Tropical Depressions and Young’s
Like most folks, we got Ike’d. Lots of small damage to trees, missing shingles and some driving range netting. The biggest loss was the metal roof on The Golden Jersey Inn that blew off. Who ever knew we had to worry about that kind of wind from a hurricane in Ohio! Our new roof should be up in a cew days — not metal this time!
The good news for us was we only lost power for about 3 1/2 hours, so no losses on refrigerated foods, freezers, etc. We only shut down Sunday evening and reopened 6 am Monday. I know we were more fortunate than many in our immediate area. I know I certainly hope we have no repeats of that for the next 100 years!
Results from the Young’s Ice Cream Charity Bike Tour
I am happy to report the results of the 2008 Young’s Charity Bike Tour. On September 16, 2008 we presented each of the four charities an $18,000 check to be used for their causes, for a total of $72,000 raised this year! That’s an almost 40% increase from 2007.
The committee, volunteers and sponsors work and plan and give throughout the year to make this ride happen. We all have fun, but always remember the main purpose of the ride is to raise fund for wothwhile organizations than work to benefit the lives of Miami Valley residents.
The four charities we supported this year are The Alzheimer’s Association, The Wellness Connection, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and Inited Rehabilitation Services (URS).
Thanks to all who help create and run this ride. They all are truly one of the best groups of people I know.
Planning for the Seventh Young’s Charity Bike Tour is already underway. Mark your calendars for July 25 & 26, 2009.
Young’s Ice Cream Charity Bike Tour 2008
The Sixth Annual Young’s Ice Cream Charity Bike is now history. Over 200 bikers, 40 volunteers and over 20 sponsors gave their time, resources and money to create the best supported bicycle ride in this part of Ohio!
We ride to support the local chapters of our bike ride charities — The Alzheimer’s Association, United Rehabilitation Services, The Wellness Connection and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
This year we created a new route that went from Young’s Jersey Dairy in Yellow Springs to Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio — about 83 miles. Most of the riders stayed in Ohio Northern University’s fantastic air conditioned dorms/apartments overnight and rode back to Young’s on Sunday.
We had five rest stops along the way, and Young’s provided lunch both days on the route — and ice cream at both ends of the ride on both days.
This ride also had one day, shorter mileage options for those who don’t have the desire to ride that far!
Each rider pledges to get donations or makes the donation themselves to support the charities. After expenses (insurance, brochure printing, dorm charges and dinner and breakfast at the University) the funds raised are split among the four charities. Each charity supplies volunteers to support rest stops, check in duties, and other helpful chores.
The ride itself is supported by ham radio operators, two bike repairs shops, motorcycles, and vehicles to pick up folks with broken bikes or who need assistance for part of the ride.
Last year we were able to distribute over $52,000 to the charities. We will finish collecting all pledges over the next month or so, but I feel confident we will beat that number for the 2008 ride.
Thanks to all who were part of this ride. You are what makes it fun and successful. We are already planning on the 2009 edition of the ride — stay tuned for more details — but keep the July 25 & 26, 2009 open on your calendar!
Changes and Remodeling
Over the winter we’ve been dreaming and figuring out how to make Young’s more desireable to visit, more fun and interesting for our Guests.
Just some of the changes we’ve done in the past couple of weeks and/or are working on within the next month:
Removed part of a wall at the Dairy Store to open up the dining room, make it easier to get in and out of when we are busy.
Replaced the entrance flooring into the dining room and our server area.
Replace the wallpaper in the dining room of the Dairy Store.
We’ve removed some chain link fence located between the picnic area and the driving range and batting cages. This should make it easier to move around that area.
We are getting ready to build a ‘goat walk’ — a much more ambitious (and safe) are for our lpayful goats to climb and put on a show for our Guests.
Within the next month, we should have installed a vending machine near the batting cages to vend tokens. It will accept cash and debit or credit cards. Once again, this is for convenience and speed. We also plan to install a driving range golf ball vending machine located in the covered tee area.
We are adding two large round tables to the choices at The Golden Jersey Inn and replacing a good number of the chairs that have been in daily use for 10 plus years. The round tables will give our larger groups and familes a good place to sit and talk while enjoying a meal.
Moovers & Shakers, our golf cart driven barrel ride into our fields, will have a new feature this spring — a twenty foot giant tunnel! It looks like fun.
We are repaving about a third of our parking lots and fixing potholes that appeared this winter.
There’s more coming than this summer — details coming from a future blog.
All Natural Ice Cream Flavors
All Natural Flavors of Young’s Ice Cream
We have worked with our suppliers to identify the flavors of ice cream that use all natural ingredients. This is a big task, as over a year’s time, we make over 110 different flavors of ice cream – some flavors are here all year and some flavors are around for a month or less – it’s just fun to experiment with ice cream flavors!
These are the flavors that we can identify as all natural. Some of these flavors are permanent and some are seasonal.
• Vanilla
• Strawberry
• Butter Pecan
• Chocolate Peanut Butter
• Caramel Chocolate Toffee
• Chocolate Chunk Cherry Vanilla
• Coffee
• Banana
• Pumpkin
• Cinnamon
• Chocoffee
We are continuing to work with our flavor suppliers to make more flavors all natural and will let you know as we expand this list.
