Whatcom This Whey 2026

Notes from visiting Steensma Creamery, Grace Harbor Farms, and Twin Sisters Creamery.

• Dairy
• Local Food
• Whatcom County

This past weekend (June 20, 2026), I took advantage of Whatcom This Whey, a celebration of Whatcom County’s local (family-owned) dairy farms and the products made locally from dairy. Several local dairies participated, offering farm tours, creamery tours, free samples, animal meeting and petting, and several other educational opportunities aimed at the whole family.

We stopped at three places and learned a lot about our local dairy farmers.

This was not our first time “at” Whatcom This Whey; we’d visited a few of the sites two or three years ago.

Steensma Creamery

Steensma was a farm we’d visited a few years ago and was one of our favorite stops. They have a milking robot from Lely, a dutch company, that also monitors all their cows via a combination of radio transmitters in a collar around the cow’s neck. This undoubtedly includes RFID that gets scanned when the cow enters the robot to determine if it’s been a reasonable amount of time since the cow had last been milked, as well as something else that transmits step counts (like a pedometer, as it turns out that a cow’s step count increased drastically when they’re in heat as they search for a bull).

We also got to talk about some of the other ways they use technology to improve their efficiency and some ways they’d like to use technology to become even more efficient and data-driven.

One of the highlights was that they will be certified organic by the beginning of July, which will allow them to more than double the amount of money they get for their milk (on top of what they turn into yogurt and sell direct to consumers and to local stores, like Twin Sisters Creamery mentioned below). The whole process, as I learned, was not terribly complex and didn’t add much more expense (they were already doing most of what was required to be certified), but it involved a lot of paperwork, tracking, and measuring.

Unfortunately, their raspberry skyr yogurt can’t be certified organic because despite sourcing the raspberry locally, the berries themselves are not organic due to the use of chemical sprays.

Grace Harbor Farms

Grace Harbor was also a site we’d visited on our previous Whatcom This Whey. We’d toured their creamery and met their goats; this year we opted not to re-tour the creamery but still visited the goats.

They had also suffered a fire the previous weekend, rendering their workshop (but not the creamery or anything critical to operations) a total loss. Thankfully no people or animals were affected, but (we learned while talking to Steensma, who uses Grace Harbor’s creamery to make their skyr) a brand-new $20,000 labeler was lost in the fire.

They did, however, have a coffee truck (Red Barn Coffee, whose main location is just off Hannegan Road) so we enjoyed iced coffee and donuts, tried brand new chocolate (goat) milk, and bought some yogurt and goat meat (which as far as I know I have never had, so I am very interested to try).

Twin Sisters Creamery

Our final stop was a new place that we didn’t previously know existed. Twin Sisters Creamery is a cheesemaker and store, known for their “Whatcom Blue” Cheese made with a roquefort strain. In addition, they have a few cheeses from other local cheesemakers (as well as some imported from Europe) and meat and other products from local farms (like Steensma).