Morgan • For many of Utah’s newest immigrants, a delicious, home-cooked meal begins with a goat. Boiled in a stew, roasted over a barbecue or chopped in a curry, goat is a staple in many parts of Africa and Asia and increasingly a standard in small markets across the Wasatch Front.

Some of it travels thousands of miles from Australia before reaching stoves in Salt Lake City, but other goats bleat locally before being slaughtered, sliced and wrapped in plastic.

With an eye to the growing demand, three African refugee groups hope to start a goat farm to use their native skills, create jobs and make money — not to mention fashioning a reliable pipeline of goats to be killed in the Muslim halal tradition. For many, that chunk of goat in the stew needs to come from an animal that was killed in the name of God and sliced at the throat with a sharp knife while it faces the holy city of Mecca.

But when they buy the meat at ethnic markets, some people wonder how long the meat has been frozen and whether it is truly halal.

“It’s not good enough,” said Ismail Mohamed, president of the Somali Bajuni community in Utah.

He is among the refugees dreaming of a goat farm and talking to 31-year-old Swan Workman in Morgan County, who jumped into the goat world earlier this year. As Workman sees it, the goat business has big potential. And collaborating with the refugees could mean taking advantage of their years of expertise.

“I know they’re quite poor and we would absolutely love to find ways to raise them up as well,” said Workman, whose family has done humanitarian work teaching self-sustainability in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

On a sunny October afternoon at the family’s TIFIE Ranch in Morgan, about an hour from Salt Lake City, his pregnant does lunched on hay and alfalfa. With a short gestation period — about 150 days — the small herd of a dozen boer goats could expand quickly. The refugees may seek a grant to help seed the farm, which some also envision as a place to grow such produce as corn, pumpkins, watermelons and beans. It may take a while to make a profit, which eventually could be funneled back to the community to pay for refugee classes or other needs.

The U.S. meat goat industry grew about 3 percent annually between 2005 and 2008, but declined between 2009 and 2011 by about 1 percent per year as the economy slowed, according to a 2011 U. S. Department of Agriculture report. That mirrors numbers in Utah, where the population of meat goats dropped to 12,000 this January from about 13,000 the previous year. As in Utah, the growing demand for goat meat in the United States is tied to the arrival of new ethnic groups.

Hussein Aden, a Somali Bantu refugee, drives to North Ogden every few weeks to buy a goat for his family, which he kills himself to insure it is halal. He learned how from his parents and made money that way in his two decades at a refugee camp.

Some refugees don’t care about the halal issue because they are not Muslim. But all of them planning the business have the same goat goal: economic self-sufficiency.

“We want to come united, so we can run this united,” Aden said. “Everybody is hungry for the farm.”

In villages and refugee camps in Africa, goat meat is often cheap and readily available. Even in Utah, a whole goat costs less than buying all the pieces of meat individually, said Alex Ngendakuriyo, a Burundi refugee who is also working on the business. He believes refugees would feel comfortable buying the goats from them because the owners would be members of their community. Communication would be simple and the refugees working on the project would have a chance to build on what they know.

“It would give them a right to do what they’re confident to do,” said the 25-year-old, who wore a bracelet that said “Pay it forward.”

The burgeoning goat business is an unusual collaboration among refugee groups, said Gerald Brown, director of the Utah Refugee Services Office. But goats are popular worldwide.

“I know a lot of refugee friends who buy goats all the time,” Brown said. “There’s always some kind of party going on.”