Management Team

Lee and Carl are lifers on the farm. Before coming back to the farm, Ken and Daniel both went to college and worked off-farm jobs. Ken received a B.S. in Mathematics from Western Michigan and worked as a project manager/estimator for nine years for Jergens Piping Corporation, who did much of their work at Pfizer (Zoetis). Daniel received a B.S. in Biosystems Engineering from Michigan State and worked as a civil engineer in Grand Rapids for the USDA-NRCS for 6 years. During this time, Daniel also received a Professional Engineering license.

Short History

In 2010, Ken and Daniel both moved back to the farm and started a spring calving seasonal pasture-based dairy, milking 100 heifers in the first year (2011). The dairy was modeled after the New Zealand style of dairy farming with zero housing, crossbred cattle, maximum grazing, and feeding a concentrate in the parlor. The lactating herd increased by about 100 cows every year, with 500 cows in the herd in 2016. Before the dairy, there was zero irrigation on the farm. Today, approximately 800 of the 1300 acres farmed are under water. Over the past 6 years, in addition to the herd expansion, the dairy has progressed in steps with adopting artificial insemination, pTMR feeding (feeding a partial TMR along with pasture instead of parlor concentrate), and now transitioning to organic production. The farm and dairy cattle will be certified organic October 2018. With the current and proposed projects, the farm will consist of 1300 certified organic crop acres, 500 organic dairy cows, 150 bred heifers, 150 heifer calves, 300 steers, 2400 finishing hogs, and 42000 breeder broiler layer chickens.

Milk Production

Since adopting TMR feeding, milk production has been increasing every year. This year (2016) milk production is at its highest since starting the dairy with an average production per cow (including calf milk for 500 calves in the spring) in the 15,000+ pounds per cow range. Please keep in mind these are not your typical North American Holstein cows that have a 30,000 pound potential, eat thirty pounds of corn a day, and are burned out in two years. These are smaller crossbred cattle with a lot of New Zealand genetics that can breed back every twelve months, stay in the herd longer, and eat ten to twelve pounds of corn per day. Our nutritionist is Dave Meidl (director of nutrition at Midwestern BioAg), and he thinks the milk potential of the type of cows we have is maybe close to that 18,000 pound range and that is with total confinement, maximum cow comfort, etc...all the costs it would take to maximize a dairy cow. I think you can put our herd’s production against any other crossbred grazing herd. Irvin Martin in Nappanee, Indiana, is a very successful organic dairy milking about 200 crossbred cows. They average between 10,000-11,000 pounds per cow. A few other large organic dairies we visited are Ed Zimba in the thumb of Michigan and Ron Miller north of Madison, Wisconsin. They both milk about 400-500 cows and average about 20,000 to 21,000 pounds per cow but they both milk large North American Holsteins and have freestall housing for the cows.

Organic Crop Acres and Feed Budget

Even after farming organically for 30 years, Ron Miller says their biggest challenge on their dairy farm is still weed control. This year for post emergence corn weed control, we spent 20 times more hours in the tractor fighting weeds (5 trips 20' wide equipment) than we did when we sprayed (1 trip 80' booms). We are transitioning all of our 1300 acres at once and just completed our first year farming organically with no herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, or synthetic fertilizers. Our wheat yields were the highest they have ever been in the 80-95 bu/ac range. Our corn silage yields were in the 19-20 ton range, which is the same as previous years when we have sprayed. We just started combining the shell corn and soybeans so do not have yield data on them yet, but we are expecting comparable yields to our conventional farming days. One of the biggest challenges in 2016 with the crop production was trying to jump into a good organic crop rotation when many of the fields were just crop residue with no alfalfa to plow down for corn or cover crops growing to suppress weeds. Having “green” growing not only suppresses spring weeds but also uptakes highly soluble nutrients from manure and turns it into a season long slow release nutrient source for the crop. Starting in 2017, all of our fields will be in good crop rotation which will help greatly with weeds, nutrient cycling, and disease. In order to jump into a good rotation, we had to plant several one year hay crops in 2016. Some fields we got zero crop from it because we seeded in late May and we got almost no rain in June. Now that we have our fields rotated, all of our hay and pasture seeding will occur in mid to late August which typically results in greater rainfall going into September and much less weed competition. See attached spreadsheet “Feed Budget” showing feed needs for our 500 cow dairy including heifers and breeding bulls. With the crop production shown in the “Crop Rotation” spreadsheet we should be able to satisfy the feed needs shown in the “Feed Budget” spreadsheet with some very achievable yield goals. The goal is that the only purchased feed for the dairy would be mineral. All pasture, hay, corn silage, shell corn, soybeans, and wheat would be produced on the farm and fed to the cows.