Small Dairy Farms Get Greenbacks From Grazing

  • Dairy cows on the Straub farm look up with a mouthful of grass. They're in one of 24 sections of a grazing field, and tomorrow they'll rotate to the next section, and so on. Cows that do rotational grazing are healthier, more productive and live longer than cows that are warehoused indoors at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. (Photo by Erin Toner)

In the retail world, big-box stores have made it tough for small companies to stay in business. That’s also true for agriculture, where the big guys are massive feeding operations that house thousands of cows. Surviving as a small farmer in that world often takes a new way of doing business. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner has the story of one dairy-farming family that’s found a way to stay in farming, and make a pretty good living:

Transcript

In the retail world, big-box stores have made it tough for small companies to stay in
business. That’s also true for agriculture, where the big guys are massive feeding
operations that house thousands of cows. Surviving as a small farmer in that world often
takes a new way of doing business. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner has
the story of one dairy-farming family that’s found a way to stay in farming, and make a
pretty good living:


(early morning sounds)


It’s one of those hazy and muggy summer mornings… where the air’s thick enough to
soak up the smell of manure, and dewy grass. Nearby, cows are swatting flies with their
tails, eating grass and relaxing in lush, green pastures. These days it’s a lifestyle most
dairy cows never get to experience. Most are confined in big buildings with hundreds or
thousands of other milk-making machines.


Howard and Mary Jo Straub didn’t like where dairy farming was going. So about ten
years ago, they switched from a farm that warehoused dairy cattle indoors, to something
called seasonal rotational grazing. Mary Jo explains how it works.


“The cows get a new paddock or area, and our areas are about five acres, and each day
they would get a new five acres of grass to eat. We have 24 paddocks, so every 24 days,
they would be back into the same five acres.”


And in those 24 days, rainfall and the cows’ own manure has helped the grass grow back
in that first paddock… and then the second, and so on. This is very low-maintenance
farming… and low-cost farming.


The Straubs don’t have to buy tons of grain to feed their cows. And they’re not applying
pesticides or fertilizer to their pastures as they would on a corn field. They don’t have
tons of manure to dispose of, they don’t have loans out on grain-harvesting machinery,
and they don’t have to pay lots of employees to feed and manage their animals.


Howard Straub says farming is a lot easier than it used to be, and a lot more lucrative.


“We used to get up and milk, we did a three-time-a-day milking before. We mixed up
five loads of feed for different groups of cows. Now we just, we milk the cows twice a
day and when we’re done milking we open the gate and let them out to go eat.”


Since their costs are so low, the Straubs make between 800 and 1,000 dollars profit on
each of their 84 cows. Before, they made around 150 dollars profit per cow.


Howard Straub says grazing has made cattle the chief asset on his farm, instead of a
bunch of machines. His cows are healthier because they’re eating grass… like they were
meant to do… and because they get lots of exercise. The cattle live longer, produce more
milk and have more calves.


And even though the idea with grazing is that there are sprawling pastures for the cows, it
doesn’t require any more land than confined feeding farms. That’s because you have to
consider all the land that supports a herd of cattle, says Tom Kriegl, who studies dairy
farming at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


“You can have a diary operation where the only land that you own is the land that the
building sits on that you house cows in, and you might buy all of your feed for those
cows and you would not own the land that the feed is grown on. But you actually need
that additional land that the feed is grown on even if you don’t own it.”


Howard and Mary Jo Straub say they encourage all the young farmers they meet to make
the switch to rotational grazing. And it is catching on. The Great Lakes Grazing
Network estimates that almost half of all new small and mid-size dairies in the region are
using rotational grazing.


Kevin Ogles is a grazing specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. He
says grazing is probably the future for all smaller dairy farms. But he says grazing is
complicated, with benefits that don’t come immediately.


“The concept is simple. Mastering it, that takes a while. So, once people make the
transition after doing it for a few years, that’s when you hear them talk about the
economic gain. The quality of life has improved.”


At this point, you could call the Straub family master grazers. Since they started ten
years ago, Howard and Mary Jo have managed to pay off a 250,000 dollar mortgage.
Today, they’re almost debt-free… and they’re able to stop farming for two months in the
winter… when they head down to Florida… as Howard says… to take time for the fun
things in life. He says that would never have been possible before.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Erin Toner.

Related Links

Dairy Farmers Revive Old Customs

  • A revival of pasture-based agriculture in the Midwest is pleasing cheese maker's palettes. Photo courtesy of Uplands Cheese Company.

