Virtual Tour of My Farm

[JediKooter]

Time for some steak and eggs.

[sterlingice]

Excellent, excellent thread, lungs! Thanks for sharing!

SI

[ISiddiqui]

Cool stuff lungs!

[sabotai]

Awesome pics lungs. 5000 gallons every 30 hours, damn that's a lot of milk.

Also, LOL @ M GO BLUE

[Izulde]

What a terrific thread. Thanks, lungs. This is awesome.

[Grover]

Originally Posted by sabotai

Awesome pics lungs. 5000 gallons every 30 hours, damn that's a lot of milk.

Also, LOL @ M GO BLUE

Someone want to try the 5,000 Gallon Challenge?

[Drake]

Here's a serious question:

I grew up around family farms in central/north-central Illinois as a kid. I have no desire to be a farmer (entirely too damned much hard work). But I love it when lungs posts info about his farm, and a small part of me always thinks, "Man, I wish I was doing something that cool with my life."

Why is that?

(Thanks for sharing, lungs!)

[Subby]

Originally Posted by Drake

Here's a serious question:

I grew up around family farms in central/north-central Illinois as a kid. I have no desire to be a farmer (entirely too damned much hard work). But I love it when lungs posts info about his farm, and a small part of me always thinks, "Man, I wish I was doing something that cool with my life."

Why is that?

(Thanks for sharing, lungs!)

Had the same reaction. Even felt that way when I visited my brother in law's turkey farm...and that was way less cool than the dairy farm.

[digamma]

Me too. My wife's family has a corn and bean farm in Southern Illinois. Getting to drive their huge combine was a total thrill for me.

[lungs]

Thanks to everybody for the kind comments....

Everybody loves visiting a farm, but just like anything else there are lots of daily stuff that can really get to people. Working with living and breathing animals can be frustrating as sometimes they have their own ideas about how things should be done! There are so many moving parts. Luck and mother nature can bite you in the ass pretty fast and there's really nowhere that blame can be placed. Commodity markets are constantly messing with the bottom line, but really, that's not an unusual thing for a business owner that produces a tangible product in any field.

Yet I wouldn't change a thing. I'm not going to get filthy rich doing this and would never expect to. Men in my family have historically been loggers, farmers or into construction. I'm now the last farmer in my immediate family and extended family has only one sheep farmer. The rest are in construction now. There's a lot of older people in the dairy industry that try to preach doom and gloom to younger people like me, but I just tend to ignore them. Most have run their farms very poorly over the years and spun their wheels. My goal is to keep my head above water during the rough times and make progress when things are good.

[DanGarion]

[Poli]

Saw this video today and thought of you, lungs.

[lungs]

Yeah that's been making the rounds between all the Agvocates....
I can't support anything with John Deere in it

[Poli]

LOL. My old roomie works for Farm Credit Services and he's a Deere fan. My godfather worked for Deere down in Jonesboro, AR.

Edit: He worked there all his life. Had something to do with service of the tractors.

[lungs]

My grandfather had a John Deere back in the 1940s or early 50s that was a lemon so that turned our family on John Deere for generations....

[Marc Vaughan]

Awesome pics - thanks for sharing

[Edward64]

Neat. Thanks for sharing.

[stevew]

What do you do with the Bulls? Has to be frustrating to work hard to get a cow pregnant, and then it shits out a boy.

[lungs]

Originally Posted by stevew

What do you do with the Bulls? Has to be frustrating to work hard to get a cow pregnant, and then it shits out a boy.

We sell them at a few weeks old. I've got three farmers that buy the bulls off me and raise them up to beef age. It's a decent secondary source of income. The bull calf market is way down due to the drought but I still can get around $75 for each bull calf. When the market was up, I'd get over $250 for some calves.

[lungs]

Dola

Some of the animal rights groups claim we kill bull calves at birth. While a small amount of people will do that, with a minimal amount of work you can raise the value of those calves. It'd be foolish to do so. I'd be losing out on $2500 worth of revenue per month.

[stevew]

Do larger firms implant female embryos? Is something like that even possible?

[lungs]

It's possible but the easier method is to use sex-sorted bull semen which will yield 90% heifer calves. That stuff was all the rage a few years ago. We were growing are cow numbers so it was useful then. But now that we aren't growing having a female birth rate of less than 50% is fine. There was an idea of using sexed semen and then selling excess heifers but the problem with that is the investment it takes to raise the heifers (feed) won't match the return we get when selling them. Selling the bull calves at a few weeks old is profitable because we feed them waste milk. The only investment I have in the bull calves is labor.

