Paul Szmal: FLX Morning continues now at 8.15. I'm joined by Jacob Maslin. He's here from Cornell Cooperative Extension of Ontario County. Jacob, good morning. How are you, sir?
Jacob Maslin: Good morning, Paul. How are you?
Paul Szmal: Good. Good. Thanks. So, this is National Dairy Month, a very momentous occasion, not just for other parts of the country, but especially here in New York, because dairy production is one of the key outputs of agriculture in this area.
Jacob Maslin: Yeah. Dairy production. So, New York State ranks fifth for dairy production, is pretty relative. They had Dale Natunan just before me, and talking about Cayuga marketing, Cayuga County is actually the number one county. Ontario County is the eighth county, I think, in the state, as far as dairy production goes. But yeah, dairy farms and dairy production has been vital to our New York State agricultural economy for centuries, I guess. And one of the main products that we produce here, in addition to things like yogurt and sour cream, is ice cream.
Paul Szmal: Ice cream. Yeah. So, yeah, go out and get your ice cream. It's going to be a hot one today, a good one for ice cream. And it's one of the highest value dairy products out there. Obviously, everybody loves it. It's a sweet treat. And yeah, dairy farmers love it when their milk can be made into ice cream, because they get a little bit higher price for it. But as with the temperature and the seasons go, ice cream falls out of flavor closer to Christmas, you know. And then you get back into your butters and milks for your holiday season. Is there kind of a cycle or a rhythm to what dairy consumption is like during the course of a year here?
Jacob Maslin: Yeah. So, when the school kids are in school, there's a lot of demand for just milk, because they drink milk at schools and cartons. And then as summer hits, all that demand drops, obviously, for about two months. And with the surplus of milk a little bit, with the cows on their natural cycle, you get kind of this surplus of milk this time of year, and it needs a home. Ice cream finds a little bit of that home. And towards the holiday season, that's when we hit more demand, because we have butters and creams and cheeses and milks in your holiday meals. And family comes to town, you need to make more food for them. And so, that's kind of the cycle, you know, peak around the holiday season, then it slowly trails down. We're in, like, the low season right now, I guess.
Paul Szmal: All right. We're talking with Jason Maslin from Ontario County Cornell Cooperative Extension. I almost said Onondaga County for some reason.
Jacob Maslin: Yeah, we're in every county, yeah. But yeah, Cornell Cooperative Extension is indeed everywhere. And a lot of the areas and states manufacturing plants that make things like yogurt and sour cream and whatnot are under some expansion. We just heard about Keuka Milk Ingredients expanding a few minutes ago, but they're not the only ones.
Paul Szmal: Right, yeah. So, we have Fair Life to the North, I think a lot of local residents have probably heard about that plant, that'll be in Webster, that's a fluid milk plant. That's brand new, it's going to where the old Xerox factory was, I think. Then you also, to the east, you have Chobani Yogurt, Chobani already has a big presence out there. So, I think they're just expanding their plant, I'm not sure by how much. Then you have Great Lakes Cheese, which might be finished expanding their plant, but cheese plant coming to state too. So, just driving to New York State as a dairy powerhouse, I guess.
Jacob Maslin: Yeah, it certainly is. Let's talk about some of the events that are coming up and get some updates here. The Farm to School Grant, something I know that you guys have been working on for a while, that has come to fruition.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, it's pretty exciting stuff. So, when school kids start going to school in September, we'll be working a lot harder getting farmers local produce and food items into schools. What that works is we're doing the education piece, we at Cooperative Extension, we're working with farmers to help them understand how to get their products into schools, how to utilize a distributor for that, so that kids in schools can eat some local healthy food from their local farmer. The idea of Farm to Table, I know it's been a big deal for restaurants, but the idea of introducing the Farm to Table concept to kids who are eating school lunches at a young age, that's a great way to get them to continue doing it as they become adults.
Jacob Maslin: Yeah, and it gets their lunches a little bit more exciting, right? When I was in school, it was kind of a boring lunch, it would be like a slice of pizza or whatever, pasta. It was pretty boring, I didn't really look forward to lunch. But if we get some more local foods and fresh foods into schools, I think kids will be more excited about it, be more healthy eating, and we'll do some education about farming, so they'll get kind of excited about farming and maybe we get a couple new farmers out of it.
