The Christmas Letter

Dear Family and Friends,

I wasn't going to send a Christmas card this year...

I convinced myself to not send a card this year, in hopes of saving time, money, natural resources, and, mostly, my sanity. It didn't take too much convincing. I didn't have a nice recent picture of all of us, or even just the kids, since at least one of us has had a red, runny nose or some other illness since Halloween. And, I wanted more time to bake Christmas cookies and make Christmas gifts with the kids.

But then all of your cards and letters started filling our mailbox, and I started to feel bad about not sending out a holiday greeting of some sort. So, I compromised with myself and agreed to send a holiday e-greeting. For the first time since we lived in Cambridge, I am attempting to write a Christmas letter to go along with our Photoshopped family picture. Since I continue to write a column for the Dairy Star and this blog, writing a Christmas letter should be an easy task, but it hasn't been so. What to include? What to leave out? Where's the fine line between sharing accomplishments and bragging? I tip my hat to the folks who have mastered the art of writing the Christmas letter.

It only took three pictures to make this one...

Our Christmas was wonderful. Dan and Monika both had delightful Christmas programs at school. We were able to gather with both Glen's family and my family. I have enjoyed the break from school, but I think Monika has had just about enough of Dan being home every day.

March 2013

Daphne is 1 now. She is an easy-going little girl who loves to laugh and smile. She's on the brink of both walking and talking. One of her favorite activities right now is riding her stuffed rocking horse, trick pony style. She hangs onto the handles with both hands, then stands on the horse's back with both feet, and finally, looks up to make sure someone's watching so she can flash her triumphant grin.

June 2013

Monika is 4. She is enrolled in the Little Saints preschool program at St. Mary's School, which holds class three mornings a week. She was an angel in their Christmas program and played the part well. Monika is always singing and has recently started interpretive dancing around the house. She also likes to help milk her favorite cows in the barn.

September 2013

Dan just turned 7. He is in first grade at St. Mary's. His favorite subjects are math and reading. I continue to be amazed at how education has evolved since I was a student; Dan is doing early algebra and reading books that I'm sure I didn't read until second or third grade. He also enjoys building machines and animals with his LEGOs, taking electronics apart, and drawing.

December 2013

Glen keeps the farm running while I run after the kids. He did a little deer hunting this fall and even fired his muzzle loader this winter. I spend as much time farming as I can and as little time keeping house as I can. I avoid housework by baking, writing, and reading to the kids.

We hope you had a wonderful Christmas and wish you all the best in 2014! Keep in touch!

Love,
Glen, Sadie, Dan, Monika and Daphne

Man meat

Maybe you had to be here for this story to be funny...

One of the ladies we do farm business with brought us a Christmas gift yesterday. Included in the gift was a package of summer sausage. As she left, she said, "Each meat shop has their own recipe. I hope you like it."

I assured her that any kind of summer sausage would be enjoyed in our house.

When Glen saw the sausage in the fridge, I could tell he was delighted. The meat shop where the sausage was made happened to be one of the plants Glen visited when he worked as a meat inspector.

It didn't take long for the summer sausage to be sampled. Glen cut himself a slice as soon as he saw it. After he took a bite, he asked Dan if he wanted a slice.

"This is man meat, Dan," Glen explained, with an air of excitement in his voice, as Dan came over to the cutting board.

Then, there was a bit of silence.

What Glen had meant to say was: This is food fit for a man. Man food. Or something like that.

But Dan's literal, six-year-old mind interpreted Glen's statement about the sausage another way.

Quizzically, he asked, breaking the silence, "Is it made from people?"

It took everything I had to keep from laughing out loud. I would have let myself laugh, but I didn't want Dan to think his question was silly. Because, in reality, his question was very valid. We talk about the different kinds of meat we eat, and which animals that meat came from, at almost every meal... "This is pig meat; it's called pork." or "This is meat from a steer; it's called beef." or "This is chicken meat."

I like to think my kids have a good understanding of where their food comes from.

Thankfully, while I was stifling my laughter, Glen was able to answer Dan's question.

"No, this sausage is made from pork and beef."

And it happens to be a very tasty combination of pork and beef.


May you, too, be blessed with little moments of humor this holiday season!

#CookieChatter: Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies

A little while ago, the folks at Land O'Lakes invited me to participate in their #CookieChatter Twitter party, as a representative of the dairy farmers who are members of the Land O'Lakes cooperative.

I agreed to join the party. But I had no idea what to expect. I've had a Twitter handle for a while now, but I rarely tweet. And I had never participated in a Twitter party.