There's also an argument to be made that sexed semen has helped the overproduction that's driven prices down.

[sterlingice]

I wonder what the mechanism is to derive sexed semen. In my mind, semen has a 50/50 chance of being male or female so you'd have to sort on a cellular level, right?

SI

[lungs]

Purified sperm is sex sorted at Sexing Technologies into X-bearing chromosome (female) and Y-bearing chromosome (male) populations. These purified subpopulations are frozen for future use in artificial breeding.

Sperm is sorted by identifying differences between the X- and Y- bearing sperm. The X- chromosome (female) contains about 3.8% more DNA than the Y- chromosome in cattle. This DNA difference in DNA content can be used to sort the X- from the Y- bearing sperm.

[britrock88]

The X- chromosome (female) contains about 3.8% more DNA than the Y- chromosome.

Proving that women are more complicated than men.
(Sorry, continue on with the thread.)

[BYU 14]

just going through this thread again I have to compliment you on the way you treat your animals. I pass a dairy farm every day and from the outside at least it the conditions don't even come close to yours.

The pens I see have a tin roof, but are filthy and no sprinklers ever going, even when it is in the 110+ plus range here.

[mauchow]

Wisconsin just rocks!

[lungs]

Originally Posted by BYU 14

just going through this thread again I have to compliment you on the way you treat your animals. I pass a dairy farm every day and from the outside at least it the conditions don't even come close to yours.

The pens I see have a tin roof, but are filthy and no sprinklers ever going, even when it is in the 110+ plus range here.

Probably an older setup... We've learned so much in the last 15 years about housing cows that a lot of these older setups are just terrible for cow comfort. And renovating everything isn't exactly cheap.

[jeff061]

I was at a dairy farm recently that had a lot off really cool technology. But the main one that stuck out was auto milking stalls. Like cows over the course of a day would walk into this stall on their own and this machine would automatically affix and milk her. It was damn cool.

Now this was a video of the technology, I didn't see it in practice live, I wonder how many of the cows actually utilize it?

[DaddyTorgo]

That's awesome. Robot-milkers!

[lungs]

Originally Posted by jeff061

I was at a dairy farm recently that had a lot off really cool technology. But the main one that stuck out was auto milking stalls. Like cows over the course of a day would walk into this stall on their own and this machine would automatically affix and milk her. It was damn cool.

Now this was a video of the technology, I didn't see it in practice live, I wonder how many of the cows actually utilize it?

A guy I'm acquainted with online installed some of these robots earlier this year. Once a cow is trained, if she doesn't go to the robot to be milked it's a pretty big red flag that something is wrong with her. I think he said each cow averages 2.7 visits to the robot per day which is close to what he was doing before, milking 3 times per day.

I like robotics in theory but they need to come a little further to where I can use them. I'm right at the threshold where it's economically impractical to spend $3 million on robots when I could spend half of that and double my herd size and hire somebody to milk for me. Robots are good options for people that can't/won't deal with hired help.

[lungs]

Here's a good video of a robot:

[lungs]

But if I built something new, it'd be more like this:

[Mizzou B-ball fan]

Lungs, ever seen this happen? Farmer in this area drove around on the roads and got a salty layer on the truck. Parked it in the pasture and the cows are using it as a salt lick.

[DaddyTorgo]

LOL

[lungs]

Hah, that's not a bad idea. They'd probably lick the truck even if it didn't have salt.

[Izulde]

So what is this $250 app to track cows? I'm curious now.

[lungs]

Link to the Company

The main program (DairyComp 305) is something I couldn't live without. It basically keeps track of all my cows and everything I've ever done with them. Milk production, vaccinations, reproduction, etc... With antibiotics being a public concern, I have records of every single administration of antibiotics too. Basically anything I can imagine, and the customizability of the program allows me to create anything I want.

The app is basically transferring all the data over to a smart phone so I can access it while I'm out in the barn. If I see cow #2309 looking like she is about to have a calf, I can pull out my phone and see when her due date is and what bull she is bred to along with pretty much everything else she's ever done in her life.

[sterlingice]

This thread once again makes me go

SI

[lungs]

And we didn't even get into the $40,000 hardware/computer program that I have to tell me when I have a horny cow

Basically, all my cows that are not pregnant wear an accelerometer on on their necks that beams a blue tooth signal to my computer that gives me hourly activity levels of each cow. Increase activity is associated with being in heat. Theoretically, low activity will show me sick cows but I still use my own eyes for that.

