So much news to share....

some of which is recent and some not so much, but I wanted to get it all written down for reference later on. I am finding that more what this blog does for me, it timestamps activities so that I can go back for date purposes.

Let's see about 3 months ago we started South Mountain Creamery Cheese Co. We hired for a brief time (a matter of about 6 weeks) a cheesemaker from Turkey and he taught Tony and my mom how to make cheddar, gouda, and fetta cheeses, and after he left Tony was making about 400 lbs of cheese per week (which we now have aging). This will be a way to utilize more of our fluid milk so that less and less will be going out to the cooperative. Our customers like the fact that they can also buy cheese made from our milk too because the fact that we don't use any hormones or antibiotics.

Another exciting "event" was the 25 year anniversary of the farm on the last day of February and the 5 year anniversary of the creamery on April 10th, which just completely amazes us even today that the farm and creamery are still here and that we are growing in the ways we are. The creamery would not be here without the farm and vise versa. We celebrated with family and employees by having a crab feed, nothing like good seafood!!

We have been in negoitations with many, many banks and other lending institutions for over a year now to get a re-finance of the business, our current lender no longer wanted to handle agricultural loans and with the business plan of the creamery being so WRONG we had accumulated a lot of debt with start-up costs and general lack of revenue those first years. FINALLY a bank came thru and while Tony and I were away in Florida last month the farm and creamery finally went to settlement!!! This bank wants to work closely with us and help us grow into the future, we are soo blessed! Here in the last 6 months or so even with our steady growth, things were still pretty tough money wise, hopefully now it will no longer be an issue!

We just hired driver #6 for delivery routes, that means we finally have enough drivers and also a FT sub-driver that can cover any routes if any of the other drivers call in sick, we have never had this in place, so hopefully this will keep Tony off the truck permanently! With Tony being able to stay closer to home, much needed plant upgrades, and office upgrades will now be possible. Tony is also in negoitations with a home delivery driver that wants to go out of business and we may be buying his routes it would consist of 200 new customers and a truck.

This past weekend we had our Spring Open House at the creamery, and what a BLAST that was!! We couldn't have asked for more beautiful weather, we had the best crowds we think we have ever seen, we sold out of food at our booth and had to go out for more supplies Saturday night (something we have NEVER had to do before). This years theme was the "Cow Caper Treasure Hunt"...and the idea behind the treasure hunt was to keep the people at the festival longer so they had to go to each station to complete the hunt, and everyone we talked to LOVED it! Tony wrote the clues himself and then we had inflatable cows hidden all over the farm and once they found the cow they had to complete an activity like make butter, or ride the hayride in order for one of our volunteers to give them a punch on their treasure map. Like my mom said HOW WILL WE EVER OUT DO THIS ONE??!! We have another festival the 3rd weekend of October and Tony and I have already started pre-planning we may try to do a corn maze this year!

Farmers Market season has started and that means all the members of the family and some of our drivers as well will be attending markets in Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia. Very busy and exciting time of the year!