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Sassy Cow: direct from creamery to customer

Susan Troller  —  8/22/2008 3:35 pm

Pride in the quality of their cows' milk and recognition of consumer demand for locally produced food have led two Bristol farming brothers to strike out on their own with a $2 million farmstead milk bottling plant.

In April, Jamie and Rob Baerwolf, along with their wives (both named Jennifer), opened the Sassy Cow Creamery. The bottling plant allows the Baerwolfs to sell farm fresh milk from their own cows directly to consumers who come to their retail farm store, about nine miles north of Sun Prairie at W4192 Bristol Road, or who shop at grocery stores and markets that carry the colorful Sassy Cow label.

The Baerwolf brothers observed the growing customer interest in fresh, farm-based products. "I think many people feel they're losing the connections they once had to the farms that produce their food," Jamie Baerwolf said.

To help foster that connection even further, on Friday, Aug. 1, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., the Sassy Cow Creamery is hosting an open house with a brat fry, farm and creamery tours and product samples. For more information and directions to the Sassy Cow Creamery and farmstead store, go to www.sassycowcreamery.com or call 608-445-2010.

Some of the area's top restaurants, including L'Etoile and the Old Fashioned, use Sassy Cow milk in their kitchens. Grocery stores in Madison, from the little Regent Street Co-op to heavyweights like Woodman's, Metcalfe's Sentry and Cub Foods, offer Sassy Cow products. And, thanks to a local distributing company, the Baerwolfs also are sending their bottled milk to stores from Wausau to Chicago, Platteville to Milwaukee.

Heavy cream and butter also are in the future, and Sassy Cow ice cream in several flavors is sold at the farmstead store.

The brothers graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences in the 1990s. Both decided they wanted to bring their ag degrees back to the dairy farm their grandfather Edward Baerwolf purchased in 1946, and which their father, Edwin, operated until his retirement.

"For about the first 10 years that my brother and I were farming, we were a pretty straightforward production agriculture kind of dairy farm," Jamie Baerwolf said. They produced milk as an agricultural commodity and sold it on the open market, where it was pooled with milk from many other farms.

But the brothers were proud of the quality of the milk their cows produced, and sensed that a growing number of consumers wanted alternatives to anonymous, mass-produced food products. They began exploring options for marketing their farm's milk directly to discerning customers.

In 2000, they split their herd and began using organic practices with about 100 cows.

Now, less than 10 years later, the Baerwolfs milk two herds of primarily Holsteins -- a conventional herd of 400 animals at one site, and another herd of 100 cows producing organic milk at a location just down the road. All aspects of each cow's life, diet and exercise are carefully monitored, and every animal spends time outdoors on lush pasture.

"You spend any time with the Baerwolfs and you sense the pride they have in their cows and the quality of the milk they are producing," said Jeanne Carpenter, communication director of the state's Dairy Business Innovation Center. In May, she was on hand for the celebration surrounding the Sassy Cow Creamery's grand opening.

Jamie Baerwolf noted that the milk from both herds travels just a half mile to the creamery where it's processed separately by half a dozen employees. Baerwolf estimated the creamery currently is processing all of their organic milk -- about 3,500 gallons each week -- and a similar amount of non-organic milk.

The rest of the milk from the Baerwolfs' conventional herd leaves the farm and is sold on the general market. As consumer demand for the Sassy Cow label continues to grow, the Baerwolfs will process more of their own milk.

"This family is prepared to try to produce the best-tasting milk in Wisconsin, if not the country, or maybe the world," Carpenter said with a laugh.

But Baerwolf, who is soft-spoken and modest, is inclined toward understatement.

"Taste is really subjective, and there are so many things that affect it. What we know is that we treat our cows well and with respect, and we can get the milk in the bottle quicker. That contributes to freshness. People tell us our milk tastes very good," he said.

Susan Troller  —  8/22/2008 3:35 pm