[Buccaneer]

Wow. I was away when this thread first came up, so I missed it. Very nice operation. This all takes me back to my childhood living in the dairy region of Upstate New York and visiting a few of my relatives that were dairy farmers.

A question though. That handful of cow food - what's all in it? It looks like some of it shouldn't be edible from appearances but besides the corn/soy/minerals added for flavoring and probably alfafa hay, I don't know what the other stuff is.

[lungs]

Originally Posted by Buccaneer

Wow. I was away when this thread first came up, so I missed it. Very nice operation. This all takes me back to my childhood living in the dairy region of Upstate New York and visiting a few of my relatives that were dairy farmers.

A question though. That handful of cow food - what's all in it? It looks like some of it shouldn't be edible from appearances but besides the corn/soy/minerals added for flavoring and probably alfafa hay, I don't know what the other stuff is.

Sometimes the diet can vary depending on availability. But that handful I had was Alfalfa haylage, corn silage, brewer's grain (spent grain from the brewing process), and our "mixture" that I showed a few pictures before which contains corn, cotton seed, soybean meal, and sugar beet pulp.

Needless to say, I hire somebody to put the diets together for me. One of my more valued consultants.

[dolfin]

This thread is awesome! I'm sorry I missed it the first time around!!

I was just in Wisconsin last week for a few days. There are definitely a few farms here and there...

[finketr]

Originally Posted by Izulde

So what is this $250 app to track cows? I'm curious now.

thanks for resurrecting this thread.

[JPhillips]

What are your thoughts on the new FDA regulations on antibiotics for healthy animals?

[lungs]

Originally Posted by JPhillips

What are your thoughts on the new FDA regulations on antibiotics for healthy animals?

As I went to resurrect this thread I realized I missed this question. As far as I know, it won't affect me. We do feed an ionophore (which is considered an antibiotic) to healthy animals but they aren't covered. Probably 90+% of my antiobiotic usage is a variant of Ceftiofur. There have been concerns raised with its usage but mostly in terms of residues in slaughtered animals. I know in the past they were lax on testing for ceftiofur, but now that is not the case. Anybody that sells an animal with residuals will find themselves on "The List". If you find yourself on the list, you'll be lucky if anybody would be willing to take your animals for slaughter.

On another note, we've added a new piece of technology to the farm. Computerized calf feeders. In the past we would feed calves twice per day but in reality that does not mimic nature very well. Calves will drink several smaller feedings per day when given the option. These computerized feeders give them that option:






There was an adjustment period after starting out but we're shooting for as near as 0% mortality we can get for our baby calves now. Much easier to catch a sick one now before it's too late as the computers measure drinking speed and the first sign of a sick calf is decreased drinking speed. Of course there will always be some mortality but if I can get near what developed countries have for human infant mortality rates, I think I'll be doing OK

[cartman]

But if you get the rate to zero, where will the tasty veal come from?

[lungs]

Originally Posted by cartman

But if you get the rate to zero, where will the tasty veal come from?

Same place it always does. If one of my calves dies, my dog gets it

[timmae]

Awesome thread... How close to a closed system do you have with your crops? Offsite sources provide cotton seed soybean meal and sugar beet pulp? Do you own all of the cultivating and harvesting machinery as well?

My family was in the fur business in Wisconsin... I often wish I would have stayed with the family business but you are right about the hours and dedication.

[lungs]

Originally Posted by timmae

Awesome thread... How close to a closed system do you have with your crops? Offsite sources provide cotton seed soybean meal and sugar beet pulp? Do you own all of the cultivating and harvesting machinery as well?

My family was in the fur business in Wisconsin... I often wish I would have stayed with the family business but you are right about the hours and dedication.

Alfalfa and corn we are mostly self sufficient so long as we don't have a drought like 2012. We do grow some soybeans in a crop rotation but don't feed/process them ourselves. We sell the soybeans which essentially cancels out some money spent on the soy products we use.

We do some of our own crop work but hire a large percentage of it out. It just doesn't make sense to have millions of dollars in equipment for our sized herd unless we did crop work for other farmers. Being that there is a guy in the neighborhood that has the equipment, we work with him to fill in the gaps that we don't have equipment for. A combine is a $300,000 piece of equipment that it wouldn't pencil out to be viable on our ~1000 acres so the guy we hire spreads the costs of that combine over tens of thousands of acres. There are some people that like shiny new equipment that go out and buy it for not enough acres but those are the people you tend to see bankruptcy auctions happening with.