Burger Night Week 8 (of 23)

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June 19, 2025

Burger Night is open, rain or shine
Thursday & Friday 4pm-9pm
Saturday noon-9pm
Sunday noon-7pm

Welcome to Week 8 of the Burger Night season and the official start of summer!

The weather proves to be a formidable foe, but it at least looks like rain and cold are not going to be a major factor this weekend!

In fact, the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction but the heat can be beet!

We've got oodles of shade, TONS of natural air conditioning and lots of cold drinks (win slushies!) so we'd LOVE if you joined us on the farm for some summer fun!

We are slowly but surely working on adding more shady spots! The Weeping Willow is growing crazy fast but we are an impatient bunch and I wanted something now.

Note that I know some of the furniture is on it's last "leg" but holy smokes is outdoor furniture expensive, so we'll keep slowly adding and replacing pieces, in the meantime, be gentle with what we've got please.

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I'm also pretty excited for this week's Burger of the Week: Beet, Feta Have My Honey!

We made this one a million years ago - during the first covid year I believe - but you asked for us to bring it back this winter and, being a sucker for beets, I succumbed to the pressure (I think it was one person 😂).

Roasted beets for this weekend's Burger of the Week: Beet, Feta Have My Honey! 😋
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Beet, Feta Have My Honey

🌱 NEW Garlicky roasted beet spread
🧀 Feta crumbles
🍯 Honey drizzle
🐮 100% grassfed beef patty
🍞 Toasted, buttery brioche bun

Even if you don't love beets (🤨) this is going to be one of those "the sum is better than the parts" type of burger and you're still just going to have to try it!!

The young'ins that work here are not expecting very many of these to sell, but I think we should prove them wrong and give them something to think about when it comes to the deliciousness that is roasted beets.

So, whaddya say? Wanna help me reshape young minds?

It will NOT look very much like this....

This is a picture of the first Beet, Feta Have My Honey BOTW we made several years ago and now we think we can make it EVEN BETTER! Come out and try v2.0 and let us know what you think!
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But wait, there's more!

NEW! Now that we are restocked with two different types of beet kvass's we thought we'd do shots of kvass at the bar!!

Not sure if you're old?

One clue: You do well at tonight's Bird trivia.

Second clue: You are really excited for non-alcoholic gut-health-promoting shots of kvass.

Third clue: You know what kvass is! 😂

In any case, I hope you're more excited for this than you ever were for jagermeister! 🤮

We just got a ton of brand new ferments in from the Wise Goat that we'll slowly be adding online, unfortunately, these will only be available for on-farm pick-up or local delivery (can't ship them).

We're loving these new kvass's so much, you can now order shots of them at the bar! Tomorrow you're going to wake up HEALTHIER from doing shots the night before - how's that for a twist?!
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Thursday, June 19

Tonight's trivia is all about birds!!

Trivia at 7pm: Birds 🐦🕊️🦅🦆🐤

Remember, we give prizes to 1st place, 2nd place and Last place. Bring your friends! (probably the more mature ones. 🙃)

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Friday, June 20

LIVE MUSIC from Chris Herriges, 5:30-8:30pm

Chris is a highly regarded singer, guitarist and songwriter based in the Twin Cities. Among accomplishments, most noteworthy is probably the large amount of airplay garnered via independent promotion, for a number of original recordings on commercial radio (Rock, Top-40) throughout the U.S., primarily in the 1990's. Also, glowing reviews in many national as well as local publications, also primarily in the early to mid '90's. Can currently be seen regularly in solo-acoustic and duo performances throughout the Twin Cities area and greater Minnesota and Wisconsin.

This will be Chris's first time at Together Farms! Let's give him a warm welcome! Like, really warm. Too warm? Nah. We've got shade and fans and wine slushies and cold beer and a pond full of snapping turtles and leeches if we get really, really desperate.
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Saturday, June 21

LIVE MUSIC from Olivia Maro, 5:30-8:30pm

Just a few of the artists she covers...

