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Schlangen Dairy Farm: 2022 Outstanding Sustainability Award Winner

Schlangen Dairy Farm: 2022 Outstanding Sustainability Award Winner

By Sunny Andersen

Stearns County (Minnesota) Farm Bureau members Steve and Cheryl Schlangen are one of four dairies to receive the 2022 Outstanding Dairy Farm Sustainability Award from the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.

Schlangen Dairy implements numerous environmentally friendly practices on their 60-cow, 200-acre farm in central Minnesota. The farm incorporates over 30 conservation practices, providing a blueprint for beginning farmers and generational farms to follow.

Practices include LED lighting, cover crops, a manure-stacking slab that prevents nutrient leaching into the water and a manure injection system that uses less time, less fuel and has virtually eliminated the need for commercial fertilizer on their crops.

The U.S. Dairy Sustainability Awards program recognizes farms, businesses and partnerships for socially responsible, economically viable and environmentally sound practices and technologies that have a broad and positive environmental impact.

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Alberta Honey: A Day at Molenkamp Honey Farms

Video: Alberta Honey: A Day at Molenkamp Honey Farms

When was the last time you read the label on your honey?

We spent a day at Molenkamp Honey Farms with Michael Molenkamp, who has been keeping bees for 17 seasons and runs three to four thousand hives. In mid-September, he was finishing treatments and getting his bees ready for winter, and he walked us through how Alberta honey gets made.

Alberta has just 150 commercial beekeepers running 300,000 colonies, and together they produce 40% of Canada’s honey. Long summer days and golden canola fields give Alberta honey a light flavour that’s hard to match anywhere else.

Molenkamp calls Alberta beekeepers some of the most resilient farmers he knows. There’s plenty of Alberta honey to go around, but a lot on our shelves isn’t from here, so his ask is simple. Give the label a second look and choose honey made by Alberta beekeepers, or buy straight from a beekeeper near you.