It’s Almost Baby Time!

……..yes, we have many, many calves due to be born in the coming months BUT, I happen to be referring to HUMAN baby time! It’s true, my husband and I are expecting our first child, a little girl, sometime in the next 2 -4 weeks!

Pregnancy has slowed me down quite a bit – hence my disappearence from this blog! Thought I’d take a few minutes to update before life gets REALLY crazy once baby arrives.

Things are going great at the farm. We’ve got 35 acres of our corn planted (about half done) and we just mowed our first cutting of hay. Beef calving season is pretty much over, but most of our dairy calves are due to be born in July, August, and September this year. The guys are keeping super busy caring for all our dairy cows – we’ve been milking a record number of at least 70…..though we’ve started drying off a number of them in the past month as they prepare for the birth of their calves (they get the last two months of their pregnancy off …….pre-maternity leave of sorts.) 🙂

We are hosting Country Pumpkins at our farm again this fall! We’ve been in the planning stages since January and are getting really excited about all the fun times ahead. We were blessed with a wonderful 2012 season and hope to continue to build on that growth. Can’t make any formal announcements YET, but we’ve got several FREE Special Events in the works that will be scattered throughout our September 13 – November 3rd season. I’ve been working on updating our brochures, flyers, and website to get a head start before the baby comes.

 

Recipe: Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream

There’s no better way to celebrate a scorching hot 4th of July than with a fresh batch of homemade ice cream…..which is exactly what we did yesterday! I’ve had several friends request this recipe that I’m sharing with you today. You may be getting this a little too late to include in your 4th of July celebrations, but lucky for you, July is National Ice Cream Month! I seriously need to hug whoever thought that one up. 🙂 Ice cream is my number one weakness of all time. I eat it almost everyday – at least once!

This recipe comes from a cookbook by Thomas R. Quinn called “Old-Fashioned Homemade Ice Cream”. My mom picked this up for me at an Amish store in Holmes County, OH a couple of years ago. These recipes are simply the BEST homemade ice creams that I’ve ever had in my life. Leftovers freeze amazingly well (anybody ever had the kind that turns hard as a rock when frozen in the freezer?) and scoop out just like store-bought ice cream.

If you try it, please let me know how much you loved it. 🙂

Strawberry Ice Cream

• 2 2/3 cups granulated sugar
• 4 eggs
• pinch of salt
• 3 cups whipping cream
• 3 cups mashed, sweetened strawberries (about 1/4 cup of sugar will sweeten berries) OR you can use thawed, pre-sweetened strawberries from the freezer section of your grocery
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice (not necessary if you use pre-sweetened strawberries from the freezer section)
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• whole milk as needed (about 5 cups)

In a large pan combine the sugar, eggs, and salt. Add the whipping cream and cook the mixture over medium-low heat, stirring constantly to avoid scorching. Remove from heat when the mixture coats the back of a spoon (about 180 degrees). Refrigerate. When cool, add the vanilla.

If using fresh strawberries, either dice strawberries into very small pieces or slice and mash them. Add the lemon juice and enough sugar to sweeten (about 1/4 cup). Refrigerate at least 1 hour to allow the sugar to blend with the strawberries.

When ready to freeze ice cream, add the strawberries to the cream-sugar-egg mixture. Pour into an ice cream freezing can and add whole milk to bring the mixture up to 3/4 full. Freeze in a home ice cream freezer. Makes about one gallon.

Note: I use a 6 qt White Mountain ice cream freezer so I don’t fill to 3/4 full because this recipe is written for a 4 qt freezer. Also, I used raw milk from our cows which has a bit higher fat content than “whole milk” so I used 2 1/2 cups of whipping cream and  5 1/2 cups milk to compensate. In addition, I added the milk at same time I added the cream and cooked to 180 degrees. This is not necessary to do – I’ve made it both ways – BUT I felt this may have given the ice cream an ever creamier texture.

Social Media Interview Published in Progressive Dairyman!

If someone would have told me two and a half years ago when I started the Alpine Hills Dairy Farm Facebook page that it would one day have been mentioned on the radio, the DFA Leader Magazine, and now the Progressive Dairyman magazine I would have laughed my head off! Really??? When I got the idea to start the page, I knew very, very little about dairy farming. My husband and I had been married just a few months (we were not working at the farm at the time) and with all our visits to the farm I thought it would be a fun place to share pictures and updates. I felt that it would really be something that people who didn’t live on farms would enjoy reading and learning about. That seems like it has turned out to be true!

As time has gone on, and we starting working at the farm full-time (celebrated our 2nd anniversary working here last week!) I have been able to learn more first hand about dairy farm life and have been here to take more pictures to share. I have absolutely LOVED having the opportunity to manage the Facebook page! Thank you to all our loyal fans who continue to give me such great feedback and encouragement. 🙂

Below is the link to the article recently published online and in print in the Progressive Dairyman magazine. Special thanks to Emily Caldwell for taking all my jumbled thoughts (I get super excited talking about social media! Ha!) and putting them into one cohesive article. She did such a fabulous job and it was a great opportunity to get to meet her! Click the picture below for the link to the entire article or click here.

Caption Contest!