Miranda lambert
Maren Morris
Zach Bryan
Zac Brown Band
Taylor Swift
Chris Young
Luke Combs
Morgan Wallen
Kelsea Ballerini
Jon Pardi
Lauren Alaina
Carly Pearce
Jo Dee Messina
Kacey Musgraves
Maddie & Tae
Lainey Wilson
Dolly Parton
kid rock
Luke Bryan
Zac Brown Band

and more!

Who are you most excited to hear??

Come and check out Olivia Maro, an up and coming country artist who is going to come an sing you some of your favorite tunes! Don't miss this one!

I think this might also be Olivia's first time! So, let's give her a warm welcome too! You be the fans! We'll drop the beats....and also beets.
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Sunday, June 15

1/2 off kids meals all day.

3 - 5:30pm: Free Xtreme Bingo for the folks over 21 (deluxe prizes pictured below) and free Kids Bingo for the folks under 21!

It's BINGO WEEK! That means they are adding an extra ball to each round to INCREASE your odds of winning!! Let's win something BIG this week!! 🎉

✨ Remember, you can't win if you don't play! ✨

Let's giveaway some prizes! Every Sunday at 3p, we play 9 games and give out either a huge fancy prize (like 1,000s of $$s) or a practical and modest gift with every round!

It's BINGO WEEK! Which means you get a bonus ball to try to win EVEN MORE big prizes this week!
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Heads up: Surprisingly, the 2025 season is 35% over after this weekend. Plan accordingly.

Farm Store Updates

Don't forget to checkout the BEEF restock! We've already got a few items selling out and the Bundle of the Month will be very soon (so we may redo it - watch for an update).

All BIRD stuff is on sale!

books
- Raising chickens
- Egg cookbooks
- Birdhouses
- Attracting birds
- Dealing with squirrels
- Bird trivia
- Bird poems
- Kids board books all about farm animals
- Turkey hunting
- Bird dog hunting
- Bird poop
- and still more!!
Stickers
Stuffies
Reusable egg cartons for you DIY types with a sense of humor
Sauces & seasonings for chicken
Felt bird ornaments
Chicken & eggs themselves
and more

....will all be on sale, all weekend!

ICE CREAM UPDATE:

The equipment is all here and all the product we need to get started. The health inspector is coming this afternoon to see if we're good to go and then it's time to order ice cream and get to dippin'!

Bird trivia tonight but all bird things are on sale all weekend!
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If you can't make it here, let's meat online instead!

Thank you for your support during what is probably going to be an unbeetable Burger Night Week!

Love you lots! 💚

Steph & the TF fam
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No dogs, carry-ins or reservations (please let us know about groups though). $10 min on cards, ATM on-site.

📍 w93 Norden Rd, Mondovi, WI 54755

See the menus and learn more: togetherfarms.com/burger-night

I am extremely biased that TF, the only "Burger Farm" in the midwest is pretty awesome, so don't take my word for it, check out the google reviews to see what others think, here's an example from Deanna: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

What a darling place out in the sticks. Well worth the drive to enjoy the atmosphere, burgers 🍔 and animals. The pigs were my fave. 🐷 Will be going back several times with our family each season! Oh, and the fries….🍟 SO good.

Celery in meat - more deception?

