S-Curve Dairy hosting annual farm brunch

Many farmers have been asked to tell their story in an effort to explain to those without a farming background what they do for a living and why they do it.

Deb Mielke doesn’t like that idea. It’s not because she doesn’t think others should know how the farm she and her husband, Dale, operate; she just hates the phrase “tell your story.”

“This isn’t a story we’re telling,” Mielke said. “All we’re doing is promoting our lifestyle, and we think the product we produce is better than these other products that claim they’re milk but they’re not milk.”

The Mielkes will get the chance to showcase the S-Curve Dairy and explain where milk and other nutritional products come from when they host the annual Shawano County Brunch on the Farm on June 25. This will be the third time the Mielkes have hosted the traditional June event.

Playing host did not come about due to want as much as need. The Shawano County Farm Bureau tries to alternate host sites between the western and eastern halves of the county, and with the 2016 brunch taking place at a farm south of Bonduel, that meant the 2017 brunch should have been on a farm on the west side of the county.

Things didn’t work out that way, according to Mielke, who has chaired the event in recent years.

“When we finished the brunch in 2015, Kevin Bonnin had called and said he wanted to do it in 2016,” Mielke said. “When we finished last year, there was nobody.”

The Farm Bureau continued to solicit farmers, but when February came and no one had stepped up, Mielke felt the best option would be to take on the host duties. The farm had been able to handle the large crowd that the brunch traditionally brings in the past.

“A couple of people I had contacted said they would be interested, but they wanted to get this done or that done,” Mielke said. “There were a lot of excuses, but you couldn’t blame them. This takes a lot of time to plan.”

Mielke said a key factor in alternating sites is to show the different ways dairy farms care for and milk the cows that provide the products that lead to grilled cheese sandwiches, butter and more.

“We have small farms. We have large farms. We have in-between farms,” Mielke said.

She and her husband, Dale, milk 320 cows on the land that Dale’s grandfather purchased in 1926. The farm, located south of Caroline, includes 320 acres that the family owns and another 250 acres that it rents to grow the alfalfa and corn used to feed the cows.

In a few years, S-Curve Dairy will become a Wisconsin Century Farm, the second in the family, Mielke said.

The farm almost found itself without a product distributor this year. S-Curve Dairy was not among the 75 farms statewide that were surprised in April by Grassland Dairy Products’ announcement that it would stop buying their milk for export to Canada, but the distributor the Mielkes had been working with, Nasonville Dairy in Marshfield, announced it was cutting ties as of April 1.

“We had two weeks to find somebody else, and the market is saturated,” Mielke said. “There was nobody that would take more milk.”

The crisis was resolved when Dupont Cheese Inc. of Marion took the Mielkes’ milk “in a minute,” Mielke said.

The deal was beneficial to the Mielkes, as Dupont is only 5 miles from S-Curve Dairy, and the timing was perfect.

“If it had been the other way around — Grassland customers calling Dupont before us — it would have been horrible for us,” Mielke said. “You’ve got buildings, land, animals, employees who have families. Then you have your own family. What can you do? You can’t just cut things off overnight.”

Mielke is eager to greet the 3,000-5,000 people who traditionally attend Brunch on the Farm. She noted that, while many brunch hosts have stayed on the sidelines talking with people about their farms, she plans to be more hands-on when people arrive next weekend.

Mielke will deliver a sermon for the nondenominational church service that starts at 8 a.m., and she’s going to do a candy toss for kids on a grassy area at 11:30 a.m. — with milk chocolate, of course. She also plans to show visitors how to make their own butter and give them some to take home, something she’s wanted to do for years.

“That can’t come fast enough,” Mielke said of her planned activities.

Other activities include the kids’ dairy bake-off challenge, 5K dairy dash, wagon rides and farm tours, mechanical milking cow, kids games, barrel train rides, petting zoo, bounce house, and the list goes on.

As for the breakfast itself, the Mielkes — along with dozens of volunteers — will serve up scrambled eggs with diced ham, sausages, hash browns, cheese, cinnamon bread with butter, milk, juice, and ice cream with strawberries or maple syrup.

S-Curve Dairy will also introduce the newest member of its family, a calf named Snowball born earlier this week. Mielke recounted how she and her daughter were planting flowers when they heard a moo coming from the dry cow barn, and they discovered that the mother had given birth there.

“They’ll let you know when something’s wrong,” she said. “We try to do a lot of things to keep them as comfortable as possible.”

Being able to show Snowball and the other cows in their element is very important to Mielke, who gets frustrated when she reads media reports about allegations of animal abuse on other farms by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and other animal rights organizations. She’s eager to show how local farmers produce the food that people will enjoy at the brunch.

“Some Farm Bureaus do their brunches as a fundraiser,” Mielke said. “Ours is education. We’re not here to sell products. We’re here to educate people.”