One thing I have discovered from photographing our cows, is that it’s pretty easy to get a comical picture of them! They all have such unique personalities and are complete hams for the camera. In fact, because of their curious nature, they often come toward me when they see me with my camera out! Such divas!

Right now, we have a Caption Contest in progress on our Alpine Hills Dairy Farm Facebook page for this photo:

The contest ends at midnight tonight, Thursday, June 7th. Do you have any good caption ideas? I’d love to hear them! 🙂
Of course, I must honor our previous winners that we’ve had so far this year. I absolutely LOVE these photos and the great captions that our Facebook fans have come up with!

Thank you to Katie Taylor for this perfect caption!

Thank you to Brandon Severn for this hilarious caption!

Our Story in the DFA Leader Magazine!

Our Dairy Farmers of America Member of Distinction experience has been almost a year in the making already! Last week, our story written by Kara Petrovic of DFA, was published in a special Member of Distinction issue of the DFA Leader Magazine! We are so honored to have our story alongside some of the most successful and innovative dairy farms in the country.

Magazine Cover

Calving Season

We are getting geared up for one of the most exciting times of the year here at our farm – calving season! While most of our beef cows calved earlier this spring, almost all of our dairy cows will be calving in the next 4 months or so. For example, we have 11 babies due in June, 8 babies due in July, and another 11 due in August! You know what that means…..calf naming contests and lots of cute baby calf pics which I will be sharing on our farm Facebook page!

This sweet little Brown Swiss heifer was born several weeks ago to our heifer, Twitter. It’s fun to see how the times and technology start slowly affecting our cow names. 🙂 This little girl is long-legged and quite dainty. Her sire is the New Generation Genetics bull, Wonderment. One thing that I find completely irresistable about these babies is their HUGE ears. In this pic, one ear is stuck behind the gate. Must be hard having ears twice as wide as your head!

Moooo-tiful Cows: Photos on Display

A few of our lovely cows and calves launched their modeling careers last month……in Iowa!

Erin, a college student that works for the Central Plains Dairy Association in Iowa, was given the task of decorating for a dairy producer dinner  preceding the Central Plains Dairy Expo. Being a fan of our farm Facebook page, Erin contacted me to request permission to use some of my cow photos for her displays. I was happy to oblige since she was sweet enough to give me photo credit AND to promise to send me some pics of the end result. 🙂

Last week I got an email from her which included several pictures of the completed table decorations using some of our beautiful Brown Swiss cows’ photos. I thought she did a wonderful job! Thanks Erin, for your work in the dairy industry!

Surprise! Barrel Trains

Last month at the Dairy Farmers of America Annual Meeting in Kansas City, MO my husband and I by chance (or more like Providence 🙂 ) met a wonderful couple who have changed our farm tour business forever. Upon meeting this couple we found out that they operate a pumpkin patch and tours on their farm in Conway, MO called Gunter Farms Pumpkin Patch. I, of course, piped right up and started peppering them with questions and exchanging ideas about our dairy tour / pumpkin farm businesses.

What an amazingly sweet couple they were! They stood and talked to us for almost two hours about the in’s and out’s of their pumpkin patch operation. One thing that we were especially excited about was the Barrel Train rides that they offer – we had seen these in action before and thought they were SOOOO COOL! They told us that their son designed and built these for their farm. My husband got the son’s number and called him right away. Fast forward a month, and woah-la………we are now proud owners of 12 super fun barrel train cars!!!!

On Wednesday, we were able to surprise our first Spring Dairy Tour group of the season (140 kindergarteners) with our brand spankin’ new barrel trains!  What a hit they were! We are so excited to be able to share them this fall as well during Country Pumpkins with our guests where we will be offering Barrel Train rides (for kids) along with hayrides for the whole family. It’s an exciting year ahead!

To view the photo highlights of our first Spring Dairy Tour at Alpine Hills Dairy Farm of the season, click here.

An Exciting Opportunity!!!

Last week I had the exciting opportunity to guest blog for the Friends of Elsie Borden Cheese Blog!

Borden Cheese is not only delicious,  it is 100% farmer owned – that means when you buy Borden Cheese 100% of the proceeds go back to American dairy farm families! Pretty cool, huh?

I would be so honored if you took a moment to read my post on the Friend of Elsie blog that was published yesterday. Click this link to check it out! http://www.friendsofelsie.com/friends-of-elsie/blog

Many thanks to DFA for recommending me, and to Kelly Goss, Director of Public Relations at Sullivan Higdon and Sink in Kansas City for helping this blog post become a reality.

“Funny Cow Photo: “Wet Willy”

Source: Uploaded by user via Shelley on Pinterest

What a success our first “Caption This” Contest was that we held on our Alpine Hills Dairy Farm Facebook page! We had many hilarious captions submitted for this cow photo that I took last week. It certainly was one of those lucky moments when I snapped the photo at JUST the right time!

Last night we announced the winner of the Caption Contest, our fan Katie Taylor, who submitted “Wet Willy” for our photo. I pinned the photo to Pinterest, and I’ve already had around 95 repins and over 20 likes! How fun! Glad to see that everyone thinks Katie did as great of a job as we thought she did! 🙂

To pin this photo to your own Pinterest account, click the photo above or click the “Pin It” button below.