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Wisconsin dairy donates milk through Kindness Cooler
Even though times are tough in the dairy industry, a family with a cows-to-consumer business is giving away fresh, nutritious milk to families that need it.
James Baerwolf with Sassy Cow Creamery near Columbus, Wisconsin says, “We’ve had days where we’re going through three or four hundred gallons a day.” The milk giveaways have been going on for more than a week, and retail sales of milk and ice cream continue inside the store.
Baerwolf tells Brownfield they, like larger dairies, experienced demand decreases because of the shift in consumer activity. “We’ve lost a lot of our restaurant and all of our coffee house business and all of those sorts of things, so we’re just as (economically) hit just like everybody.
With more milk then they can sell at the creamery and to their foodservice clients, Baerwolf says his daughters came up with the Kindness Cooler, a refrigerator they stock where people that need milk can get it for free.
And, he says they’ve been busy. “Yeah, definitely. We’re about ten or fifteen minutes out of Madison and now the surrounding ones, so we’re by a lot of people so definitely, we get visited a lot.”
Baerwolf says he has neighbors that are dumping a lot of milk, and although it costs him money to pasteurize and bottle the milk, Baerwolf would rather give it away to families that could use it.
Sassy Cow Creamery is a third-generation farm and creamery owned and operated by brothers James and Robert Baerwolf and their families. Along with the retail operation, they also operate a 250 cow organic farm and a 600 cow conventional dairy farm. The store offers milk and ice cream products made from milk produced by their own cows.
James Baerwolf with Sassy Cow Creamery discusses the Kindness Cooler
