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Unveiling “The Big Cheese” at the Indiana State Fair

The American Dairy Association of Indiana is helping celebrate Indiana’s bicentennial with this year’s cheese sculpture.

Sarah Kaufmann, The Cheese Lady, says designing this year’s sculpture, was a no-brainer.  “Where would Indiana be without the pioneer farmers that brought their little Buttercup-the-cow,” she says.  “Every farmer had their dairy, their milk for sustentation.  Here we are now 2016, 200 years later and dairy is so big in Indiana.”

The sculpture is made up of more than 1,200 pounds of cheese and she tells Brownfield it is a great opportunity to educate fair goers about the importance of dairy.  “As I’m carving – I’m mic’d,” she says.  “And I just talk what I’m thinking about.  And I talk about nutrition and if they eat one inch square cubed of cheese equals an ounce of cheese and one ounce of cheese equals an 8 ounce glass of milk.”

The cheese sculpture will be on display through the end of the Indiana State Fair.

Once the fair is completed BioTown Ag, a sustainable energy operation will cook the cheese to produce methane gas, run it through a methane digester and create electricity to put back into the electrical grid.

AUDIO: Sarah Kaufmann, The Cheese Lady