[Fidatelo]

Originally Posted by lungs

Well for one thing, the rise of the Wisconsin dairy industry was due to a lot of New Yorkers migrating here in the 1800s so NY and WI have very similar styles of dairying. A lot has changed since the 1960s but there are still plenty of operations that are still using facilities and such from that era and doing well.

We got our start during WW2. My great-grandfather served in the cavalry in WW1 and got his horse machine gunned from underneath him (cavalry wasn't fun when machine guns came along). The thought of my grandfather going through the same thing horrified him. So my grandfather married into a nice Swiss farming family here in southern Wisconsin and both sides helped him along with buying a farm and getting him going. So he was a draft dodger in a way, but he also was feeding the country too (my dad did the same thing during Vietnam or he would've ended up being over there during the Tet Offensive).

We've gone from 10 cows and a bunch of chickens and hogs to 20 cows to 40 cows to 80 cows to 150 cows to 300 cows to now 500 cows since we got our start in the 40s. My dad figured he'd never have to milk more than 150 cows but ended up at 500. I figure I'll never have to milk more than 1000 so that means I'll probably end up at 3-4000 if the industry doesn't swallow me whole

Do you have the cool machines where the cows just walk up when they feel like getting milked and it drains them automagically? We have an 'Open Farm Day' here once a year and I took the kids to a dairy farm last year and saw one of those, it was awesome.