Top Performers - Brian and Jill Nelson of Olmar Farms

How many times a day do you milk, and what is your current herd average, butterfat and protein?  We milk twice a day. Our March 2025 rolling herd average was 30,318 pounds of milk, 1,287 pounds of butterfat and 978 pounds of protein, with tests of 4.2% butterfat and 3.2% protein.

Describe your housing and milking facility. We have a tunnel-ventilated freestall barn and a double-8 herringbone parlor that was built in 2010. Everything was designed for the utmost in cow comfort and ease of handling cows alone. The stalls are head-to-head, with an 18-foot span and 52-inch width. We use sand bedding and have a high-quality air curtain that keeps the barn from freezing in the winter. The ceiling is insulated to help maintain a more constant temperature and help reduce variations in feed intake during the hottest and coldest days. We also have sprinklers. Our gates and headlocks were designed to enable one person to move cows from pen to pen if needed.

Who is part of your farm team, and what are their roles? We have a great team that works well together. My husband, Brian, is the feeder and crop guy. He also keeps everything in working order. I manage the dairy side of things. We have two trainees from Japan who stay with us for a year. They not only learn the tasks of doing chores, but also learn treatment protocols and other skills they will need to take a leadership role in their jobs back in Japan. We also have 2-3 other part-time employees to help with chores. Most often, they are high school students or people looking to pick up a little extra work.

What is your herd health program? We installed CowManager about four years ago. At that time, we went to herd health checks every three weeks. We vaccinate newborns with Calf-Guard and Nasalgen 3-PMH. Older calves and pre-breeding heifers get Bovi-Shield Gold FP 5 L5 and Ultrabac 7. We give ScourGuard 4KC and Ultrabac 7 to dry cows and booster Bovi-shield to milking cows pre-breeding. The entire herd gets EndoVac three times per year.

What does your dry cow and transition program consist of? We have a one-group dry period that is balanced more for the pre-fresh group. Our dry period is 45 days. Cows confirmed with twins or that have had high somatic cell count are given a 60-day dry period. The ration is wheat straw and corn silage balanced for dietary cation-anion difference. We try to do just-in-time movement to the calving pen since we only have two smaller than optimal pens for calving. Post calving, they go into a pack pen in the milking barn until they clean and have at least two milkings. Then they go into the fresh pen. Fresh heifers and multi-lactation cows are mixed together. Our fresh heifers are well-grown and we have no issues with mixing them. The pre-fresh heifers are housed in our old freestall barn and get the same ration as the dry cows.

What is the composition of your ration, and how has that changed in recent years? We have a small fresh group, a high group and a late lactation group. The high group ration is 50% forage and the other groups are high forage. We feed brown midrib and, more recently, Enogen corn silage. Last year, we started feeding cover crops and will continue to explore that as a cost-saving and soil preservation strategy. We have a few pounds of dry hay, corn silage and haylage diet. We balance for amino acids and volatile fatty acids, which have been instrumental in increasing components very quickly. We let the cows tell us what is working and what is not. I’m a big believer in Quality Liquid Feed, which keeps the cows from sorting, among other benefits. We also feed OmniGen and Rumensin. In the past we had a first lactation group, a high group and a small low group. This strategy was OK, but we struggled getting heifers started well. We also ended up with more heavy late lactation cows and felt our feed costs were higher than we wanted. Now we have a small pre-fresh group and a larger high group and low group.

Tell us about the forages you plant and detail your harvest strategies. In a perfect world, we harvest all of our alfalfa as haylage at 67% moisture and maturity to hit 22% protein and 160-170 relative forage quality. But we don’t work in a perfect world. We do our best to maximize quality with a top-performing inoculant from Chr. Hansen. A good inoculant pays for itself in quality feed, reduced shrink and better stability in the feed bunk. For corn silage, we continue to try different strategies to maximize starch content and fiber digestibility. Most recently, we have been alternating rows of BMR and either Enogen or a high-starch variety of corn. We like Enogen for using as the first bag in the fall. The starch is more available with a shorter fermentation versus other types of corn silage. We use bags for nearly all of our forages and do use 1-2 silos as our pad space is limited. Piles are convenient, but for a farm our size, we feel it has more potential for quality issues.

What is your average somatic cell count and how does that affect your production? Our SCC ranges from 85,000-140,000. Keeping udders healthy is critical for maximizing production.

What change has created the biggest improvement in your herd average?  Fixing our stray voltage problem in 2017 and clearing out the damaged cows in the five years after has been huge in quickly increasing our herd average. This is an often-overlooked cause for all types of herd problems. One example of the immediate change we saw in our herd was an 18-pound increase in milk production over the summer months with no increase in dry matter intake. The energy that should have gone into milk production was being used by the cow to stay alive when we had stray voltage. Our RHA had dropped to 25,214 pounds of milk, with 3.8% butterfat and 3.1% protein in 2017 after a 9-year battle with it. It took nearly five years to almost completely turnover our herd to finally have a healthy herd. As a result, our current herd is quite young. We look forward to having more high-producing old cows once again and seeing where our production can go.

What technology do you use to monitor your herd? We use CowManager and closely observe the herd while we work with them. There is still no replacement for a good eye to find those off cows. We do not use a shot program for breeding except on hard breeders. Our voluntary waiting period is dependent on the cow. It can range between 60-10 days in milk. It is hard to dry off cows giving over 90 pounds of milk per day.

What is your breeding program, and what role does genetics play in your production level? For over 80 years our breeding goal at Olmar Farms has been to breed every animal to be high type, high production and long living. If you consistently make every bull selection and mating based on those goals, you will attain a consistent herd that meets those goals. We do not chase the current trait of the day. Instead, I focus on selecting bulls that will make the next generation better. I use all of the tools, including genomics. I don’t look for the highest Total Performance Index and Net Merit Dollars. Instead, I look for bulls who will sire daughters that match up to what the paper says. I insist on proven cow families as I have been burned by using the “hottest” bull and ending up with daughters that just don’t meet our standards to be a mother of our next generation. It’s easy to stack high NM$ on top of high NM$ to boost those numbers, especially by using bulls from shorter generation intervals. If a bull mother has been through a base change, her son’s numbers can be a bit lower for us to use because, on paper, she is at a disadvantage. In our experience, carefully chosen bulls from proven cows outperform daughters of much higher bulls born from 1-2 generations of very young, unproven cows. I really like to see classification scores of Very Good young cows and Excellent old cows in the pedigree. I also look for 2-year-old records over 30,000 pounds with high test in the pedigree. The current bull proof model is known to penalize older genetics even when their daughters prove to be top performers. Most of the bulls we use would fall in the range of 2,800-3,100 TPI.

List three management strategies that have helped you attain your production and component level. There are so many little things that all add up to big things. Forage quality is key to consistent high production. Having an analytical person mix the feed will ensure the cows’ feed is mixed right every time. Cow comfort is important. It may not be feasible to build a new facility, but improved comfort can be attained even in older facilities with some thought. It’s also critical to get the young calves started right. We feed pasteurized whole milk and an accelerated feeding program to get the most growth in the early months of life. We calve at 24 months with well-grown heifers ready to compete in a freestall group with mature cows. We look at herds doing better than us and see what they are doing to meet their goals. Another key thing that has helped us reach our goals is to reach out and ask for help. Sometimes we can get in the way of our own success.

Tell us about your farm and your plans for the dairy in the next year. We are excited to see what this year brings. We will be starting our own creamery where we will make artisan cheese. We hope to have Compass Rose Creamery’s first cheese ready for debut late summer. We are also looking forward to being the showcase herd at the Minnesota State Fair.