OWATONNA, MN — At the Steele County Fair’s refrigerated butter-sculpture window, this year’s centerpiece is, by every available measure, a cow.
Roald Bjerke, 71, who has carved the fair’s annual butter sculpture since 1998, confirmed Friday afternoon that he had "simplified." Last year’s piece, titled Harvest Pull, depicted a cow operating a John Deere 4020 with a smaller cow in the cab. The 2023 piece reimagined The Last Supper using twelve Holsteins and one slightly mournful Jersey. The 2025 piece is a cow.
"We did not ask him to scale back," said Linda Vermeer, who has chaired the Dairy Promotion Committee for nine years. "We asked him if everything was alright. He said everything was fine. Then he submitted the schematic. The schematic was a cow."
The placard beside the sculpture reads COW (HOLSTEIN) in a font noticeably larger than in previous years. A printed note on fairground stationery, taped beneath, adds "82 lbs. butter — Land O’Lakes." Visitors who linger more than thirty seconds have begun glancing around for a second sculpture they may have missed. There is not one.
Attendance at the viewing window is reportedly up 14 percent over last year, which Vermeer attributes not to artistry but to "people who heard something was off and came to see for themselves." A small line forms every hour or so. A child near the front asked his mother on Friday afternoon what the cow was doing. "Standing," she said.
Mrs. Henson, who drives in from Blooming Prairie every August specifically to see the butter, called this year’s offering "fine, actually." She paused, considering, then added that it was "a very good cow," and that she did not want to make a thing of it.
A 4-H exhibitor named Caleb Ostermann, 14, who had walked over from the swine barn, studied the sculpture for some time and said it was "accurate." Asked whether he meant the proportions or the breed, he said both, and also the expression.
Reached Saturday morning at the fairgrounds picnic shelter, Bjerke declined to discuss his artistic choices but did note that the cow had taken him eleven days, "same as always." He was eating a pork chop on a stick. He said the chop was good.