Hello Cheese Lovers!

What an action-packed start to the year in national/worldwide news and in cheese news. If you weren’t paying attention, the 20th was a pretty important day, internationally. Yes, there was a new President installed, a $730 million Powerball was won and the Minnesota Wild both played a game (important to note when that happens) and won said game… but also important is that the 20th of January is National Cheese Lovers Day. We hope you found a way to celebrate. If not, scroll down to the “order now” button and we can fix your issues. ;-)

Good Food Awards tonight
As we’ve noted before, the Good Food Awards ceremony is announced tonight, 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. CST. We are up with a Tim-made North Fork Whiskey Washed Munster batch from July. We’ll have our own little (private) watch party at our place. If you want to watch, tickets are $25 and give you $5 off at the Good Food Awards Pop Up Shop.

If you’re interested, tickets and more information are available here: https://goodfoodfdn.org/event/good-food-awards-ceremony/

From the farm Q & A -
Q: What happens with the activity monitors if the cows get out? Does activity go way up?
A: Great question. Funny how timing works! Sometimes when you try to save time on a farm or anywhere else it really costs you.

Such was the case on Wednesday. We tried to take a short cut as we were cleaning out the “high school” heifer pen. These animals enter the pen at 10 months, and are breeding age at about 13 to 14 months depending on size. As we were taking our short cut, the heifers found their own short cut with about 20 of them venturing about the farm to sniff and skip into unexplored territory.

While any day the animals get out of their pen causes extra activity, three of us got them in in about 45 minutes extra time, with help from two personal vehicles, the tractor attached to the manure spreader, and even our friendly Feed Co. feed truck driver whom happened to be delivering a the time - it made a pretty nice corral. We presumed they might all show up with high activity the next day, or in other words the software would show they were all “ovulating” since the sensors are based on deviations from the animal’s average activity.

But, because the sophisticated software also takes in group movements into account we think the group movement deviations cancelled out the individual deviations. Thus - exactly 0 showed up on our report the next day.

Happy New Year! Stay happy, optimistic and healthy, and we hope to see you or you see our cheese, soon.

Jerry, Linda, Alise and Lucas