KEYSTONE HEIGHTS – Rolling down State Road 21, the turn onto Jones Creek Road is easy to miss.

It’s a dirt road surrounded by lots of woods. When it has just rained, a truck or four-wheel drive vehicle might be necessary. On this particular day, the road was dry and dusty, almost like beach sand, which also made getting stuck a risk.

About a mile down Jones Creek Road are some fenced-in, large open fields for horses and grazing cattle. A barn and other buildings sit at the end of a long grass driveway, and there are gated areas for various other animals.

This is CJ Acres Animal Rescue Farm.

Upon pulling into the driveway, a friendly, 800-pound pig comes up to the edge of his pen to say hello. A couple of horses stroll over and stick their heads out over a fence, requesting to be petted.

“We have some mustangs, a stallion, there’s a quarter horse over there, and there’s a donkey,” Lee Sackett, director of CJ Acres, said as he pointed around the property.

Sackett, who owns an advertising company called Carpe DM, has a home on the premises. The Ohio native began CJ Acres – a nonprofit that relies entirely on volunteers – 19 years ago in North Carolina, and then moved it here in 2003.

“We moved animals with us,” he said. “They had already been abandoned once, so we didn’t think it would be a good idea to leave them in North Carolina. So we brought everybody down here. And the farm continued to grow, in terms of acreage, volunteers and the number of animals.”

CJ Acres focuses on farm animals, not domesticated pets. In addition to those already mentioned, animals currently on the grounds include sheep, goats, turkeys and ducks. The rescue farm takes in and adopts out animals that have been abused, abandoned, neglected or been victims of a catastrophic disaster.

“The joke around here is that I wanted a dog when I was little, and my mom said, “Well, you can’t have a dog, but when you have your own place, you can have as many animals as you want,’” Sackett said. “That was the one time I guess I listened to her.

“I rescued dogs and cats from college on. I had never had an opportunity to work with larger animals, and I found that there was really more of a need for that. There are lots of shelters for dogs and cats, but if the pig got loose or somebody didn’t want their cow anymore, there were very limited opportunities for those animals.”

CJ Acres, despite not rescuing dogs, has a dog in its logo. That’s because the rescue farm is named after the first dog Sackett ever had – a Chinese Shar-Pei named CJ. Many of the animals CJ Acres takes in are from the southeastern United States, but the farm rescues animals from throughout North America, including Canada.

Its mission is to “rescue, rehabilitate, re-introduce [adopt] and re-train” animals in need.

“We always seek for animals to be adopted, which allows us room for more animals to come in,” Sackett said, as a nearby rooster began singing “cock a doodle-doo" periodically. “One of our criteria is, if we rescued it and rehabilitated it, you can’t have it for lunch.”

CJ Acres receives all of its funding from private donations and ticketed tour events. In March, it will be holding “St. Piggy’s Day,” and every year in June it has a “Wine with the Swine” event. The rescue farm also offers free public tours at various times each year.

CJ Acres usually has 15-20 volunteers on weekends as well as a regular pool – or “herd” – of about 20 volunteers throughout the week.

“Being here has been very, very rewarding,” said Tracy Wallace, a retail manager who lives in Jacksonville and has been volunteering here for a little more than a year. “I’ve always had a passion for rescuing animals, and I wanted to make a difference in the community. It’s something I’ve wanted to ever since I was young.”

To adopt, donate or volunteer, people can contact CJ Acres through its website at cjacres.org.

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Email Christiaan DeFranco at chris@opcfla.com. Follow him on Twitter @cdefranco.