Challenges and Opportunities
As we are just getting into spring and warm weather, the busy season for Young’s is just around the corner. We are happy to see the sun shine — ice cream sales like warm weather! I don’t need to tell you that there is a more than normal amount of uncertainty with a lot of things that affect us at Young’s and you, our valued Guests. The price of oil — with gas prices so high, how is that going to affect visits to Young’s this year?
On the one hand, it’s more expensive to get in your car and drive 20 or 30 miles to get to our farm. On the other hand, we are a lot closer and cheaper to visit than many of the alternatives, like Kings Island or Cedar’s Point, or a Reds game, for example. Only time will tell.
Our Guests can be assured we are focused on making your trip to Young’s a worthwhile experience. We hire, train and coach the ways to make each Guest visit a good experience. I know we are not perfect and we don’t always deliver, but we always strive to make your visit fun and enjoyable — worth your money, time and gas! The price of oil has affected so many things. Last year our packaging (paper, plastic, or other) went up 12-20%). I don’t need to tell many of you how the cost of dairy, eggs, sugar and flour have increased.
Most of this can be attributed to the use of so much corn to make ethanol. I don’t know what the long term solutions are to the energy crisis, but I don’t think the idea of using corn is a sustainable idea. It may be a short term fix, but the worldwide disruption in food prices caused by this just isn’t going to work in the future. We are at work inventing new things to do at Young’s this year (more on that in another posting). We are also replacing some old floors and wallpaper at the Dairy Store, getting some new furniture in and repairing a major part of our parking lot. Kinda boring stuff, but it’s a part of everyday business and taking care of our Guests. Take care — I hope to see you soon at Young’s. Thanks for your business. Dan
Check Out our Green Thumb – No Till Farming
We use no till farming for much of the crops we grow. No-till farming, is a considered a kind of conservation tillage system and is sometimes called zero tillage. It is a way of growing crops from year to year without disturbing the soil through tillage. Once called chemical farming, the reference was subdued in order to promote the idea of no-till being more natural.
This minimizes soil and water erosion and the level of pesticides needed to grow things like corn and soybeans and actually sequesters carbon in the soil – not releasing it into the atmosphere. We of course also use a lot of ‘natural fertilizer’ – the by-product of having cows! This reduces the amount of manufactured fertilizer we purchase and apply to our crops.
New Homemade Ice Cream Flavors
We try to keep Young’s fun — for our guests and for ourselves. To me, one of the most fun things to do is work on new ice cream flavors. We get ideas from just about anywhere — our staff bring us ideas, customers have suggestions and we read a lot about what’s going on. But the best source of flavor ideas is the imagination. with ice cream, if you can imagine the flavors co-existing, then it probably will taste good — if not great. Best of all, eating the not so great ideas is still good!
When we first started selling ice cream, we made perhaps 25-30 flavors a year. Now we make over 110 flavors a year! Some of them we make all year, some for a season, and some for as little as a week or two. New flavors we just put out to sell this weekend include Chocolate Chunk Cherry Vanilla. It tastes pretty much just as you would expect! Lemon Custard is back for the spring and summer. A favorite of Congressman Dave Hobson is back, also — Peaches & Cream. He’s been buying dips of Peaches for years now.
If you have any ideas for ice cream,please feel free to email me at [email protected]. I appreciate all flavor ideas!
Recycling Our h2o
One of the coolest things we started doing about 12 years ago is recycling our wastewater. All of the wastewater from both restaurants and the ice cream room goes through a four stage process to organically break down the ‘gray water’ to water we can use to irrigate our fields and the Udders & Putters facility (both miniature golf courses & the driving range).
We operate an advanced facility called a ‘wetlands filtration system’ that aerates and stores the wastewater until we can use it. We recycle about 3,000,000 gallons of water each year at Young’s!
Since we also operate our own water wells, pumps, and chlorination system, we in essence keep almost all the water we use here on the farm. We pump it out of the ground, treat it, use the water for drinking, washing dishes, cooking, etc. We capture it, treat it and use the water to irrigate the water on our fields.
Recycling Fever!
Cardboard
As you can probably imagine, we go through a lot of cardboard in a day. All of the different food items we have available at our stores comes in cardboard, things being sold in our gift shop come in cardboard boxes, even the golf balls that we sell at the driving range come in cardboard boxes.
When we started recycling cardboard, we actually got paid for it because not many businesses were doing it and the demand for used cardboard was high. Times have changed and for the last decade or so, we have paid the waste company to haul the cardboard away to get recycled. By doing this, we are reducing the amount of landfill space needed and of course are using less trees & energy.
Aluminum Cans
Most of you know that for the past few summers, we have had a promotion with Pepsi to place a coupon on Mountain Dew cans. This has been one of our most popular promotions, and as can be expected – we have collected a lot of Mountain Dew cans, 70,000 to be exact (or close to exact – that’s a lot of cans to count).
We donate these cans to local charitiable organizations to recycle – they pick them up and take them to the recycling plant and keep the money to support their organizations. We have had some success in recycling cans from our company picnics during the year as well, using the same method.
Cooking Oil
We have been recycling our cooking oil for over 10 years. After we cook our french fries, onion rings, chicken and other goodies in the oil, it goes back to special equipment that filters the oil and otherwise cleans it for many uses – animal feed, cosmetics & soap. In the past few years, scientists have been able to use recycled cooking oil to burn in diesel trucks, busses and cars.
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