their travels happened to coincide with the national housing crisis, when Wall Street faltered.

“I interviewed families living on a fraction of the income that bankrupt families were living on. They were living well. They had an average of $10,000 per person and were very content,” Hayes said.

Her book, “Radical Homemakers,” which called for both men and women to make hearth and community the center of an ecologically sustainable future, was controversial.

Hayes got criticism from all sides — some found her treatise anti-feminist while others found it overly feminist, she said.

“I got hate mail from all sides so I decided it was balanced,” said Hayes.

“My premise was our work life should not undermine core values,” said Hayes, naming four:

— Ecological sustainability: “Don’t ravage the planet,” she says;

— Social justice: “Don’t negatively affect others; don’t take advantage of other, poor cultures”;

— Family; and

—  Community.

“There are problems when jobs overwork and underpay,” she said. “One antidote is to encourage American families to reclaim domestic skills.”

On her cross-country trip, Hayes said, “I got to interview families from all walks of life.” Half of the homemakers she interviewed were men.

In the 1960s, Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” was a seminal text for the second wave of feminism. Friedan describes the unhappiness of married housewives, without careers, raising children in material comfort. A central tenet of Friedan’s book is that “housewife syndrome” causes depression and malaise. “That got women into the workforce,” said Hayes.

Hayes said she could not make a case for one partner in a couple to stay at home if that person “goes crazy” at home. “I worried it would promote a new battle of the sexes and cause my own gender to go backward,” said Hayes.

In some of the homes she visited, Hayes found women that were “so subjugated, I needed to shower” after visiting their homes.

Hayes defined three phases that single-income households went through. The first is “renouncing,” which generally involves reading books and “an almost adolescent rejection of the corporate world.”

The next phase Hayes calls “reclaiming,” which involves learning skills like sewing or fixing cars, skills needed to support a family without a six-figure salary.

The third phase she calls “rebuilding,” which applies to the economy and the community.

“This is where I saw the breaking point,” Hayes said of rebuilding. “If they didn’t turn outward, then ‘housewife syndrome’ would set in.”

Taking it home

She applied what she had learned to her own family as her daughters grew. Initially, Hayes said, “I was focused on home schooling. I knew I had to turn outward to stay happy.”

At the same time her two daughters were becoming more independent, she and her husband were involved in a farm-transition plan. “We were priced out of buying more land,” said Hayes.

So last year they decided, instead, to transition to a farm-to-table café.  They found “a special place, a forgotten place” that used to be a firehouse for sale.

Hayes asked her older daughter what she thought of the idea of turning the old firehouse into a café. “She flipped out for it,” Hayes reported. “She has a passion for cooking.”

So, said Hayes, “My husband and I flew to Seattle to learn to become coffee connoisseurs.

They set up a small café in West Fulton that is open just on Saturdays and Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Saoirse at 13 does everything from plating dishes to working the cash register. Nine-year-old Ula enjoys greeting the customers and chatting with them.

“We answered their rebellion by challenging them,” said Hayes.

The café’s food is, of course, farm fresh and many of the recipes come from Hayes’s favorite book, “Long Way on a Little: An Earth Lover’s Companion for Enjoying Meat, Pinching Pennies and Living Deliciously.”

Her book, Hayes says, has “really helped people approach sustainable meat economically.” Formerly, she said, people thought of “eating cheap” as consuming beans and pasta.

“I put a lot of work into nutrient-dense and frugal foods,” said Hayes. “We had to get recipes that work. Kids love them.”

The book touts using all parts of an animal, like a grass-fed cow. “Bones and fat make up 30 percent of a carcass, which Americans throw out.” Not Hayes. She boils the bones to make broth and renders the fat to use like Crisco.

Patrons of the café have asked what the secret ingredient is in the “best gingersnaps” they’ve ever eaten. They are surprised to learn it is rendered fat, said Hayes.

The cow’s tongue may go into a ploughman’s platter, and heart and liver may go into making a paté, said Hayes.

The café also serves “direct trade coffee, from farmer to farmer,” said Hayes. It’s served with grass-fed milk from nearby farms and has gotten rave reviews, she said.

The café also offers high-speed internet, a rarity in the area. “People stay for a long time,” said Hayes.