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Business has been growing steadily for several years at the Riverslea, Farm in Epping, where Jeff and Liz Conrad sell sheep and goats to a variety of customers, including a large number of immigrants from the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Many New England transplants from Greece, Bosnia, Albania and other far-off lands make frequent visits to Riverslea to choose and kill an animal on site for a family, social or religious gathering on the same day.
The Conrads noticed some of that business drop off, however, after last September 11th.
I couldn't say by how much," Jeff Conrad said, "because my business has been growing every year." But he noticed some of his regular customers were coming around less frequently, and he thinks he knows why. Many of his customers, he said, like to roast the lambs at gatherings held in public places, such as a state or municipal park. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, some Americans became less friendly toward their culture and traditions, he said.
"After 9/11, foreign-looking people sharing a lamb in public didn't look too good," Conrad said. But whatever slump the business endured apparently didn't carry over into the spring and summer of 2002.
I can't produce all the Animals necessary to provide the customers with what they want," Conrad said.
If business is good for the Conrads today, the farm they bought 11 years ago was not an overnight success. Nor was farming what they had planned to do when they decided to move to New Hampshire from Massachusetts nearly a dozen years ago.
"We needed a place that was commutable to Manchester for work," said Conrad, a former telecommunications employee with AT&T. Liz Conrad, an employee with Shawmut when that bank went...