How did you get into farming? The only reason is our dads, Keith (Matt’s dad) and Ken (Tim’s dad), were doing it and we started helping. Our dads are brothers. We bought the cows in 2013, but we started farming the land in 2010. We joined the farm out of high school. We started with getting paid to help. Under our occupation on taxes, we’ve always been dairy farmers. Growing up, we milked for neighbors, helped with hay and worked for odds and ends. We were helping neighbors before we could drive as soon as we could throw a hay bale. The first business we did together is we bought steers, our dads fed them, and that was our bonus. We had some of our own cows, so we already had a few animals in the herd when we purchased it.
What are the most significant ways your farm has changed since you started farming? We were milking 86 cows at two farms. On the home farm we were milking with buckets and a step saver and had no barn cleaner. In 2000 the first barn cleaner was installed. Before 2000 I was a lean guy. We had to haul all our feed over to the other farm and haul all the manure back. Labor Day 2011 we added the pipeline at the home farm. We added 14 tie stalls in the old calf area so the barn went from 49 stalls to 63 stalls. In June 2012, we reduced cow numbers and went down to one barn instead of two. We grew up working with our dads, but now predominantly it is the two of us. We bought another 240-acre farm in 2021. We started our trucking business so we could help pay for it. We keep our beef herd at this new farm. The beef freshen at our main farm, and then once they are established, we take them to the other farm.
What was a challenge you faced in your dairy farming career and how did you overcome it? Keeping up with the rules and regulations as they get tighter and tighter and all the stuff you have to do to just sell milk nowadays. Trying to keep up with the National Dairy FARM Program rules. We have to switch our dehorning practices because the rules no longer allow us to use gouging.
What is the best decision you have made on your farm? Matt: Putting in the milk house and the pipeline and the ease of having one barn. Tim: Purchasing the truck and diversifying. We got into trucking in 2020. It’s been a lot of long, hard days trying to do both, but the amount of revenue that that’s brought in has far exceeded anything that we could have brought out of this barn. We have a 1998 Peterbilt 379. The first year we had it, Matt hauled gravel all summer during the day and Tim hauled turkeys at night. For a few years we hauled sweet corn. With sweet corn we had to keep a guy in the truck 24/7. That got to be too much, so we stopped. One of the things we haul currently is turkeys which still happens at night. The trucking business has allowed us to purchase nicer stuff when the milk price goes south.
What three things on the farm can you not live without? Explain. The skid loader. It saves a lot of manual labor. The heated shop. Just being able to drive something in there and work on it on cement with heat or we can put a tractor or spreader in there during a real cold spell and know that it will start in the morning. The third thing is family. Everybody has everybody’s back. We are so blessed. If one of us wants to get away someone can pick it up. To do this job by yourself would be really difficult. At any given point we can have a lot of stuff going on at once. One day we were picking corn, running grain cart, combining corn, chopping stalks and hauling cattle. It just makes you smile. To have that capability is awesome. Sometimes it takes one guy to put out fires and keep everyone and everything moving.
What are your thoughts and concerns about the dairy industry for the next year? For a while it was the uncertainty of whether somebody wants our milk, but not so much anymore. It’s hard to produce a product that nobody wants. If you don’t have a place for your milk, you don’t have anything. How many places are taking places farms with less than 100 cows?
What strategies do you use to withstand the volatile milk prices? Diversifying through all the extra stuff that we do. We don’t just milk cows. We have a trucking company. We have H&S bale wrappers that we rent out and go do that. We do a little custom baling. We have beef cows and we’re able to raise the steers. We also bought a cutter baler.
How do you maintain family relationships while also working together? Communication is huge. It’s better that we’re cousins instead of brothers. We have seen our dads grow up as brothers and that was more difficult. Knowing each other. As time evolves, people often will have different goals. Through those differences, the less ambitious person will hold the more ambitious person back while the ambitious person can push the less ambitious person. You don’t have to have the same goals, but just the same mindset on where you want to be and to not let yourself get far apart.
What do you find most rewarding about dairy farming? Working together, absolutely. Watching everything go on. Everyone for the most part has their roles, but everyone can do everything.
Tell us something special about your farm. We let our cows in and out. Not many people do that anymore, especially in the tie stalls. Cows go in and out every day except if the weather is especially nasty.
What are your plans for your dairy in the next year and five years? In the next year, it probably will be pretty much the same. In the next five, there could be potential for change depending on what some of the kids do and whether they are interested in joining the farm. If they are, we would try to integrate them into the farm. We could have enough work for more people between the trucking, beef cows and dairy.
How do you or your family like to spend time when you are not doing chores? Tim: I like snowmobiling. I try to take a few trips each year. As a family we went up north in August. Matt: We go camping every year with my wife’s family. Its tent camping with a softball tournament, eating pie at the local pie social and sitting around the campfire at night. Both: Overall, family is very important to us. Going to sporting events is a priority. Those get more fun as they get older. Watching T-ball compared to Little League and similar advances in other sports, it’s fun to see the plays set up. We don’t go anywhere together really because on-farm we spend more time with each other than we do with our wives.
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