If you drive out into our Midwestern countryside these days, expecting pastoral scenes of placid cows grazing leisurely on grassy hillsides, you’ll be at least 50 years too late. Traditional pastoral herding practices, based on the summertime abundance of self-renewing grasses, has mostly disappeared. It’s been replaced by year-round production based on dried feeds grown from intensively worked soils. However, if you were to visit Pleasant Ridge Farm in Dodgeville, Wisconsin or a small number of other farms around the Great Lakes region, you would find a successful and quite modern, revival of pasture-based agriculture. You would also find an incredibly tasty cheese. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Ed Janus reports:

Transcript

If you drive out into our Midwestern countryside these days expecting pastoral scenes of placid cows grazing leisurely on grassy hillsides, you’ll be at least 50 years too late. Traditional pastoral herding practices, based on the summertime abundance of self-renewing grasses, have mostly disappeared. It’s been replaced by year-round production based on dried feeds grown from intensively worked soils. However, if you were to visit Pleasant Ridge Farm in Dodgeville, Wisconsin or a small number of other farms around the Great Lakes region, you would find a successful and quite modern, revival of pasture-based agriculture. You would also find an incredibly tasty cheese. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Ed Janus reports:


Although they own a dairy farm and milk 200 cows, Mike Gingrich and Dan Patenaude really don’t farm at all like their neighbors. They’re grass farmers and herders. Their cows feed themselves on well-managed, systematically rotated pastures of flavorful summer grass – on farmland that does not know the plow, or soil erosion. So fresh is their grass that their cows convert it into milk that is unusually rich in essential dairy flavors. As Mike explains:


“This rotational grazing was a way that we preferred to run a dairy. It’s easier on the soil, it’s easier on the animals, and easier on the farmer, I think, too. All of our land is pastureland. We graze our cows all summer long. That is unusual. So they’re eating a live plant. Pasture produced milk is sort of like going back in time. You know, a hundred years ago and earlier, all milk was pasture produced.”


As traditional dairy farmers, Mike and Dan’s labors had been both anonymous and poorly compensated. Their milk was combined with that
of hundreds of other farmers and processed into a standardized,
personality-free product. But, on the way to proving that herding could be economically viable, they learned that this method of farming also made a real difference in the richness and flavor of their milk.


“I had always heard from old-time cheese makers that the best milk for making cheese was the June milk when the cows were on that new pasture. And that’s the ideal stage… for both nutrition for the cow and the flavor development of these cheeses coincidentally. That’s why, for instance, dairy products from New Zealand will have a stronger dairy flavor because their national milk supply is grass-based. Whereas in the United States, our national milk supply is stored feeds predominantly, and they’re much milder, they don’t have these dairy flavors.”


Because of their system of rotational grazing that allows them to move the cows from pasture to pasture, their cows are regularly introduced to new and flavorful grass. That means that they have that strong tasting June-like milk from late spring through October. Finding a way to get that milk with its unique qualities directly into the mouths of consumers was the next step for Mike and Dan. They decided that making their own cheese was the answer. So, Mike got his state cheese maker’s license, apprenticed in a small road-side cheese factory and became a farmstead cheese maker.


“A farmstead cheese comes from the milk from a single farm.
It has the potential of having unique and different and interesting flavors that are not available in production cheeses. And that’s because the cheese maker is the same person that milks the animals. Because we use only our milk, and we manage our cows so differently than a
typical farm, we really get a substantially different milk, and then of
course the cheese that we make is only from that milk.”


To make a cheese worthy of their milk, Mike chose a French alpine cheese called Beauford as his model because it too is made from the milk of grass-fed cows that gives it a pronounced but subtle, earthy
flavor and color. Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese, like its French cousin, is cave-aged and turned by hand at least fifty times. And like its French cousin it has something lacking in mass-produced cheeses. It has “terroir” – the flavor of a particular place and the character of the people who make it.


Apparently there is a place for “terroir” in America. Last year Pleasant Ridge Reserve was awarded the Best in Show by the American Cheese Society. This year Mike and Dan will sell 2,000 ten-pound wheels of their cheese to top-scale restaurants, gourmet cheese retailers and on their Web site, at prices many times what they would get if they just waved goodbye to their milk at their farm gate. And, happily for cheese lovers, Mike and Dan, like a handful of other Great Lakes states farmstead cheese makers have found a way to package some of the splendor from their grass.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Ed Janus.