Good Marketing, Happy Clients and Baby Cows.
Got Milk?
Pushing the boundaries in the “commoooonications” world is our passion. We enjoyed our time working with our client Dairy Max in a Satellite Media Tour and Facebook Live event. Now, Social Media LIVE™ allows us to serve our clients with live streaming on multiple-channels, simultaneously. If you are a communications professional that loves watching exciting campaigns unravel, as well as watching baby animals being fed, then you are in for a good ride.
Dairy to the max. We recently visited Legend Dairy in Clovis, New Mexico on behalf of our client Dairy MAX. The SMT, featuring Diary MAX’s Dr. Lana Frantzen and Dr. Travis Stork, star of the hit show “The Doctors”, was a 32-city media tour. And then to top it off, a Facebook Live broadcast event featuring Dr. Stork and family dairy farmer, Tara Vander Dussen, and of course, Sugar and Spice– two little calves that we met just about feeding time.
And there’s nothing that brings the authenticity and ability to deliver the station’s engaging content, like transmitting from remote locations. And through our new Social Media LIVE™ package that allows our clients to stream their stories simultaneous to outlets like Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and others, you can do it to the max and maximize your coverage.
MICHAEL FARR: I’ve asked Tara to honor me with just showing me a little bit about how to feed one of our lovely calves here. If you want to take a look at there, we have Sugar and Spice, right Tara?
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: Sugar and Spice. They’re both taking it a little more easy now. We had them being a little more rambunctious earlier. I think we wore them out with the taping.
MICHAEL FARR: Now, tell us a little bit about Sugar and Spice’s background. Where are they from and what’s their whole story?
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: So they’re from our dairy from our family farm. They were born here on the dairy. And they’re about four days old. And so they’ve been living in our calf barn. So when a calf is born, it’s really important to bring them inside, dry them off, warm them up, and get them that first bottle. Like that is really the key to a great start for these calves.
And so that’s what they’ve been doing for the last couple days. And then, they came out here to join us. And they’ll be headed back to the calf barn a little bit later today. Spice ate earlier, so let’s try Sugar. But something I like to do is use one finger and kind of get them headed your way. Right, so she’s sucking on my finger.
MICHAEL FARR: Should I give her a little love there?
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: Yeah. And then–
MICHAEL FARR: Do I get my finger in there too?
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: Yeah, go ahead.
MICHAEL FARR: OK. Now, this is always fun. You can imagine how fun this could be.
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: So now, she’s like, OK, that’s not any fun, so try switching it over.
MICHAEL FARR: So now, I’m going to go from finger– guys, take a look at this now– and I’m going to try and get that milk in there and, hey, there we go. So how much do they consume a day?
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: They’ll consume two of these bottles a day.
MICHAEL FARR: OK. And now, how big is Sugar and Spice– how big are they going to grow to be?
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: So our full-sized cows will grow to be about 1,600 pounds, so just under a ton. So they will end up large ladies.
MICHAEL FARR: OK. Tara, just tell me a little bit about the everyday life here, because I don’t think people really understand what goes into creating this product. And how are you doing? You doing good down there?
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: She is. She is hungry. So yeah, you’ve learned a little bit in the last couple of months that we’ve been working together. You know, we had to work through everyday life on our farm with the filming, and so it took a little bit of back and forth with us trying to get it all worked out. So some of the things that happen on a dairy every day is we obviously, milk our cows every single day, two times a day. They spend about eight minutes each time in the barn being milked.
MICHAEL FARR: Hey, good job.
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: Oh, she’s done. We feed our cows twice a day. They have a nutritionist that will regulate their diet, plan their diet, so they can get a good balance of carbs and proteins. Just like us, they need to have a well-rounded diet. And we also have veterinarian that comes in once a week and checks the herd health. So there’s always something going on in the dairy. It just depends on the day of the week, what we have going on, but it’s a busy day on the dairy.
MICHAEL FARR: Now, this is a family affair, so just talk us a little bit about all the people involved. I’ve met brothers, and cousins, and nephews, and moms, and dads. We had just such a great time, so special thanks to you and your family. But tell a little bit about all the people involved, because it’s really a true family affair.
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: Yeah, so I’m a fifth generation dairy farmer, so this family affair goes back several generations. And yeah, you had a chance to meet everyone at the barbecue last night. But for this dairy, my husband and I, we dairy farm with his parents. And then, he has five brothers, so there’s six boys total. And we dairy farm with all of them and their families.
And so we’ve got multiple generations here on our dairy, from grandparents, to us, to grandkids, and so it’s really cool to kind of see that transition of the farm from one generation to the next and kind of the changes that happen along the way and the new technology.
MICHAEL FARR: We are incredibly thankful to you and your family for having us out here. It was a lot of fun.
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: It was.
MICHAEL FARR: I want to thank Sugar, Spice? Spice, Sugar?
TARA VANDER DUSSEN: Yes, Sugar is being the spicier one this time around. But yeah, we so enjoyed having you guys out here too. It was a learning experience for us, too. We didn’t know anything about filming until we got started. So we really enjoyed having you here. Thanks for making this process so seamless.
MICHAEL FARR: It was great.