| Working Smarter:
How Seasonal Dairying Can Save Labor and Protect Profits
Larry Shearer, a retired dairy farmer and one of Northeast SARE’s Sustainable Farmer Educators, has a story to tell: “In 1988,” he says, “my wife and I took a two-month vacation in the summer time. One of my sons, who was interested in farming, took care of the place while we were gone. But when we came back he told me, ‘Dad, I’ve changed my mind. I’m not interested. It’s too much work. I’m too tied down.’”
Although there are certainly profitability issues in farming, Shearer’s talks with dairy farmers and graziers around the Northeast often begin with concerns about more personal matters: “The thing I hear first,” he says, “is what their quality of life is, and what they’d like it to be. It is better with grazing than confinement, but it isn’t as good as they would like it to be.” The farm often demands 16 hours a day, 365 days a year. “What can we do to improve our quality of life?” Shearer asks. “It’s not necessarily to make more money. What I hear is, let’s keep the work load to 50 hours a week, instead of 80 or 90.”
It was in the context of his own farm that Shearer began to explore seasonal dairying. “I knew about the New Zealand style of seasonal dairying,” he says, “that gives the farmer a two-month vacation from milking, and we began reading up on what they did there and in other countries like Ireland. Then we talked it over, and we decided to try it. What we liked was that there was no capital investment involved—it was strictly a management change.”
It took two years to get all the cows in synch, but that was the year that they took two full weeks off from milking. “That year was also the second-best year we ever had.” He concedes this may have been partly accidental—new techniques rarely pay off so quickly—but because they didn’t know yet how many cows they were going to need, they ended up with 40 cows to sell to other farmers for replacements.
The skepticism about seasonal dairying runs deep—other farmers wonder if it can really work, and some lenders are wary of the concept, since it means there will be two months with no milk check. “Some lenders will let you make 12 payments over 10 months,” he says, “but some others have lending committees that won’t go along with that. Their attitude seems to be that farmers don’t have the discipline to do that.”
Discipline, of course, is an abundant commodity among farmers: Shearer points out that seasonal dairying works because the loss of income is carefully balanced by a drop in operating costs: In his first year, his feed bill dropped to within a few dollars of the difference in farm income, and he learned that “you can operate so much more efficiently, because all your cows are in the same stage of lactation. When they are all in synch, you have only one feed program, one set of decisions, and you can vary your feeding and save on feed costs.” Handling and feeding the calves is also more efficient, and Shearer reports that his calf mortality is essentially nonexistent: “We haven’t lost a calf in 12 years, except for one that jumped through a window and I’m not sure that counts.” In New England, it generally costs about $1200 to raise a calf; Shearer says it costs him about $500.
The efficiencies that come with seasonal milking are multiple—cows are fed more precisely, herd health is easier to manage, and the savings in time and money can be substantial. Shearer milks 50 cows, and even though his production has dropped about 20 percent and his gross farm income about 15 percent, his grain bill has been cut in half and his vet bill has dropped dramatically, to about a quarter of its previous level of spending. His feeding program, which includes managed intensive grazing, varies according to the lactation cycle; he has found he has avoided the metabolic problems that come with over- or underfeeding. Even their culling rate has dropped to about 10 percent, while the average rate in the Northeast is about 30 percent.
It’s not all roses, and Shearer’s talking points with farmers includes getting cows bred to become seasonal and all calve in a narrow window, how to make the management decisions that make seasonal dairying profitable, and how to cope with the isolation that comes with using a production technique that is not supported by the professional community. “All the magazines, all the farm advisors, they will all advise against it and tell you it doesn’t work. But it does work—our farm is profitable. Last year was the best year the farm has ever had.” The lack of advisory support is what he hopes to address as he travels around the region—he has spoken to farmers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York since his appointment as a Sustainable Farmer Educator.
William Murphy, a grazing expert at the University of Vermont, commented recently on the problem of resistance to new approaches to dairying. “I wish,” he says, “that more of the leaders in the ag community would listen to Larry. The big dairy confinement farms are not good for the conditions in the Northeast, but that’s what gets advocated. But pasture-based dairying is ideal for the conditions here, and it doesn’t get advocated by leaders. Farmers listen to these leaders.”
Murphy attends many pasture walks and meetings, and points out that these gatherings are always attended by the same double handful of farmers who are already receptive to new ideas. Some sort of breakthrough into mainstream dairying is truly needed : He describes Shearer as a “voice of reason” and he thinks people will pay much more attention if the economics of dairying get rough enough to make pasture-based and seasonal dairying appealing despite the lack of support for it from the top.
As for Larry Shearer, he seems undaunted—his experience as a dairy farmer, grazier, and informed maverick have given him momentum. He talks about the things that have prompted him to make changes on the farm, things like long periods of chopping in the field. “After you’ve been out there for a couple of days, and maybe it rains, and maybe the chopper pipe gets plugged, you begin to think that maybe there’s some smarter way to do this,” he says. Turning to seasonal dairying was a part of this search for a smarter way, and Shearer feels that, for at least some dairy farms, the model can offer Northeast farmers a manageable work load, healthy cows, and something very close to an actual vacation. But it’s hard to go against what we’ve been told to do: “And we’ve been told to milk more cows, and make more milk per cow, but we also have to look hard at the bottom line, at how much labor is involved, and how much profit goes into our pockets at the end of the year.”
|
