Emma the Hired Girl

Greetings and salutations!

Welcome to the Sweet Grass Dairy blog. While I don’t know exactly who you are, if you found your way to our farm website and blog, I’m guessing you’re the type of person who cares about things. Maybe you care about real food, healthy land, and living an authentic lifestyle. Maybe you just like cows. Maybe you care about how your food is raised, the impact those farming practices have on the future, and the reliability of securing that food from people you trust.

If you haven’t found out already, you’re about to find out that these are the things we care about, too.

My name is Emma, and I am the hired girl here at Sweet Grass. (That is the title I gave myself. Employee sounds too mainstream.) I will be the one behind the pen, or rather keyboard, whose voice you will get used to hearing here on the blog.

A little bit about me: I grew up on a produce farm in western NY state, which is a lot like Ohio, except there are these things called “hills.” My family was the kind who worked really hard while the sun was out and sat around playing guitars and fiddles on Saturday nights. I attended a tiny state school in a tiny rural town, where I lived with a family who operated an organic dairy farm. I fell in love with farming in a completely new way, partly because it was a completely new way to farm. All the while the degree I was pursuing assured me I would end up in a job where I wore heels to work and sat in a swivel chair.

I ended up wearing heels for a little while, and the swivel chair was fun...but farming eventually won over. I gave my heels to a coworker and in spring of 2021 moved to central Ohio to become part of the didactic and thriving environment that is Sweet Grass Dairy.

But before I was a farmer, I was a writer, and so it is truly a pleasure to have you as a reader. What can you expect to find here? Well, there will be recipes, some real food education, stories from everyday life at the farm, and the official scoop of what’s going on here across the different seasons. I promise not to be too long-winded. There is no time, with all these animals to take care of.

Whether you are a farmer yourself, a foodie, someone who wears heels to work or someone who wears a hardhat, I hope I can encourage you to keep caring about the important things and to grow your enthusiasm for stewarding land and animals by supporting farmers who are working to do just that.

So buckle up, or unbuckle, because we’re just riding on cow paths and back roads....

~Emma