The cows and calves enjoy the grass and the sunshine, but we need more rain to keep the grass going. The cows move pretty quickly through the pastures now as the grass slows down. We’ve already filled up our two hay barns to have enough hay for the winter. We’ve noticed the raspberry bushes along the cow path have ripe berries already. For some reason, everyone wants to go check on the cows now.
Now that most of our calves from this spring are weaned we are giving them leftover whey from making cheese mixed with water to drink. We set up a gravity flow system that feeds all the calf pastures from the top of a hill. That’s one benefit of living in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania.
We are running a little low on our blue cheese now. We had to make so much for the US Open early in the spring that we ran out of space in our cooler. We couldn’t make any more until we delivered the cheese. We will try to spread it out evenly but we will be short on Pirate Blue for the next month or so.
Our first batch of cheddar from this spring reached sixty days of aging mid-June. We still have a lot left from last year’s production of cheddar. We decided to create a mature and a mild cheddar. We are calling our mature cheddar Four Leaf Clover. Four Leaf Clover is two dollars more per wholesale price to cover the cost of the extra aging. We will be re-branding our cheddar as “Clover” once we use up all of our old labels. We decided to do this because there is a standard of identity that must be met to name a cheese “cheddar.” Our recipe is still the same, but due to our aging process, we may not always meet the standard moisture content for cheddar. If we give it our own name, we don’t have to worry about meeting a standard.
We had a meeting with our accountant last week. He told us that we are wholesaling our cheese below production cost. Eventually, we may have to increase our pricing across all of our cheese. For now, we will just be adding two dollars per pound to the wholesale price of any cheese aged over 12 months. Our market prices will remain the same. For this month Tussey Mountain and Uncle Joe’s are the only two cheese that will be increasing in price.
Well, that’s all the updates for this month. Would you like to get these newsletters every month via email along with our monthly cheese inventory? you can sign up for our monthly updates via the form at the bottom of our How to Purchase page. Thank you to all of you who support our family farm and allow us to keep making great products.
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