Persistence pays off

BRANDON, Wis. — Over the last 12 years, Seth and Jacqueline Huizenga have endured the bad and savored the good as they build a farm they can be proud of. From a battle with stray voltage that nearly cost them the cows to learning to grow different forages to feed them, the Huizengas have persisted in their quest.

“We always put a lot of emphasis on taking care of the cows, giving them an extremely comfortable environment and good-quality feed,” Seth Huizenga said. “They give a lot of milk.”

The first-generation dairy farmer spoke Sept. 30 as part of the Dairy Forage Seminars at World Dairy Expo in Madison, sharing his challenges and triumphs of starting a dairy farm.

The Huizengas and their children — Rosalie, Lindsey, Jocelyn and Liam — milk 130 cows and farm 200 acres at Huizenga Family Dairy near Brandon. Cows are milked twice a day in a swing-12 parlor.

Healthy soil, healthy crops and healthy cattle are intertwined principles underlining present-day success at Huizenga Family Dairy. Producing high-quality feed is a focus for Huizenga, who won second place for cereal forage and fourth place for alfalfa haylage in this year’s World Forage Analysis Superbowl at WDE.

Huizenga’s parents did not dairy farm, but he said he learned a lot about forage quality while working on his grandpa’s farm.

“If your forage quality was bad, you had to shovel out a lot of bad feed,” he said. “In winter, I remember carrying out stemmy hay the cows didn’t eat.”

In 2014, the Huizengas purchased a farm of their own and bought his grandpa’s herd to fill the barn. 

“The barn was junk, and the stalls were junk, but it was how we got our foot in the door,” Huizenga said.

Jacqueline was born and raised in the Netherlands. Her family moved to the U.S. in 2006 to start their own dairy, and it is her Dutch roots that drive management practices at the Huizenga farm.

Numerous visits to Jacqueline’s homeland have given Huizenga insight into their way of farming as he strives to be Dutch-efficient. After each trip, the Huizengas returned home invigorated with new ideas to keep their farm profitable, including how to implement grass in lieu of other forages.

“One huge advantage of being a first-generation farm is that we don’t have Grandpa and Dad standing above us saying, ‘Don’t do this, don’t try that; this is how we do it,’” Huizenga said. “We try all kinds of things. We have one field we rent that’s way in the back so we can try new formulas without neighbors saying, ‘What is that crazy kid doing now? What kind of cover crop is he going to feed his cows this year?’”

When they started out, the Huizengas milked 70-75 cows and averaged 85 pounds of milk per cow per day.

“We were getting a fair amount of milk for our facilities and had enough cash flow to make improvements,” Huizenga said. “In 2017, we did some things we thought would be good but turned out to be very bad.”

  They knocked down a few silos and recycled them into a walkway for cows to easily access pasture.

 “We’re pretty sure that caused stray voltage on our farm,” Huizenga said. “After that, the tables really turned. Things got tight.”

Later that year, Huizenga’s eyes were opened to a new way of feeding his cows when they visited Dutch friends in northern Wisconsin who were growing and harvesting grass.     

“That really flipped on the switch in my mind of forage quality and not being stuck in a traditional corn silage and alfalfa diet,” Huizenga said. “There are other ways to make milk besides these two ingredients.”

The year 2018 marked the last time Huizenga would plant alfalfa for a while.

“It was a good decision for us,” he said. “That year, things really started to go downhill because of stray voltage. Production was almost half of what it was when we started. When you have a bad milk price and half of production, things go bad quickly. We lived on milk and eggs for a couple of years.”

Huizenga decided to start planting Italian rye grass.

“It was a poor man’s way of trying to feed green to my cows,” Huizenga said. “I could chop a green feed wagon full of Italian rye grass, and by morning, 65 cows had it cleaned out.”

During that time, he cut back the total mixed ration by 50%.

“There wasn’t any production there anyway, but the cows didn’t lose any production either,” Huizenga said. “They looked somewhat healthier.”

Huizenga also planted Yield Max from Byron Seeds — a summer annual mix.

“I really love that mix,” he said. “That’s some of the best feed. I made a couple of crops of Italian rye grass and was excited because one sample was 200-plus relative feed quality. It was a little scary going into winter with no corn silage, but I was pretty confident after I saw the cows doing well.”

 He also fed round bales of sorghum mix.

“That sorghum feed smelled like candy,” Huizenga said. “It was great stuff. The RFQ was better than third-crop haylage.”

Meanwhile, the Huizengas continued to suffer the effects of stray voltage.

“Towards the end, the cows didn’t look good,” Huizenga said. “It was bad, it was rough. We had to stretch the little bit of milk check that we had.”

One morning, everything came to a boiling point for the couple. Jacqueline made a call to the trucking company to pick up the herd.

“We gave up,” Huizenga said. “We were physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially done. Something that we worked so hard for, and it was done. We didn’t know what was next. It was just a hopeless feeling.”

Fortunately, a chance encounter changed the Huizengas’ plans before the cull truck arrived.  A farmer north of Brandon stopped to ask if they wanted to rent his buildings — on the very farm they had admired for years.

Instead of selling the herd, they relocated the cows to the farm, which included a 135-stall sand-bedded freestall barn. In three months, production rose from 50 pounds of milk per cow per day back up to 85 pounds.

“We felt so accomplished after that, knowing that we weren’t crappy farmers,” Huizenga said. “We were doing things to the best of our ability, but there had been something out of our control hurting us. The cows were now comfortable and happy, and production was there to match.”

They removed corn silage from the menu temporarily and instead fed baleage and a lot of sorghum and Italian rye grass baleage. In 2022, Huizenga moved away from baleage and took an interest in growing different grasses after seeing the benefits of Italian rye grass.

“The cows were doing well on rye grass,” he said. “They were healthy, full of milk, and breeding back well.”

In 2024, Huizenga entered his first World Forage Analysis Superbowl with an Italian rye grass that had an RFQ score of 230.

“It was great feed,” he said. “The cows’ coats were shinier. We had better overall cow health when we switched from alfalfa to feeding more grass.”

Huizenga said almost zero health alerts come through on his CowManager system now. He also noticed that rumination time is higher on grass at 9.5-10 hours per day compared to 8.5 hours per day on alfalfa.

“Digestibility of my grasses and cereal forages is so much higher,” he said. “Our cows are eating less and milking the same, if not better. I hope to feed more grass in the future.”