Paul Szmal: And speaking of kids and the excitement of a county fair, those kind of things go hand in hand, and the Ontario County Fair is coming up later on in July.
Jacob Maslin: Yeah, that's my favorite week of the year, July 22nd through 26th this year. And we have a grant this year to bring kids from summer camps, youth groups, to fairs. So right now we have about over 200 kids coming to fairs. They're going to ride a bus to fair, we're going to give them kind of a look around, we're going to do a scavenger hunt with them. Some of the 4-H kids are going to be kind of doing the education piece with us. We're going to be educating about agriculture, all things fair, feeding them some lunch, ice cream, and have some fun.
Paul Szmal: Oh yeah, well you have to have ice cream because it's summertime. Especially ice cream at a fair. Those two things, I mean, to me they're just like locked together.
Jacob Maslin: Yeah, it hits a little different.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, it certainly does. You mentioned the word camp, well I know that camp is starting up pretty quickly here, what, in a week or so?
Jacob Maslin: Yep, camp's starting about next week. So regular campers will come in. I think they take campers all the way through last minute and through summer still. So if you have kids that might be interested, it's not too late to sign them up. But that's really ramping up and I'm not sure how many campers they have, almost a thousand probably over the course of the summer. So they have all sorts of fun activities for them, high ropes. Because this is the 100 year anniversary of camp, we have a lot of extra events going on too. So in September we're having a fall fest with a run, so we're actually doing a 100 minute running challenge. Or if you don't want to run for near 100 minutes, you can just do the mile, which is a fun event. So it'll be fun, perhaps we'll have a food truck at camp and it'll be a fun, cheap day for the kids to come out and play.
Paul Szmal: Wow, a 100 minute run. I could do that, but you've got to move the decimal point about four places left. The Ag Awareness Educator that you have, Emma, is going to be doing a special program with a little help from the friends at New York Kitchen.
Jacob Maslin: Yeah, so Emma's normally in the schools, but then now school's out, so she does some more food preservation classes. This year she's partnering with New York Kitchen to do a strawberry class, a strawberry preserves class. It's next Saturday, I believe. You can look at New York Kitchen's calendar and sign up. It's almost full though, so do it quick. She's going to take a group out to a strawberry farm, they're going to pick some strawberries, then they're going to go back to New York Kitchen, and then they're going to make strawberry jam.
Paul Szmal: Oh, nice. So it'll be fun, really hands on, and it'll be a whole day affair almost.
Jacob Maslin: Love me some strawberry jam. You've also got a kombucha brewing class coming up. I know, I've heard of kombucha, I don't know exactly what it is.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, so that's Emma's specialty. I'm not much of a kombucha drinker either, but it's kind of like a fermented beverage. It's not alcoholic, although I'm not sure pregnant people should be drinking it. And if you make it wrong, it could be alcoholic. So Emma's been getting into it and really learning how to make it, so she can teach class. There's a lot of interest. I think you can get it at the store and stuff, lots of different flavors. So we'll be teaching this kombucha class in the near future. You'll have to check our website for more information to sign up, and maybe check the later half of the day, because I haven't got it on the website yet, but it should be good.
Jacob Maslin: And speaking of the website, the website that people can check out for stuff that we've talked about here this morning?
Paul Szmal: Oh yeah, we post all of our events there, and there's lots of information and resources on there. We try to keep it up to date. So anything you need to help with, you can obviously, we're getting a lot of questions on gardening and homeowner type things. You can check our website first, or you can call the office, and Russ or I can help you with most of those questions. Although I learned last week, I'm not that great at identifying plant pests and diseases, so hopefully Russ is in the office if you do that.
Jacob Maslin: Yeah, there you go. All right. Well, I appreciate you coming in, Jacob.
Paul Szmal: Thank you.
Jacob Maslin: Thanks for having me, Paul.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, not a problem. We'll see you next time. 2424 on FLX Morning.
