Farm Week in Review: Meet the Herd

The underlying goal of our farm, and the local food movement as a whole, is to reconnect consumers with the food that they’re consuming (and the families that they’re supporting). If you’ve ever grown a tomato on your back porch, or collected the first egg from your backyard flock of chickens, you know there’s nothing more empowering or ecstasy-inducing than consuming the food that you’ve helped to  produce. 

This is why we love sharing stories from our farm and family through the blog, website, and social media – because there’s something powerful about not only understanding where your ham came from but actually seeing the living animal root around the pasture, growing that ham, and subsequently seeing the sacrifice that animal makes to sustain your life. It is sometimes jarring – yes – but beautiful and natural, too.

Which leads me to today’s addition to the website – our Meet the Herd page! It’s less gruesome than seeing your pig or steer slaughtered, but no less important. For those that part of the cow share program, milk isn’t something to grab on your way home from work from Meijer or Walgreens (although you might pick it up from a delivery location or the farm!)

That store milk at some point came from a cow and was then run through a process of dividing components, heating, cooling and ultimately reconstituting them to hide all the dead bacteria, pathogens and sludge into something that can only be called a fluid milk product because it bears such little resemblance to actual real milk.

Click here to read 15 Things Pasteurization Kills by Mark McAfee

However, to our cow share members, the milk that they consume is a pure, unprocessed and unadulterated, completely natural and living food that one of a handful of cows produced within 24 hours of pick up. That cow has a name, a story, a baby she is producing some of her milk for. She has an intimate relationship with the other girls in the herd and the girls that milk her in the barn each morning.

One of the most rewarding aspects of giving farm tours is seeing how people begin to connect the food they consume, in this case their milk, to the animals that produce it. Yes, your milk came from a cow! This cow, in fact! And her health is directly related to yours! It puts a smile on our face every time we have that conversation.

So, without further ado, head on over to our Meet the Herd page to learn a little bit more about the ladies we love and work with every day. You’ll see their faces, hear their stories and learn a little bit more about their personality quirks! Enjoy!