The term farmhouse ale is real, and I love them. However, Spotted Cow does not fall into that category. The Cow is a farmhouse ale in name but not by style. Unless of course you want to claim that the farmhouse style does not necessarily define what is and is not a farmhouse ale and that the style intentionally allows for regional and stylistic variance.
At the end of the day, if you brew a Spotted Cow like beer, hand it to anyone worth their salt (in beer knowledge), and tell them it is a farmhouse ale, they will be disappointed. It is not funky, austere, or any of the subtle and great things that make a simple farmhouse ale wonderful. The cow is a simple beer with a good amount of corn and very little bitterness. It is a great gateway beer for those new to non-BMC and is a fine beer for tossing a few back. It is by no means a complex or subtly beautiful beer. Not to knock it, just being real about what it is and is not.
Of course, this is all my opinion, and discussing different opinions is the spice of life. It may well be that Dan Carey crafted Spotted Cow with those great Belgian farmhouse ales in mind, but wanted to tailor it into a flagship beer style for the lager drinking Wisconsinites of his home state. So he took out the funk, replaced it with a fruitiness ala the Koelsch yeast fermented warm, and used corn as a thumbs up to the lager and Miller crowd so wide spread in the land of cheese.
tom-A-to tom-ah-to, use loelsch yeast fermented around 68º.