Highlights from June Dairy Month
I can't believe it is already the end of July. Where did this summer go?! The summer started off fast and furious with June Dairy Month. But what an amazing month it was! I loved seeing all the dairy positive posts throughout the whole month. Dairy producers really went above and beyond to reach out to their communities and to consumers to share about dairy. And in this post, I wanted to take a minute to wrap up all of my posts from the month and showcase my favorite highlights from other dairy farmers during June Dairy Month. 
The Story of Milk
At the beginning of this summer, I started preparing for June Dairy Month by writing a guest blog for Progressive Dairyman called "Real Dairy Wives: Sharing our dairy story is a family affair". This post gave me a great chance to reflect back on why I decided to start on this blogging journey. And it really was about trying to help people understand where their food comes from. After writing this post, I was inspired to get back to that basic idea of telling people the story of milk and our farm. From how we care for our cows to nutritious milk to how milk gets from our farm to your fridge.I kicked off June with a blog post "The Story of Milk: Farm to Fridge" and how to find out where your milk is bottled. From there, I started weekly live Q&As on my Instagram with each week focusing on the following topics: Dairy Sustainability, Cow Care (featuring Milkman Dan and our cow nutritionist, Clancy), Kids and Nutrition (featuring an RD and mom of two, Sara) and Large Family Farms. You can find all the details from my live Q&A in my blog post here. I also took the big step of finally creating a Facebook page for New Mexico Milkmaid and an IGTV Channel. If you haven't already, go check out my page and don't forget to like it! And check out my first IGTV episode.
Dairy Great Team-ups
Throughout the month, I worked with different dairy publications and marketing teams to promote dairy. I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Dairy MAX about United Dairy Women, a charity very dear to my heart for their Undeniably Devoted series, "Undeniably Devoted: Helping Children from Farm to Table". I talked with the National Dairy Farm Program about what brought me back to the farm in the article "A Family Legacy Draws Tara Back to the Farm". And I changed gears a little with a guest article in the Sioux Nation Ag Center publication called "Using your Nutrient Management Records to Tell your Story". And finally, to celebrate some big milestones on Instagram, I teamed up with My Big World Playscapes to do a giveaway for my followers and their little future farmers! 
Highlights from Fellow Farmers and Companies
SeeJessFarm from Spruce Row Farm released her awesome farm book on Amazon: Farm Nursery Songs. This is a must have for the little farmers in your life. Domino's had the coolest Undeniably Dairy facts on their pizza tracker website. Throughout the month, when you ordered a pizza through the pizza tracker, Domino's shared fun dairy farm facts. How cool is that?! Another one of my favorite things from the Undeniably Dairy campaign is the giant dairy murals. Check out these murals at Dairy Good. Dairy farmers across the country shared about the amazing things they are doing on their farms like Royal Dairy in Washington: "This Amazing Dairy Makes Clean Water from Manure". June Dairy Month was a great month of highlighting all the incredible achievements of the dairy community and I can't wait to see what next year brings.
Udderly,New Mexico Milkmaid