UPDATE, 12-19-2025: I just learned that synthetic nitrites, aka pink salt, are pink because red dye is added to it. But, since it's at such a low percentage it is not required to be labeled on the meat (more bs in my mind). So that would be a point for Team Celery; however, with red dyes being banned, all the red dyed pink curing salts are now being phased out. So point is nullified, Team Celery still loses. Today we're talking about something that really irks me, really gets my britches in a bunch, really makes my blood boil, really drives me up the wall....but I will do my best to not devolve into anger and name-calling, I am clearly a professional so we'll keep this educational and factual because that's what you're here for and I don't even know where to get knickers from to twist. I'm obviously in such a state of controlled rage because it's Easter and so up popsCELERY. 😡Obviously. The gist of it: My belief is that nitrates and nitrites in meat should be avoided due to the creation of nitrosamines and that this is created whether the nitrates/ites are from the chemically pure lab-created (aka synthetic) nitrate/ite or if they are from concentrated nitrates/ites derived from celery because the same reactions will occur and be treated by your body in exactly the same way and it's best avoided. To further confuse matters, "their [synthetic nitrate/ites compared to those derived from celery] chemical composition is absolutely the same, and so are the health effects," says Joseph Sebranek, Ph.D., Morrison Endowed Chair in meat science at Iowa State University. 1 Just like how my blood sugar will spike if I eat a spoonful of sugar or a hunk of sugar cane. 🥄🌿REGARDLESS of what the label on the raw sugar cane says - it could say "natural", it could say "organic", it could saw "raw", it could say "derived from natural locations".....my blood sugar will spike because my digestive system is 100% immune from marketing gimmicks or downright deceptions.A+ work digestive system....please teach the eyes. 👁👃👁 Finding smoked meats without any added nitrates/ites in ANY form from animals raised well and organically on a small farm and then processed by an animal-welfare approved butcher that cares about health is quite a feat! Congratulations! 🎺🎺🎺Pictured: our $99 March Bundle of the Month (not pictured: included recipe cards and all the transparency we offer, mostly because it's transparent).Now that it's Easter time, the SMALL FARMS I follow are out there telling their customers that their hams are "uncured" and contain NO nitrates/ites because they use "celery" and therefore it's healthy....either they are directly saying it's healthier or are very heavily implying it. But they are literally say "NO nitrates/ites included" in their emails and social posts.Which is actually 3 lies. ‼ Lie 1. It's not uncured. Celery-derived nitrates/ites are chemically the same BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE. No literally. There's more. Since the USDA will not classify celery-derived nitrates/ites as being a curing agent (which makes zero science-sense) they will also not regulate it's use and so it's basically it's like the wild wild west.Not only that, but I have had butchers personally tell me that they then use MORE just to be "safe"!And the fact that nitrate/ite levels in meats using celery-derived nitrate/ite compounds is at least the same as synthetically sourced nitrate/ite was actually found to be true by researchers. So again, the chemical will behave the same, like a curing agent, regardless of how it came to be. Chemistry. Lie 2. It's just some celery - you know, the green leafy vegetable that is good for you. Well, yes but no. That's just like saying high-fructose corn syrup or glucose syrup is corn. 🌽Yes, but no. Yes it was derived from corn but after extensive further processing and concentration. If you told me "here's some corn for you to eat", I would imagine a cob of corn or perhaps a bag of frozen corn, I wouldn't think you were handing me a spoonful of glucose syrup. Same with the celery.They are not rubbing the meat with a stalk of celery, they are highly refining and processing the celery to extract out the naturally-occurring nitrates/ites and concentrate them which they then use as a substitute for pure synthetic nitate/ite curing salts. The entire point of adding the celery-derived nitrate/ites is for the nitrates/ites, not for flavor or nutrients or color or anything else. Nobody is even pretending there is any other reason for it's use except to act as a cure. Lie 3. It's healthier. I feel like we proved the point as far as celery nitrates/ites are the same chemically as synthetic ones and your intestinal tract also can't read, so just like my intestinal tract, it is what it is.The nitrosamines are created and probably cause colorectal cancer. But, wait, the celery option itself actually gets even a little bit worse. Okay, so it's true that nitrates/ites naturally occur in foods - especially leafy vegetables or any veggies with higher water content (because nitrates/ites occur in water) so then the veggies themselves concentrate that, some a little more than others, and we eat it, but that is seemingly okay. Kind of like how nicotine is naturally occurring in some veggies and actually might be good for you in small doses of that raw form, but I'm doing my best to stay focused here. Just remember, the problem seems to be the heating up of the nitrates/ites in a protein-rich environment, not necessarily the nitrates/ites themselves.Okay so what else are veggies that are full of water going to be full of? That's right - pesticides, herbicides and whatever else is floating around in or dissolved in all that water they are drinking or being splashed with. Celery currently ranks #16 on the EWG's pesticide contamination list (again, they don't look at any of the other -ides) and, here's the kicker! Non-organic celery is used to make celery-derived nitrates/ites even for organic products! 