VERMONT — Want to know where your food comes from? This summer, you can go straight to the source. Vermont’s Breakfast on the Farm will be held in East Montpelier on Saturday, June 17, and in Bridport on Saturday, July 22. Breakfast on the Farm is a free, public celebration where you’ll meet the cows and farm families who work hard to make nutritious and wholesome dairy foods for Vermont and beyond.
The Hall family of Fairmont Farm in East Montpelier and the Audet Family of Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport will serve a free pancake breakfast and offer self-guided walking tours of their dairy farms with educational stations. Those stations will focus on caring for cows, environmental stewardship, community contributions, and much more. A kid friendly scavenger hunt includes milking a pretend cow, riding a smoothie-blending bike, and exploring the big tractors.
The Audet family has owned and operated Blue Spruce Farm since 1958. They were the first farm in Vermont to have both a methane digester and a 100-kilowatt wind turbine. The Audets collect the manure from the cows and turn it into energy that supports the electricity needs of some 400 families in the state. At Breakfast on the Farm, these technologies will be on display, and visitors will learn about other innovative practices on the farm like manure injection and cover cropping to protect the soil and water.
Both farms are members of Cabot Creamery Cooperative, where the milk from their farms is made into cheese, butter, yogurt and other local dairy products.
The event organizing team, which includes the Vermont Agency of Agriculture in partnership with New England Dairy Promotion Board, will seek to build on the success of last year’s Breakfast on the Farm events, which drew 2,000 people to two Vermont dairy farms for fun, facts and pancakes.
“Dairy products from Vermont are top quality, and it is important to our region that people support their local dairy farmer,” said Bill Rowell, owner of Green Mountain Dairy and 2016 Breakfast on the Farm host. “Our Breakfast on the Farm (last year) was an opportunity for those who participated to see for themselves the practice of caring for the cows, and producing quality food on today’s dairy farm.”
Breakfast on the Farm is a free event, but tickets must be reserved through www.VermontBreakfastonTheFarm.com.