NOVEMBER 2019 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC
Mega-dairies are the future of US farms
Openness to visitors helps calm public concerns
by DAVID SCHMIDT PANNOCK, MN – Despite
more than five years of unsustainable milk prices that have driven thousands of US dairy farms out of business, the American dairy industry continues to expand. Replacing the hundreds of small family dairies which dotted the US Midwest are more and more so-called factory dairy farms. Leading the way is
Riverview LLP. Once a family crop and beef farm, Riverview Farms is now a limited partnership with over 300 investor-owners. It has been in a non-stop expansion since opening its first 800-cow dairy in Morris, Minnesota in 1995, and now operates 14 farms in Minnesota, New Mexico and Arizona milking a total of about 95,000 cows. While the original farm comprised a lot of acreage, subsequent farms include only enough land for the farm’s infrastructure. The newest farm, Meadow Star Dairy in Pennock, Minnesota, is just 160 acres in size yet has 9,500 cows, of which 8,500 are milked twice a day in an 80- cow rotary parlour. Cows are divided into four
groups (fresh, high lactation, mid lactation and low lactation) and housed in 12 pens in a single 1,600-foot- long six-lane drive-through barn with tunnel ventilation. Rather than grow their own forages, they contract neighbouring farmers to grow them. In exchange, growers buy and use Riverview’s manure. “We have a waiting list for
manure,” says Natasha Mortenson, a Riverview partner who works at the original farm in Morris. Reno Williams notes most
Riverview farms are in Minnesota because of the access to feed. “Last year, we bought
haylage from 15 farmers just for this dairy,” she states. (Her husband was one.) The herd is crossbred
Jerseys. Top cows are bred with sexed Jersey or Holstein semen. Bottom cows and those top cows who do not become pregnant within two inseminations are bred to Riverview’s trademarked Limousin-based “Beefbuilder” sires.
Heifer calves are tube-fed colostrum within 20 minutes of birth and twice more over the next four hours. Within five days, they are trucked to Riverview’s calf-rearing farm in New Mexico. After being weaned in New Mexico, the heifers move to Riverview’s heifer-raising facility in Arizona. After being calved out in Arizona, they are shipped back to their home farm in Minnesota.
Cheap milk Riverview uses self-
propelled Mensch manure vacuums to suck up the manure and deliver it to a screw press. Solids are dried to 40% moisture content and reused as bedding while liquids are stored in giant lagoons capable of holding 125% of the farm’s annual waste. “Our goal is to produce milk as cheaply as possible,” says Williams. “We strive for a US$13/hundredweight (about $39 Cdn./hectolitre) cost-of- production.” To combat negative public
perceptions of their style of farming, Riverview offers consumer-oriented farm tours every Friday and Saturday. “We have about 10,000 visitors a year,” Williams says. “It’s overwhelming the amount of lights that go on during a tour and they change their minds very quickly.”
Same but different Brothers Scott and Brad
Feuerholm of Plymouth Dairy Farms in Iowa have also embraced the model, though their approach is much different.
When they joined their
father’s crop, hog and beef farm in the late 1990s, they replaced the livestock with a dairy, saying it “adds more value to your crop ground.” “When we started in 2000,
we milked 1,500 cows. Now the farm is milking 2,000,” Scott says. The Plymouth farm had been milking as many as 2,900 cows but the number dropped after the family built a new facility 15 miles away. Opened in March, the new barn has an 80-cow rotary parlour and room for 4,000 cows. (it currently milks 3,150 but the Feuerholms expect to reach 4,000 within two years.)
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Jerry Jennison of Jer-Lindy Farms in Minnesota poses in front of his Holstein dairy herd. DAVID SCHMIDT PHOTO
The new facility is strictly a milk production unit. “All we do here is feed
them, breed them and milk them,” Brad says. All dry cows and calves are housed at Plymouth. While Riverview focuses on
low input costs and minimizing crop production, the Feuerholms crop 2,650 acres of owned and rented land and focus on high production. Their Holstein herd is milked three times a day, averaging 91 pounds a day of 3.6% butterfat and 3.0% protein. “Our cost of production is about $16.50/cwt but we expect to bring that down to
$15/cwt when we are in full operation,” Scott says. The Feuerholms use sand bedding and a flush system which runs five times a day. They claim to average a 130,000 SCC through the winter. The Feuerholms say the key
is to “find the right cow guys and then get out of their way. Our biggest challenges are capital management and keeping our key people.” The Feuerholms also use an assembly-line approach for their heifers, shipping calves to Kansas, then to Nebraska. They return home about 30 days before freshening. Small dairy farmers like
Jerry and Linda Jennison, who milk 180 to 190 cows at Jer- Lindy Farms in Minnesota, expect to see more megadairies in future. “That’s economics,” Jerry
shrugs, noting that he depends on government support to survive. “The government gave me
my start, it paid for my manure storage and it is now subsidizing me through the US Farm Bill,” he says. Although he relies on it, he
believes the current subsidy is too generous. “I fear that by the end of this farm bill, the US will be even more heavily overproduced,” he says.
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