DURAND — With a line of cars back to the stoplight, the Pepin County Dairy Promotion Council and Durand Area Food Pantry figured it would be best to get their National Farmers Day dairy drive-thru started a bit early.
People started lining up at 2:30 for the drive-thru, which was scheduled to start at 4 p.m. After Pepin County Dairy Promotion Council Chairman Randy Koller received a congratulatory text message from the police chief about the turnout as he was pulling in with the council’s trailer, they decided to start handing out milk and cheese at 3:25 to avoid snarling traffic in Durand.
The Hunger Relief Federation of Wisconsin, which supplies the Durand Area Food Pantry with much of their food, delivered two pallets, 432 gallons, of milk for the drive-thru. Every car pulling up to the drive-thru was given the option of taking two gallons of milk, as well as cheese and cheese curds donated by Eau Galle Cheese and Ellsworth Cooperative Creamery, and all the milk was distributed by about 5 p.m.
“There were so many thank-yous,” said Marcia Bauer of the Durand Area Food Pantry. “It was very much appreciated.”
The National Farmers Day food drive-thru on Oct. 12 was the sixth milk and cheese giveaway the Pepin County Dairy Promotion Committee has organized since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
Koller said the drives started after a conversation with Bauer, who said at the time the food pantry was having a difficult time getting enough milk to meet demands of their regular customers.
“Everything they put out at the food pantry is food, which all involves farming,” Koller said. “We thought that National Farmers Day was a good opportunity to do something.”
Bauer said since the beginning of the pandemic, the food pantry has seen a lot of new customers. They even expanded their service area allowing anyone who comes to the door to leave with food.
“And we went through a lot of food,” she said. The pantry serves about 100 to 120 families each month and has given away an average of about 12,000 pounds of food each month since the beginning of the pandemic.
“Which is a big number for a small community here,” Koller said.
The Pepin County Dairy Promotion Committee started bringing in milk for the food pantry and for drives twice in April, then again on World Milk Day in June, and has continued drives on a nearly monthly basis since August.
“The whole community has stepped up in many different ways, whether it’s donations to the food pantry, donations to the dairy promotion,” Koller said. “Early on, we had a couple businesses say, ‘We want to see you make sure there’s milk in the cooler at the pantry.’”
The Hunger Relief Federation has given the Durand Area Food Pantry between 1,200 and 1,500 and the Dairy Promotion Committee has pitched in another 900 gallons for the drive-thru food drives.
“We were somewhere in that 2,600 and 3,000 gallon range between here and the dairy breakfast,” Koller said. “That totals up to, if you see a semi tanker load of milk going down the road, that’s about a half a tanker load. Which is a lot of milk for our area.”
October 19, 2020 at 07:00PM
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Pepin County dairy group milks National Farmers Day with drive-thru - Leader-Telegram
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