Dayspring Farm

Dayspring Farm Healthy, simple, practical luxury. Artisan soap.

04/30/2026

Just a quiet minute hanging with our goats while they clean up the garden. It's the perfect environmentally friendly w**d amd grass mowdown - when they're done we'll lay cardboard over the places where we want garden beds, and we'll lay deep mulch over that (goat manure compost!). Happy Spring! 💐

Meanwhile the ladies are turning that gorgeous fresh grass into milk for your soap. 🧼 ❤️

It's humble and familiar and comes from practically next door: lard. My grandmother's best pie crust recipe featured it,...
04/25/2026

It's humble and familiar and comes from practically next door: lard. My grandmother's best pie crust recipe featured it, it lends flavor to my favorite Mexican foods, and growing up in the 80s and 90s it was vilified as an unhealthy saturated fat sure to cause heart disease.

Why do we love it so much as a soap ingredient?

🧼Conditioning: it leaves skin feeling soft and supple, while preserving moisture.
🧼It increases the longevity of the bar - lard creates a hard, long-lasting soap that's a good value.
🧼Lather: it makes a creamy, stable lather that feels luxurious.
🧼Moisturizing: lard contains glycerin, a natural humectant, which draws moisture to skin, making it particularly effective for soothing dry skin.
🧼It's locally sourced and plentiful, which makes it sustainable and lowers environmental impact.
🧼It's cost-effective, keeping your soap a good value.

The lard we use at Dayspring Farm is locally sourced as raw pork fat from butchers in Amery, Woodville and Durand (Cain's and the Smokehouse). We then hand-process it here on the farm so we're sure of its purity, quality, and freshness. We use only the best in our soap.

Come see us til 1 pm today!
04/25/2026

Come see us til 1 pm today!

Wow, hard to believe this little worker bee is 9 today. Hard working, thoughtful, precise, and just so - all words that ...
04/24/2026

Wow, hard to believe this little worker bee is 9 today. Hard working, thoughtful, precise, and just so - all words that describe Marta! My sweet little peanut, the smallest of my babies, and absolutely a force of nature. Though she be but little, she is fierce! 😍 Happy birthday, Marta. 🥰🎂

Today is one of my favorite days of the year. Sometimes care for creation feels like an afterthought in our culture, if ...
04/22/2026

Today is one of my favorite days of the year. Sometimes care for creation feels like an afterthought in our culture, if it's a thought at all, but Earth Day reminds me that I'm not alone: many people value environmental stewardship. It's very close to my heart, because God gave us this world as a gift and we are responsible for keeping it whole for our kids to inherit. And then - because God is like that (😂), He moved us to Clear Lake, WI, the home of Ga***rd Nelson, the founder of Earth Day. And our kids go to the school named after him.

Today our kids are at school celebrating Earth Day by picking up litter and learning about ecologically-friendly approaches to life, and we are here at Dayspring Farm, shaping our business to be easy on the environment. Naturally made soap (which is biodegradable), made with locally sourced ingredients (not petrochemicals), with low-waste packaging, is about as environmentally friendly as it gets. Furthermore, we work hard to keep our animal husbandry as ecologically sound as possible. It's corny but it's true - we really do try to make every day Earth Day at Dayspring Farm. 🥰

Happy Earth Day, friends. 🌱❤

Have you visited Chet Johnson Drug recently and checked out all the local offerings? Dayspring Farm Soaps and Brew Bling...
04/21/2026

Have you visited Chet Johnson Drug recently and checked out all the local offerings? Dayspring Farm Soaps and Brew Bling Botanicals offerings are the perfect skincare self-care for yourself or a loved one. Visit today!

It sure sounds good, "Artisan Handmade Soap." "Artisan" just makes things sound bespoke and special. Artisan cheese, art...
04/18/2026

It sure sounds good, "Artisan Handmade Soap." "Artisan" just makes things sound bespoke and special. Artisan cheese, artisan bread. I'm salivating already.

I'm a mom of five, though, and a farmer to boot - I don't have money to throw around on fancy-sounding products. I need bang for my buck. In a soap, I'm looking for a bar that lasts, and I'm putting it on the people who are most important to me, so I need a bar that's healthy to use. My kids have sensitive skin, so it can't have anything irritating. And me? I'm almost 46 years old, so it can't be drying. Artisan? Only if it also means quality.

With a tight budget you bet I'm tempted by the bars on the bottom shelf at the grocery store, the ones that cost $0.99. After becoming a soap maker, however, I've gotten an education in soap ingredients. It turns out most of those cheap bars aren't actually soap at all. Companies call them "cleansing bars" or "beauty bars" because a true soap is a bar made from naturally saponified plant or animal-based oils - calling them soap would be a false claim.

If a "cleansing" bar isn't soap, what is it? It's a bar of petroleum-based synthetic chemicals. Now, everything's a chemical and I'm not interested in fear mongering (chemical makeup of water: H20). But when I say these bars are made of petrochemicals, that's a fact. 

What's in our bars? Ingredients you recognize: tallow, lard, coconut oil, castor oil, olive oil, goat milk. Most of them you can safely use in cooking your food, so you know they're safe on your skin.

