The Kiss Your Cow cow-share program is a cooperative effort between dairy farmers in the Shenandoah Valley and Smart Markets, Inc. Smart Markets has offered marketing and promotional assistance to a group of dairymen who must turn to selling the cows themselves in order to survive. Wholesale prices for their raw milk have dropped — or spilled — off the table in recent years, and families who have been dairymen in the valley for generations are losing their farms as a result.
You will have an opportunity to purchase your cow share from certified organic farmers or from farmers who practice earth- and animal-friendly dairy farming. Kiss Your Cow will offer them a way out of financial distress and offer the consumer a safe, legal and convenient way to access raw milk in Northern Virginia. One cow share will cost $60 and get you a gallon of milk each week. Maintenance including the boarding, feeding and milking of your cow will cost you $32 a month for one share of certified organic care or $28 a month for all-natural and humane care. The only difference is that the small amount of feed that the certified cows eat in the winter months must be organically grown, but not so for the non-certified — though it is all grown on local farms without fertilizers, pesticides or fungicides on local farms, just not on certified-organic farms.
You will be able to pick up your milk each week at any one of a number of Smart Markets farmers’ markets in Northern Virginia. The milk will be kept cold to guarantee its safety, and unlike at some other pick-up locations, your milk will be available to be picked up over a three-hour period.
Special features of this program will include planned visits to the farms to visit your cow and meet the farmers and families who take care of your cow. You will also have the opportunity to meet some of the farmers at our markets to ask them about how they raise cattle. You will be able to learn everything you want to know about your cow, its milk and its caretaker. Read this flier (PDF) to learn more about Cedar Springs Farm in the Shenandoah Valley and its proprietors, Virgil and Julia Wenger.
To receive and review a copy of the contract, please e-mail coordinator Lorenzo Moore at lopatech@comcast.net. And learn more about raw milk at the Campaign for Real Milk website.
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