Building their dream

WILSON, Wis. — After seven years of conventional dairy farming, Jon and Melissa Kuhn transitioned their dairy farm to an organic production model in 2020.

The Kuhns milk 37 Jersey cows on Kuhn’s Springfield Jerseys near Wilson in St. Croix County. They have shipped milk to Organic Valley for the past five years. Jon operates a fencing business in addition to farming, while Melissa runs a daycare business.

The Kuhns are averaging about 40 pounds of milk per cow per day.

“It doesn’t seem like a lot of milk, but it just works,” Kuhn said. “Some people will laugh at you, but in the end, I don’t have much into making that 40 pounds.”

The Kuhns sold their herd of conventional cows in preparation for making the transition to organic milk.

“When we started shipping organic milk, we were milking something like 16 or 17 cows, about a third of the conventional herd,” Kuhn said. “We were bringing in just as much with a third of the cattle. It didn’t take long to figure out we’d made the right decision to switch.”

Since transitioning to organic production, the Kuhns no longer feed corn silage. They buy grain corn from the Amish, which they grind themselves for feed. In addition to dry hay, they make baleage, which they feed during the winter.

The Kuhns farm about 70 acres, with 30 dedicated to pasturing their herd. They also rent nearby organic-certified land for making hay and baleage.

“Some of our ground is just full of rocks; it can’t really be cropped,” Kuhn said. “You start digging a rock out, but then you realize it’s the size of a Buick, so we just leave it the way it is, and just use it for pastureland.”

Rotational grazing has been a learning curve Kuhn said. This summer marks the first time he has successfully rotated pastures for his cows all summer long.

While his cows have regular pasture access, Kuhn decided he wanted to better his grazing efforts. Kuhn divided the 30 acres of now-dedicated pasture into sections, as close to five acres each as he could make them. This summer he has been able to keep the cows rotating through the pastures on a 30-day schedule.

“At one point we had inter-seeded it, several years ago,” Kuhn said. “I made hay off it for five years, turning the cows out in it in the late fall. They’d eat there for a couple of weeks. Then we’d come and plant some clover in it — clover grows like wild on this farm. The cows love it, and they really milk on it.”

Because of labor constraints, Kuhn does not move his cows daily.

“Some people move them every 12 hours, but to me you’ve got to have a life, too,” Kuhn said. “This takes a lot of your life, but you still got it. We allow them five days, or this last time around it was four days, in each one.”

Kuhn said he clips each paddock after the cows finish grazing to stimulate regrowth.

To facilitate grazing, Kuhn installed a lane that goes the length of the farm, which he uses with a series of gates to direct grazing traffic. Currently the cows have access to two automatic waterers along one part of the lane. Kuhn said he is hoping to eventually have additional water access available closer to the paddocks that are at greater distances from the barn.

Kuhn uses the cues his cows give him for grazing time during the summer heat.

“In some of the paddocks they can lie in the shade of the tree line, which gives them a lot of protection,” Kuhn said. “If they don’t have access to the tree line, most days by noon or 1:00, they’re back up to the barn, ready to come in under the fans.”

Kuhn said the more he has utilized grazing over the years, the bigger the improvements in soil health he has witnessed.

“We have been farming here for 25 years with cattle, but we weren’t milking here until 2013,” Kuhn said. “Since then, it’s changed a lot. The soil gets lots of manure, and it didn’t produce like this until we started getting the cow manure out there.”

Working with farmer-led groups aimed towards soil improvement, Kuhn has learned principles that are key for his operation: minimal disturbance, keeping the soil covered and maximizing biodiversity.

“The less tillage you do, the more you can keep the microbes going,” Kuhn said. “Doing less tillage means you’re creating a better habitat for those microorganisms. They are the things that actually rotate nutrients that help your crops, your grasses, whatever is growing.”

Kuhn said the rampant biodiversity in the soil is apparent when he spreads manure.

“When we used to spread manure, you felt like you were committed to tilling it in, to incorporate it,” Kuhn said. “Now in a few days, you don’t even know it was there, the soil microbes digest it all quickly and efficiently, and everything is just lush and green. The soil, and those microorganisms, are doing all the work.”

This venture in dairy farming is not his first, Kuhn said, but it is the most enjoyable.

“I was milking cows in a rented barn before and then (had) an auction in 2009 and sold everything,” Kuhn said. “I was a single dad, with little kids, wondering, what was I going to do next? My neighbors there, where I was farming before, had this little barn where they milked 20 cows. I thought, if I could just figure out how to build a barn where I could milk 20 cows, maybe I could raise the kids.”

Eventually Kuhn found where he wanted to build his little barn and met Melissa.

“Here I was with kids and a half-built dairy barn, and I met my wife,” Kuhn said. “She understood my dream, how I wanted to live. Together we finished the barn, and here we are, living that dream.”