Butter Sculpture Unveiled at 2018 New York State Fair

The front and back of the 2018 butter sculpture at the NYS Fair

This year’s butter sculpture at the New York State Fair is a step back in time.
 
For the 50th anniversary of the famous fair attraction, sculptors Jim Victor and Marie Pelton of Pennsylvania have unveiled “Your Milk Comes From a Good Place,” paying tribute to the state’s hard-working dairy farmers.
 
The sculpture features a farmer transporting milk director from his dairy farm to a consumer in the grocery aisle, showing that milk makes it from the farm to the kitchen table in just 48 hours.
 

Marsha Anderson Leonard

But the farm depicted in the sculpture is called Over the Moon Dairy Farm, a tribute to the first butter sculpture unveiled at the fair in 1969. That sculpture was called “Cow Jumping Over the Moon.”
 
Another shout out to 50 years ago was former State Dairy Princess Marsha Anderson Leonard, of Chautauqua County. She was dairy princess 50 years ago and was at the fairgrounds to unveil the very first butter sculpture in 1969.
 
“I was newly crowned and then they told me the next day I had to unveil the butter sculpture,” said Leonard, a retired nurse whose brother still runs the family dairy farm in Kennedy, Chautauqua County. “And I’m thrilled to be around to be here today.”
 
The butter sculpture, in the Dairy Products Building, consists of 800 pounds of butter. After the fair is over on Labor Day, the sculpture will be taken apart by Cornell Cooperative Extension Master Gardeners and transported to Noblehurst Farms in Linwood, Livingston County, where it will be recycled in a methane digester to create electricity and liquid fertilizer for crops.
 
The American Dairy Association North East is in charge of the butter sculpture each year. The sculpture is sponsored this year by Wegman supermarkets.
 
The New York State Fair runs from Wednesday, Aug. 22 through Labor Day.