Well, the party was tonight. And it was wild. My head is still spinning.

During the party, I shared the last guest post I did for the Land O'Lakes blog – Baking Memories Together: Our Holiday Traditions on the Farm. The post includes some tips for baking and decorating cookies with kids – and keeping your sanity. It did not include the recipe for the sugar cookies I make, because I figured just about everyone has a sugar cookie recipe already.

Several requests for the recipe were tweeted during the party, so here's the recipe I got from Glen's mom for Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies. (The raspberry extract was my idea; I use it all the time in place of almond extract.) These roll-out cookies are made with both real butter and cream cheese. They bake up perfectly crisp, yet almost creamy — even without frosting.

Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies

2 cups butter, softened (4 sticks or 1 lb)
1 (8 oz) package cream cheese, softened
2 cups white sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp raspberry extract (or almond)
2 egg yolks
4½ cups all-purpose flour

Cream together butter, cream cheese and sugar. Beat in egg yolk, salt and extracts. Stir in flour until well blended. Divide dough into six pieces and chill for 8 hours.

Preheat oven to 375°F.

On a well-floured surface, roll one piece of dough out to 1/8 to 1/4 inch thickness. (Keep other pieces refrigerated.) Cut into shapes with cookie cutters. Place 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Leave cookies plain for frosting or sprinkle with colored sugar before baking (press sugar into dough with back of spatula to secure).

Bake for 7 to 10 minutes, until light and golden brown. Cool completely before frosting.


Tips & Tricks  (added January 10, 2014)

After my sister made these for the first time and called for advice, I decided I should add a few tips to this recipe.

→ If you're new to rolling out cookie dough, this video from Land O'Lakes is extremely helpful.



→ When you take this dough out of the fridge to roll, it will be rock hard. Either take it out 5 to 10 minutes before you start to roll or squeeze the dough gently in your hands (while still wrapped) to warm it up before rolling.

→ Use a generous amount of flour on your rolling surface and your rolling pin.

→ Lots of rolled cookies recipes will recommend re-rolling dough only once (so will the video above), but I re-roll this dough until it's all cut into cookies. There might be a slight difference between the first rolled cookies and the re-rolls, but it's insignificant.

→ The number of cookies this recipe makes varies considerably depending upon how thick you roll the dough and what size cookie cutters you use.

→ I think these cookies are best when the dough is rolled out to 3/16 of an inch, but since I started using an adjustable rolling pin to roll my dough, I roll this cookie dough out to 1/4 of an inch – but only because my rolling pin doesn't have an option for 3/16 inch. They turn out great at either thickness.

 → I've tried several recipes for frosting these cookies, but this recipe has been the best so far.

I hope these tips help. Happy Baking!


I am a farmer-member of the Land O'Lakes Cooperative. Affiliate links were used in this post.

How Dairy Farmers Carve Pumpkins

Halloween is over. The rest of our country is now decorating Christmas trees and tackling holiday shopping. (It seems that Thanksgiving has once again been overlooked.)

But I still have a skeleton hanging on my patio and a jack-o-lantern sitting on the porch. There are still some Halloween cookies in the container on the counter. And, thank heavens, the kids' collection of candy from trick-or-treating hasn't been polished off yet . So it's not too late to write about all the fun we had with Halloween this year.

About that jack-o-lantern...

I'll let you in on a little secret: There is nothing about carving pumpkins that appeals to me. Well, the carving part isn't so bad. It's cleaning the pumpkin out that makes me gag.

But, from the way my kids talk, carving pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns ranks right up there with Santa Claus coming. So, for my kids' sake, I steeled my stomach and we managed to get one of our pumpkins carved after chores one night.

During chores that night, as I was dreading the upcoming carving, I had an idea. An ingenious way, if you ask me, to make pumpkin cleaning much more tolerable: an AI glove.

The kids thought that using a glove was hilarious and, of course, insisted upon using the glove to help.

 

The glove worked really well. And so did the canning lid I used to scrape the pumpkin guts off the shell. Next year, maybe we'll get all three pumpkins carved.

About the cookies and the candy...

My favorite part of Halloween this year was baking Halloween cookies and decorating them with our friends.

I stayed up late one night to roll and cut sugar cookies... by myself. I love baking and I love my kids, but, sometimes, baking with kids can be tricky. Baking by myself is a treat. A quiet, peaceful treat.

I also tried a new recipe for chewy chocolate cookies that the kids could frost and decorate with candy.

Cookie decorating with five kids was a little bit crazy and a lot of fun. So fun that I didn't manage to take any pictures during the decorating. But I did get one of the finished cookies.