You'll find these ingredients in many non-soap bars:

Sulfates: Sodium Laurel Sulfate (SLS), Sodium Coco Sulfate, Sodium Laureth Sulfate
Ethoxylates: Laureth-6, Laureth-7, Lauryl Ethoxylate, Alcohol Ethoxylate
Glucosides: Decyl Glucoside, Lauryl Glucoside, Coco Glucoside, Alkyl Glucoside
Betaines: Cocoamidopropyl Betaine
Oxides: Lauramine Oxide, Cocamidopropylamine Oxide

These ingredients are made using the following petroleum products:

Methanol: used in formaldehyde production and as a gasoline additive.
Ethylene: a raw material used in plastic production.
Toluene: paint thinner and glue solvent.
Propylene: a raw material used in plastic production.
Propanol: an industrial solvent and gasoline additive.

I don't know about you, but these don't sound like things I want on my skin. I'm sticking with ingredients that nourish, ingredients that are safe, ingredients that have been in use for thousands of years (interesting history: distilled petroleum products entered mainstream use in 1859. The first use of true soap? Probably around 2800 BCE).

Best friends. 🥰We are a small, diversified farm, which means keeping different species together in a beneficial fashion....
04/08/2026

Best friends. 🥰

We are a small, diversified farm, which means keeping different species together in a beneficial fashion.

Goats eat, then produce manure, and our chickens scratch through manure and waste hay to reduce parasite loads and increase the breakdown or compostable materials.

Our great grandparents had reasons for pairing animals on the farm! Goats and chickens not only produce food (and soap ingredients!) for us - they enrich the environment and produce unbeatable fertilizer. It doesn't get more efficient than that. ❤️

🥥Coconut oil is a favorite ingredient for many artisan soap makers. It produces unbeatable lather, an excellent hard, lo...
04/07/2026

🥥Coconut oil is a favorite ingredient for many artisan soap makers. It produces unbeatable lather, an excellent hard, long-lasting bar, cleanses well, has antimicrobial properties, and is sustainable and eco-friendly.

🧼Most of our Dayspring Farm soaps contain coconut oil, with two notable exceptions: Honey Oatmeal, and Unscented. Why'd we leave it out? These are our gentlest soaps, geared toward sensitive skin that needs extra TLC. While coconut oil has many benefits, some folks find it drying (and obviously if you have a coconut allergy you'd want to avoid it!). These two soaps are designed to be extra-moisturizing, non-stripping, and anti-inflammatory.

💦You may find they lather slightly less than our other bars because they lack coconut oil. Interestingly, while most of us associate lots of lather with good cleansing, that's not necessarily accurate. Nice bubbly lather makes for a lovely sensory experience, but it isn't related to how soap cleans. On a molecular level soap is a surfactant, which means it interferes with the bond between oil, dirt, and surfaces, making it easier for water to wash impurities away. Gentler soaps can do this without a dramatic lather and are effective at washing without stripping skin's moisture away.

🐐Try a fun comparison. Our most luxurious lather comes from our beer soaps, because they contain both beer and milk, sugary liquids that produce big, stable bubbles. Our goat milk-only soaps also produce a lovely lather, but the coconut oil-free bars lather with fine, small bubbles, not big suds. They'll all get you clean while producing different washing experiences.

03/24/2026

Wishing you happy spring! Nothing says spring like these little guys. Just days old, and already up bouncing around and VIGOROUSLY sucking down bottles. 😍🥰 In farm life there is nothing so satisfying as seeing the fruits of our labors, and these healthy, happy little ones are the gift of good (and blessed) goat husbandry.

Spring is springing, and so are a bunch of new baby goats, here on Dayspring Farm. Nothing makes it feel more like a fre...
03/21/2026

Spring is springing, and so are a bunch of new baby goats, here on Dayspring Farm. Nothing makes it feel more like a fresh new season than seeing fresh little faces with all their energy. It's time to get out and enjoy fresh air, sun on our skin, and new life. Spring always seems to bring a small renewal in energy and health as well.

If you're looking to improve your skin's health (especially as warmer weather motivates most of us to bare our skin much more than in winter), using natural soaps free of harmful additives is a great place to start. While we know goat's milk adds a unique boost to skincare, never underestimate how much good it does to simply leave unnecessary, harmful ingredients OUT.

Dayspring Farm products will always be free of weird stuff like parabens, phthalates and sulfates. You'll find them in most cleansers on the grocery or drugstore shelf. Why? They're inexpensive petroleum products that extend shelf life and artificially add lather to soaps. But we don't think petroleum products belong on your skin. Indeed, it's been shown these are the very ingredients that exacerbate skin conditions like eczema, acne and dry skin.

So do your skin a favor and leave them out of your skincare regimen, while adding the benefits of goat's milk to repair skin damage and inflammation. Goat milk soothes and conditions, natural oils in our soap add back nutrients and moisturize, and we leave out all harsh additives that strip away moisture or cause irritation.

Finally, if your skin needs extra TLC, try our coconut oil-free soaps (Unscented and Honey Oatmeal). Coconut oil is a lovely natural fat for some skin, and adds beautiful lather to soap, but for some of us, it's too drying. That's why we offer two soaps that are free of coconut oil and fragrance - they're about the gentlest cleansers money can buy.

Babies have arrived! 🥰
03/18/2026

Babies have arrived! 🥰

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Clear Lake, WI

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