3So along with those celery nitrates/ites comes the concentration of whatever else was in that celery. I mean, at this point, if we didn't have this godsend of an option with our butcher of "D. None of the above".-------> we would choose synthetic over "celery". <------- Now at this point I should just leave well enough alone and send you on your merry way to digest all this info but I'm not really a professional like was indicated earlier so before we go, I'd like to show you this label and you tell me if it's telling you the truth and can be trusted or if it's deceiving you: It's hard to read but under the white banner it says "No Nitrates or Nitrites Added" and then in the asterisk at the very bottom in the white it says "except those naturally occurring in....celery powder" which you'll see below was added. 🤣 what?? so which is it? added or not added?That would be like if the Snickers or whatever candy bar said "no sugar added except for those naturally occurring in corn" instead of "high fructose corn syrup". 🤯And, of course, it says "uncured" in giant letters as part of the name, which it chemically is not Again, the back is hard to read though it does say you can have "peace of mind" eating this (more like, I'll give you a piece of my mind Applegate).A close-up of just the ingredients is included. Notice that the celery is not organic even though this is an organic product. It's not just celery. Some butchers will say "vegetable" or use carrots or beets or some other veggie or combo of veggies but it's all the same - a veggie being highly processed to extract and concentrate nitrates/ites to then be used as a better sounding cure. Could actually be worse depending on how much those other vegs concentrate bad stuff. Okay so they both said "no nitrates/ites added" but also then added the concentrated form of celery nitrates/ites which is chemically exactly the same as the synthetic nitrates/ites and behaves exactly the same way....as a cure.Okay and here's a picture of our label - what do you notice? The label says "uncured", the ingredient list does not include any vegetables or any asterisks that say "except for..." so it really is uncured and there really are no nitrates/ites added. Just good meat that was in a salt & sugar brine and then smoked the old-fashioned way using a smokehouse and hardwood chips! No water injections or reforming either. Just a smoked ham. That's right - actually no nitrates added. Congratulations! You have just unlocked a new set of decoder glasses complete with a ring! 👓💍This is a big deal, as the "Celery in Meat" ring + glasses are both are very hard to collect. This got much longer than I expected so I am going to save the butcher story for next week. I am also a little concerned I'm on the verge of starting a cult with all these secret super powers I am giving you so stay tuned for part 2 as to why and how we ended up here - clean meat, raised organically on our small farm and processed well. No way are we going to work so hard on raising the best meat we can (hand-fed pastured pigs!) only to have questionable ingredients added at the butcher! Hard pass. Of course if you want to eat meats with nitrates/ites in any form - great! If you aren't worried about nitrosamines, great! If you don't think I'm right or my references are not trustworthy, that's all fine. Of course, you probably shouldn't expect to be invited to present at the Annual Convention of Chemists, aka ChemCon, but that's fine, you've got better things to do anyway. 🧪 I just want you to be able to have the CORRECT and trustworthy information you need to make those decisions. And right now, "uncured" meats and "celery" are a huge pile of lies, deception and greenwashing. This really might be the worst example of greenwashing I can think of, specifically because we assume the word celery = better and we assume we can trust all these small farms. It's actually worse even than meat being able to be labelled "Product of USA" no matter where it's from because at least small farms aren't doing that to their blindly trusting customers. Ugh, it all just makes me so sad and frustrated. Also a small pro-tip, according to my chef friend, celery is best left out of broth making too as it brings some unpleasant flavors with it (nitrate is that you??). So keep celery in its place: Bloody Marys and we'll all be fine and live forever. Hmm, a drink actually sounds really good right now. Thanks for being a part of our little farm and I hope you really can trust us - I don't think we are self-deceived (although that's the thing about being self-deceived) and we do our best to be as transparent and honest as possible, but you'll never get the full story until our reality show becomes reality. ❤ Your farmer & founding-member-of-the-Church-of-the-Flying-Anticelery-Monster friend, Stephanie Schneider