And, we really didn't need any more sweets in the house, but I took the kids trick-or-treating anyway.

My little dragons and ladybug and I hope you had a fun Halloween, too.

The Equation

aka How to Calculate a Cow Owner's Share of Milk Income 

Last year at Midwest Dairy Expo, Glen and I shared our experiences as beginning farmers as part of a producer panel. One of the questions we were asked was how we calculated our milk check while we were working on another farm as herdsmen and housing our milk cows there. I'll explain everything below, but here's The Equation that Glen came up with:

number of cows

x  average daily milk production in pounds

x  days in month

x  milk price (per pound)

x  farm's net farm income ratio

x  cow owner's percentage of income

= cow owner's share of milk income

Before I explain how we ended up using this equation and give an example, let me share a few assumptions and requirements for this equation to work.

This equation can be used in a situation where the Cow Owner(s) own the cows, but someone else (the Farm) provides housing, feed, veterinary care, breeding expenses, labor, etc. Cow Owner(s) might be farm employees who own cows, like we did, but Cow Owners do not necessarily need to work on the Farm. Milk from the Cow Owner's cows is commingled with milk from the Farm's cows in one bulk tank. This equation is set up for a once-monthly payment from the Farm to the Cow Owner.

To use this equation, you need to know the cows' average milk production for the month. We used the production information from our monthly DHIA (Dairy Herd Improvement Association) test. We kept our cows in a separate string, which allowed us to easily determine average production.

For milk price, we used the Farm's mailbox price, which, of course, isn't available until the milk check for that month comes. (For example, we were paid in mid-January for the milk our cows produced during the month of December.)

You also need to know the Farm's net farm income ratio. The net farm income ratio, which is a measure of the Farm's financial efficiency, is the percent of the gross farm income that remains after all expenses are paid. The farm where we housed our cows was enrolled in the Minnesota Farm Business Management program, so we pulled their net farm income ratio off the executive summary of their financial analysis. We included this ratio in The Equation to make sure the Farm was compensated for feeding, housing, and otherwise providing for our cows.

The Cow Owner's percentage of income is a percentage that's mutually agreed upon between the Farm and the Cow Owner. We used 66%, which meant that we received two-thirds of the income from milk our cows produced and the farm kept the other third. This figure wouldn't necessarily need to be included in The Equation, but we added it so that our situation would be a win-win for both us and the farm we were working on. Adding our cows to the farm meant longer milking times and rearranging some fencing. In other situations, employee-owned cows might be occupying stalls that could otherwise house farm-owned cows. If the cows being housed on the Farm are owned by multiple owners, this percentage could be divided accordingly.

Here's how we ended up needing The Equation:

Back in 2006, we were milking cows on my dad's farm. We had just purchased the cows from him, but were still renting the facilities. Jane Salzl needed a herdsman for one year for the dairy farm she owned with her husband Sam. Sam had been badly injured in an accident earlier that year and was still recovering. Jane called us on July 29 and asked if we would be interested in the herdsman position. (Glen and I had done relief milking for Sam and Jane before we started farming.)

After considering Jane's question, we said yes, but with one condition – only if we could bring our cows along. As most dairy farmers and cow owners understand, we were attached to our cows. And we knew that after our year of working for Jane and Sam, we planned to find a farm in Stearns County and return to dairy farming on our own.

Jane and Sam decided that they could make room for our cows in their dry cow pasture, so we brought three-quarters of our small herd along with us. (Glen's dad and brother milked and housed the rest of our milk cows, along with our older calves.) We brought our bottle calves along to Jane and Sam's. We left our yearling heifers at my dad's.

During the four weeks between Jane's first call and the day we moved, one of the things we needed to figure out was how we would get paid for the milk our cows produced while they were at Sam and Jane's. One night during milking, Glen came up with The Equation as a solution. When we presented the idea to Jane and Sam, they agreed that The Equation would work.

Finally, here's an example of how we used The Equation:

In December of 2006, we had 32 cows milking at Sam and Jane's. On test day, they averaged 77 pounds of milk. Sam and Jane's milk price for December was $14.81/cwt. Sam and Jane's net farm income ratio was 37% (based on their financial analysis from 2005). As mentioned above, we used 66% for our share of income from our cows' milk.

So, plugging those numbers into The Equation...

32 cows  x  77 lbs.  x  31 days  x  $0.1481  x  .37  x  .66 = $2,762.51

We used this money to make our equipment and cattle loan payments while we worked for Sam and Jane.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.