Jason Wiebe Dairy

We are very excited to announce that Jason Wiebe Dairy will have cheese available made from 100% a2 casein milk! It will be available on Feb 25, 2019. It will be made exclusively from the milk from cows tested to only have the a2 casein gene. It will be available as pasteurized milk mild cheddar only at the first, but we hope to add more varieties soon. Be sure to click the tab that clearly says “100% a2 casein milk” if you want the a2 casein milk cheese.

We have been growing our herd of a2a2 cows.  It is a very slow process as you can’t change what kind of DNA is in an animal, you can only slowly change her offspring.  In some cows it takes several generations to get them to a2a2.  So our milk is getting more of the milk produced by cows with the a2 gene.  As always, we love to hear your comments!!

Spring is here and there are plants starting to grow in our fields.  We farm using no-till and cover crops to improve our soils and conserve them.  I love seeing earth worms and insects coming back to our soil in greater numbers than when we didn’t use no-till and cover crops. I believe that healthy soils grow more healthy plants which make for more healthy cows which produces more healthy milk to be used in our cheese which would make it more healthy for our customers and consumers.

Currently some of our feed is GMO.  We are considering going GMO free, but the cost will be significant, and our cheese price would need to go up possibly  $0.75 to $1 per lb.  Please leave comments or email us directly if you would feel that would be worth it to you, our customers.  Also let us know if you are a current customer, or would you be a customer if we didn’t feed any feed that contained GMO’s.

Here at Jason Wiebe Dairy, we are contemplating starting to produce a2 cheese, from tested a2 cows milk.  We are curious what the demand would be, if there are people out there looking for a2 cheese.  It would not be real easy to do so we would like to see what the demand would be.  The price would be higher than our typical cheese is now.  If you would like to see a2 cheese on the market please comment or send us an email to a2cheese@jasonwiebedairy.com

At the World Cheese Championship Cheese Contest held last week in Wisconsin, our Cottonwood River Cheddar Reserve scored 98.55 points. We are pleased with the results, even though we didn’t get into the top three. This contest has cheese from all over the world, and I find it very interesting that an entry from a cheese maker in the United States hasn’t taken the Grand Championship in over 20 years!! We continually work to improve our cheese, so maybe some day…

Today was a beautiful, warm day in the mid 70’s, and the pasture had grown enough to start grazing again.  It looked really good to see the cows out on the green pasture again.  Hopefully we’ll have enough rain to keep things growing and hopefully not have a repeat of the drought of last year.  Our cheese sales are good, and the new cheese we’ve been selling since last summer (Cottonwood River Cheddar) is increasing in sales  with lots of good reviews.  Another interesting point is that our Raw Milk Cheese has become our best selling cheese.

Yesterday we started the second time over on the 60 acres of triticale that we have for them to graze.  It had regrown just enough that they have some very tasty eating…

We are grazing ALL our milk cows starting yesterday.  We don’t know how long that we’ll be able to graze as the weather is getting cooler and the crop grows very slow.  It will go dormant sometime when the weather gets cold enough, and then we won’t have any thing to graze our cows on so we will go back to giving them all they can eat of a mixed forage and grain diet.  We always try to feed as much forage (alfalfa hay and corn silage) as we can, to keep the cows very healthy.

We are trying something with our cows again which we tried a few years ago, and that is grazing some of our milk cows on pasture.  The pasture has triticale and radishes growing in it.  We give them a new area to eat about every 12 hours.  We have been doing it since about the middle of October, and so far it has worked well.  The cheese we make from this milk may have a bit more color to it, but it will probably not be noticeable.  We will see how long the weather cooperates so the cows have something to eat.