Holiday & Sale Updates & Deadlines

Since the weather refuses to co-operate I've been trying really hard to get all the products online but whooo boy! It's a big task. I've added a TON though and am actively working through all the candles. It's day 8 of the 12 days and today all candles, melts & diffusers are 20% off!! I love these new candles made from upcycled wine glasses, check them out here! I'm working through the milkhouse candles now - my success here will depend on my level of success in the physical farm store, if we are busy, you won't see much more added, if we are not, they should keep showing up! We have something for all the candle lovers out there:🐝100% beeswax only.🐝100% beeswax with essential oils.🕯️Diffusers with essential oils only.🕯️Soy-wax with high quality fragrance oils.🕯️Electric candles with built-in 6 hour timers, they are even dipped in and made from wax so they look really legit but without the fear of fire or forgetting to blow them out. And without the pain of turning them all on every day! I love them. We have every shape and size: taper, tealight, small and large pillars, toads, mushrooms, fox, corn and more! Even the DIY candles are on sale today! So no matter your candle preference, you'll want to stop by the farm store for some free sniffs today! Open 2-6pm Table Centerpieces Unfortunately, we are woefully low on holiday centerpieces for your table (you guys are learning from all of our selling out in past years!). We have some beautiful pork tenderloins that make a great centerpiece especially when wrapped with bacon (or use a pork roast and make the family-favorite (and easier-than-pie) Bacon-Wrapped Kalua Pork which will IMPRESS). We have hams, but we may need to combine a few smaller ones to get to your desired poundage. No whole beef tenderloins but we do have filets (again, bacon wrapping is pretty spectacular) pair them with a whole side of one of the wild Alaskan salmons and you'll have the perfect surf & turf! Deadlines Until Christmas, ignore the online default deadlines (every time I try to override them, I screw something up): we will ship non-meat orders ASAP until the 23rd (flat $9, free for orders over $179). To bypass the store's limitations, follow these steps. Order MEAT and we'll ship this week if you are ready with Monday the 22nd being our last ship day (and a risky one for some of you, especially since the meat will arrive frozen, so plan accordingly!). Thank you so much for shopping small! Ironically, it makes a WORLD of difference to not just our little farm family but to all the small businesses you buy from through us too. We have 100s in our little farm store that we'd love to show you. ✨ Holiday Sale

Day 4 of 12! Books & Jewelry Sale

It's day 4 of our 12 Days of Christmas Deals at TF! with ALL BOOKS & JEWELRY on sale today only!! Farm store is open 2-6pm, a few products are online too but if you see anything you'd like in the photos that you can't find online, reach out (steph@togetherfarms.com) and I'll add them for you. I have amassed quite a diverse book collection and I would LOVE to show them off to you today (or really, any day). And the jewelry is best described as eclectic. It ranges from classy to fun with statement pieces made from the most gorgeous feathers you've ever seen, spoon jewelry you didn't know was possible, clay art, copper bracelets, porcupine quills....all the way to silver cuffs featuring the periodic table for those science nerds that also like to be fancy sometimes. 🤓💃 (it's possible our niche is getting a little too narrow.) We'd love to see you at the farm today but if you need virtual, we can do that too! Farm store: Mon & Tue: By appointment. Wed: Closed. Thur, Fri & Sat: 10-6pmSun: 2-6pm. 📍 w93 Norden Rd, Mondovi, WI.