All about the Grand-View Holsteins herd
Do you love cows? Well, do we! That's why we wanted to dedicate an entire page just to our girls, and tell you, our customers just how important they are to our candle business!
One of the main ingredients of our candles and melts is cow's milk. Without our girls, there would be no candles or melts! The extra milk they bless us with that doesn't go to feed the calves, is used to create our products. Since we are too small of a herd to sell our milk here in Wisconsin, we got a bit creative with what to do with the extra milk from our ladies. From this crazy idea of making candles with the milk, Barnlight Candle Company was born!
The Grand-View Holsteins herd currently consists of 4 milking cows, 3 breeding age heifers, 2 pre-breeding age heifers, 1 heifer calf and 3 bull calves. As with most dairy herds, we only keep the girls (heifers/cows). Once the boys are old enough to be weaned and gain weight to about 450-500 lbs or so, we sell them to either become breeding bulls in another farmer's herd, or to be raised as a steer for meat purposes. While we own them though, they're spoiled rotten!
The sale price of the boys is what helps cover feed costs for our girls...who eat a LOT! We also take a portion of candle sales to put back into the herd to upgrade their housing, fencing, whatever we need for them to be even more comfortable then they are now.
Like our mission statement says, we are all about the love of our cows and our love of candles coming together. They really go hand in hand for us.
The cows who are currently in milk and are contributing to candle making and wax melts are: Jewel (pictured above on the left with her granddaughter Joy), Jade and Pala. Pictured above on the right from June 2022 is Pearl, with her second calf, a daughter named Phire. Pearl is currently dry, which means she isn't milking right now. She is enjoying being pregnant with her 3rd calf and is on vacation from helping us make candles and melts, until after she calves in.
Here is a general family tree of our ladies, who nearly all came from Jewel, who started our herd in 2018.
Jewel- she has had 4 daughters oldest to youngest: Pearl, Jade and Gem (twins) and Glory. Her last calf was her first son, named Jack. She's had 5 calves so far.
Pearl- she has 2 daughters oldest to youngest: Pria and Phire
Jade- she has 2 daughters oldest to youngest: Jazzy and Joy
Pala- she has 1 son named Peroni who we are very excited to keep as a breeding bull for our herd (we added Pala to the herd in 2021)
Partee- she's one of our youngsters, and isn't old enough to breed yet (we added her to the herd in 2022)
If you'd like to learn even more about our ladies, or just want to follow what the farm is doing, please visit our farm's website at:
https://grandviewholsteins.wixsite.com/home/the-girls
They also have a Facebook page! Just search: Grand-View Holsteins
We strive to educate the community about dairy farming and dairy cattle in general, so if you have any questions at all, please feel free to ask! We are very passionate about our herd, and always strive to give them the very best we can. This is why we take a portion of our profits from making candles and wax melts, and put it back into the herd. After all, we wouldn't be able to make such a wonderful product line without them. They're always our employees of the month and VIP team!