Supplemental Dairy Questionnaire

We are currently trying to acquire new product liability coverage.

It has been quite an education.

One of the agents working on this for us forwarded a questionnaire that one potential underwriter wants filled out. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry as I read it. I finally concluded that there was no way that I could answer the questions without further explanation, which I typed in a letter. Tim suggested that people reading the blog might likewise be interested, so here it is...

To whom it may concern,

In attempting to answer the “Supplemental Dairy Questionnaire” I realized that simple answers might not tell the whole story of our dairy, so I decided to provide anyone interested with this supplemental explanation.

Swede Farm Dairy is a small, family run goat dairy. We milk our small herd (under 40 goats) ourselves, there are no employees. Every single task performed on the farm is performed by my husband or myself or one of our adult children, from delivering baby goats, filling feeders or milking. As such, there is no such term as “full time”, “part time” or “seasonal”, it is, instead, work like crazy 24/7 purely for the love of the animals and the people that you work with. The questionnaire asked if there had been any employee injured while employed on the dairy. Well, recently our four year old was “helping” move "his" goats to the holding pen prior to milking and he tripped and the goat got away from him. Once he was dusted off, he was fine. The cookie might have helped.

We care for the goats ourselves. Under our license(s) we milk the goats, pasteurize and bottle the milk. Our products that we sell (at local Farmer’s Markets) are whole milk, chocolate milk, yogurt, vanilla bean yogurt, and a new coffee-flavored milk akin to Starbucks bottled Frapacinnos. We do sell to customers on the farm as well as the markets. We pick up feed at the local Co-op, driving our own personal vehicle, tossing the bags in the back of the van, driving them home. I do not know if this counts as an unlicensed feed truck, I assume so. If this is the case, we have two unlicensed feed “vans”. (We have eleven children so all of our vehicles are vans.) They are licensed for street use but I assume that you mean something different, I am just not sure what. Our quality control consists of running our hands through the feed and smelling the feed—we have had these animals for their entire lives, we want to make sure that they stay healthy…some of them even belong to our seven year old and heaven forbid anything happened to them! Since most of our acreage is wooded we must buy our hay the same way, picking up whatever square bales we can fit in the back of the van after the bags of lactation pellets are loaded and tossing them in the van. Our quality control there is the fact that our 17 year old daughter feeds the hay and usually buries her face in it and sees what it looks and smells like. She is an asthmatic so we usually know pretty fast if there is an issue! We do not probe newly stacked hay, at this point all hay isn’t stacked long, it pretty much goes straight from the van to the pens! The value of hay on premises is depleted quickly, usually within a day or two as the goats chow down. In the part of the questionnaire that asks for the distance between haystacks and between haystacks and buildings—there isn’t any because we do not have haystacks!

Tanks, milking machines, pasteurizer are all cleaned the same way—they are emptied, rinsed then scrubbed with a brush and dairy cleaner. Tubes/hoses are scrubbed out. They are then soaked in a acid-wash to prevent milkstone. They are sanitized prior to use. Our plate cell counts have been significantly under the state allowed level when tests are done.

All chemicals, agricultural or otherwise, are kept under lock and key. After all, not only do we have goats (a creature that spends every waking hour trying to get themselves into trouble) we also have three toddlers—all boys.
We have not had any antibiotic violations or adulterated milk violations, that question I understood!

Our cleanliness and quality control are driven by one overriding issue over and beyond the requirements of the state when they inspect us for our license. This issue is the fact that every single one of our children drink our milk. We do our best to make sure that our children have the best, safest milk that they can possibly have and would never provide less for other people’s children. We understand that our farm is so far out of the scope of what the industry sees as a dairy farm as to almost not even be the same thing. If I had any doubt of this then answering the questionnaire (or trying to) confirmed this fact. I hope that this letter helps explain why some of the answers on the questionnaire are unlike other questionnaires that you may have received. If you have any further questions, please feel free to let us know. You can also find further information on our website at www.swedefarm.com.

Sincerely,

Tim and LeeAnne Carlson and Katarina, Christin, Grace, Sara, Linnea, Emma, Timothy, Liberty, Noah, Judah and Seth.