Sculptors working on butter cow for Utah State Fair

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Sculptors with Dairy West have begun building the annual “butter cow” to be displayed at the Utah State Fair.

Scuptor Matt McNaughtan said he and fellow artist Debbie Brown made the sculpture’s skeleton out of rebar last week, and now they’re molding 800 pounds of butter around it.

The work lasts three days. It’s cold labor — just 45 degrees inside the fridge, so the sculpture doesn’t melt.

“When you’re first moving with the butter and it’s all soft, you’re pretty warm. But as you start to go to details and stuff, and it’s just blowing on your face, it gets cold in there,” McNaughtan said.

This year’s design is a cow on the beach. McNaughtan said they were originally thinking about doing something related to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, they decided to go with more of a celebration. That fits the fair’s “funtastic” theme.

“We have the cow on the beach. We haven’t started the calf yet, but he’ll be building the sand castle. And we’ve got a farmer with a wave of water crashing through. We’ve got Utah’s drought as well; we thought we’d put them out there in the water.”

The butter cow has been a staple at the fair since 1998. This is McNaughtan’s 14th year sculpting it.

“It’s something that people come and can’t believe that’s all butter,” he said. “People just have to stop and look at it and really get in close.”

McNaughtan said the butter gets reused for a few years so it doesn’t go to waste, but this year they needed a little more than the typical 700 pounds.

You can see the finished product at the Utah State Fair, which runs from Sept. 9 through Sept. 19 in Salt Lake City.

And here are some fun facts from Dairy West: You could butter more than 22,000 slices of toast with the butter sculpture. It would take the average person two lifetimes to consume the whole thing.