Cowbella

They belong among the wildflowers🎶Jellybean and Juniper are living their best lives this gorgeous spring day💛🖤And! Butter production has officially begun for this grazing season- reserve some Jersey gold with us now so you’ll have some sunshine to spread even when it’s not this nice out☀️

Our cows are our family, so we can’t help but share how proud we are of our girls after their last classification scoring by the American Jersey Cattle Association💓
19 out of our 40 cow milking herd are now classified in the top “Excellent” 90+ category, including our beautiful coal black Kaboom pictured here🖤

New Excellents:
DJF Fizz Kaboom 88➡️91
DJF Fireman Latte 88➡️ 91
DJF Greg Lady 88➡️91
DJF Nitro Millie 87➡️90
DJF Varick Nightengale 85➡️90

And New Rockstars:
DJF Bold Igloo 90➡️92
DJF Shadrack Licorice 92➡️93
DJF Honok Kola 92➡️93
DJF Vernon Halo 92➡️93

Eleven year old Gummybear still reigns as the queen of the herd at Ex 94👑

Many hands (even tiny ones) do make light work🫶🏻

Evening up on top of our world is everybody’s happy place

It’s been a while, friends….and it’s been one helluva year. One that felt like it needed a winter of retrospection, rumination, with perhaps some reinvention. After so many years of trying every which way on our dairy farming journey, we have learned there is no such thing as a clear path or easy answer. The crushing realities of this industry are ones that have fractured even our own family into two very divided camps of those who get why we fight so hard to play the precious hand we were dealt, opposing those who can’t understand why we didn’t sell it all years ago. They underestimated our determination, though, and how this farm can generate food that people want because it is specific to the beauty of the land and animals we care for here in this place we consider our sacred ground. So it seems only fitting that after our time of hibernation, our first post is about the birth of Nugget’s first calf. One of our last posts in the fall was a video where we mentioned Nugget, a heifer who took her time becoming a mother- here she is today with her perfect baby girl on the first day of spring. Seems like a wonderful sign to us, and we’ve got some big plans….stay tuned for news about an exclusive run of our best grazing butter once our herd hits pasture and only available by preorder until we sell out. Details to come, or send us a message to be one of the first in the know.

A day after her 10th birthday, Gus’s Gummybear made history here at Danforth Jersey Farm today as she was classified by the American Jersey Cattle Association at an Excellent 94 points. We couldn’t be prouder of our reigning queen, our Palmatiers and all her family who helped her shine her brightest to achieve this hard won, well deserved honor.

Our grazing sunshine butter is back, now solid gold inside and out! Every May we can’t wait to announce that the grass our cows are eating on pasture is doing it’s magic on the color of our butter💛 Stock up and be able to pull edible sunshine out of your freezer all year round!

Friends….here we go🤟

It’s not often we can post a picture like this on April 19th, but it’s not unheard of either…

This peanut made a surprise arrival almost a month before her due date. At maybe 25 lbs she is one of our tiniest babies of all time, and can walk right underneath mama Marmalade’s belly without touching it. She has royal bloodlines in our herd, going back to one of our best beloved cows, Winny (whose mother’s name was Shannon). Winny’s daughter was Flicka, whose daughter was Kringle, whose daughter was Marmalade, new mama to this feisty little princess.

Modesty is a guiding principle with our Amish friends, so they do not believe in having photos taken of themselves. We very much have their blessing, however, to share the story of how their communities in our area are becoming a growing part of our Cowbella herd. Up until last September, the milk for our butter came exclusively from our own little herd of grazing Jerseys, but it has always been our goal to make Cowbella about more than our small farm. We wanted to grow by supporting other small farms that share our beliefs and values. Last year, an Amish friend who had bought some animals from us over the years including a cow as a wedding present for his daughter, started talking to us about his frustration with his organic milk contract and wondered if we would like to start buying his milk. So we did. Soon, we were also picking up from his daughter and son-in-law’s farm who were milking our “wedding present” cow, Kaleesi, and also from his neighbor’s farm. We are now picking up the milk from 7 Amish farms with 10 more lining up to join us, in addition to 3 non Amish farms - they are all farms that are either fed up with their current milk companies or have been dropped by them as these big companies tighten their financial belts. The small farms are the first to be sacrificed. We believe they are the ones most deserving to be saved. So that’s what we’re doing. They are all farms like ours, except without electricity and tractors, where the cows are living pastured happy lives. We stand behind their practices because as farmers ourselves we go to their farms and see with our own eyes that they are doing the right thing, and we reward them for their good practices with a good price for their milk. When you buy Cowbella butter, you are supporting the best practices from the best farms producing the best milk from the best cows to make the best butter. It’s about integrity. And our belief that preserving small farms and the effect that has on our communities and landscapes makes the world a better place for us all.

‘Twas a big day down on the farm yesterday as the American Jersey Cattle Association awarded 2 more of our girls the 90+ classification, now making 16 of our 37 cows in our herd “Excellent” by their standards.

In the first photo is our Igloo, 7 years old and going strong in her 5th lactation.
The next 2 photos are our Licorice, a Gummybear daughter in her 2nd lactation- a great beauty, floppy ear and all.
And the last 2 photos are of our bella Kola, the fairest of them all to some of us. She already was Excellent, and got moved up to 91 points. She’s standing next a fellow 91 in the last shot, Hummingbird, who never misses an opportunity for her close-up.