Resident Farmer Gives Name

To Dairy Collective’s New Ice Cream

By Shannon Hicks

In January, The Farmer’s Cow announced that it would have ten flavors of ice cream available beginning by Memorial Day weekend. The Farmer’s Cow is the collective of six Connecticut dairy farmers who have been selling fresh milk, eggs, and other products publicly since October 2005. The new ice cream being introduced this year — vanilla, chocolate, chocolate chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, strawberry, cookies and cream, black raspberry chocolate chip, peanut butter cup, cherry vanilla, and coffee — were initially missing something almost as important as their key ingredient, however: Names.

The public was invited to submit names for the ice creams until mid-February, and the winners were announced at the beginning of this week. Newtown resident Jennifer Gaskins, who with husband Trout owns Farming 101, an heirloom tomato farm on Brushy Hill Road, is one of the competition’s winners.

Jennifer’s winning entry was Fields of Mint Chocolate Chip. Her name will be used on The Farmer’s Cow’s mint chocolate chip ice cream, and she will also be treated to a summer’s worth of Farmer’s Cow ice cream.

Thousands of entries were received for the contest, including ten each from Jennifer and Trout Gaskins.

The Gaskinses heard about the contest through their purchase of Farmer’s Cow products, as well as having read about it on the company’s Facebook page.

“We were driving to a farming conference in late January, the 2010 Farmers’ Market Meeting, and I thought it would be a fun game for us to play on the way,” Jennifer said Monday afternoon. “We were thinking about farming on the way to the conference, and part of the Farmer’s Cow competition was to think about farming and keeping things local when you were trying to name these flavors.”

Between them, Jennifer and Trout each came up with names for all ten of the flavors.

“I’m shocked that none of his made it because they were fantastic,” she admitted Monday afternoon. “For the coffee flavor he came up with Cock-A-Doodle Coffee, and Utter Nutter Peanut Butter Cup was another one he came up with.”

Among Jennifer’s additional names were Strawberry Patch and Farmhouse Vanilla.

For the mint ice cream, Jennifer thought “about farming, and that as mint grows, it fills a field pretty quickly. The ‘field’ and ‘mint’ kind of felt like it worked well together.”

More than 3,000 entries were received for the contest, according to Farmer’s Cow Managing Director Robin Chesmer

“It was a lot of work judging all of the names … [and it] was really a tough job because there were so many good names.,” he said via an April 12 press release. “We blind judged all the entries and had no idea who entered the ice cream names so I’m pleased to see that our winners cover the entire state and ranged in age from high school to their 90s.”

Mr Chesmer told The Newtown Bee that Jennifer’s name for the mint chocolate chip resonated well with him and the judges.

“There was a lot of names, but that one just had a nice feel to it,” he said Monday afternon. “You could envision a field of mint growing, and it really tied nicely to our agricultural, farm messaging.

“We wanted all the names to relate to the farm and have a ‘farmy’ feel to them, and that one certainly did.”

Additional winners and their ice cream names were Hay! Hay! Hay! Vanilla by Tracy Shortell, Wallingford; Cow Barn Chocolate by Sebastian Tonewo, Franklin; Farm Stand Cherry Vanilla by Karen Provoncha, Storrs; Summer Meadow Strawberry by Kip Kolesinskas, Manchester; Up Early Coffee by Jim Orffitelli, Manchester; Heifer Nutter Peanut Butter Cup by Sam Hinckley, Windsor; Milking Time Cookies & Cream by Marc Sanchez, Manchester; Black Raspberry Moo Chocolate Chip by Barbara Hambach, Broad Brook; and Muddy Boots Chocolate Chocolate Chip by Zak Nadeau of Moosup.

In addition to the ten winning names, The Farmer’s Cow picked one name at random from all of its entrants. Allen Patenaude of Torrington will also receive a summer’s worth of ice cream just for entering the contest.

A summer’s worth of ice cream, according to Chris Watts at The Farmer’s Cow, will “probably be those five-gallon containers. Big containers of ice cream, and probably one each for the month of June, July and August.”

The details on how to deliver that much ice cream and when were still being ironed out when the contest winners were named on Monday afternoon, but Mr Watts promised, “It’ll be enough that they won’t want any more ice cream for the rest of the summer.

“It’s premium ice cream, with a high butterfat content, so it’s rich and creamy but you don’t want to eat a lot.”

Jennifer Gaskins isn’t worried, however.

“We’re going to have the neighborhood over to help with the supply,” she said.