Top Performers: Zack Bushman of Countryside Dairy

How many times a day do you milk, and what is your current herd average, butterfat and protein? We milk three times a day and currently have a 92-pound bulk tank average. Our butterfat test is at 4.2%, and our protein test is 3.4%.

Describe your housing and milking facility. We use a 3-row freestall barn and milk in a swing-10 parlor. We also have a retrofitted building we use for our 2-year-old group, and we use sand for bedding in all the freestall barns.

Who is part of your farm team, and what are their roles? My wife, Rachael, and I work together on the farm with our kids. We also have an employee who helps us. He does a little bit of everything around here, but mainly milking.

What is your herd health program? We do herd health once a month. Everything we have gets Vira Shield 6+L5 vaccine at dry off. We also use CowManager for activity monitoring to look for health alerts and heat activity.

What does your dry cow and transition program consist of? Our dry period is 60 days. Right now, dry cows are housed in an open lot, bedded outside. During the summer, they’ll have access to pasture. They eat a total mixed ration out of a J-bunk. The TMR consists of straw, corn silage and a mineral mix. If we see active calving, we’ll bring them to a pen inside one of the barns. After calving, we’ll move them into our group of 2-year-olds. We milk in three groups, and that group is specifically designed to make things a little easier for our younger cows.

What is the composition of your ration, and how has that changed in recent years? Our ration sits at 68 pounds of corn silage, 16 pounds of haylage, 4.7 pounds of roasted beans, 8.5 pounds of corn gluten, 15 pounds of ground corn and 6.5 pounds of my lactating mix. Our biggest change has been going from organic to conventional. We switched in January 2025 and switched nutritionists that March. In my opinion, gut health has been really good. We also started feeding high oleic soybeans. Adding that and finer ground corn at the same time, we saw a 6-pound increase in milk and a bump in butterfat.

Tell us about the forages you plant and detail your harvest strategies. We plant corn and alfalfa. We planted a 62-52 seed starch this year, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. We bag mostly everything. This year, we piled some corn silage and used a haylage bag as a bunker wall on one side. It’s helped prevent waste and saved us space in our feed area.

What is your average somatic cell count, and how does that affect your production? In November, we averaged 128,000 for the month. I rarely have to treat anything for mastitis. Milk from the two highest cell count cows we have, we put in a bucket for calf milk to help keep that number down.

What change has created the biggest improvement in your herd average? Changing our ration when we switched nutritionists helped with our herd average. We added more corn silage to our ration, and that has helped us see a big change in our average.

What technology do you use to monitor your herd? We have used CowManager for the last four years. It’s been really huge for us to spot potential health risks and see heat activity. I didn’t use synchronizing shots when we were organic and still do not since we switched to conventional. The CowManager helps us stay informed about the best time to breed according to the cows themselves; it has been something that has worked really well for us.

What is your breeding program, and what role does genetics play in your production level? We get semen from ABS Global. The guy we work with is really good to work with. We have gotten some good bulls. We are starting to see more of that in the 2-year-old group we have coming in now; they are really showing it. It also depends on the cow. In our 2-year-olds, we will breed starting at 60-70 days, but if we have an older cow who is producing well, we will wait until 80-90 days to start breeding. Genetics is pretty huge in production; if you don’t have good genetics, cows are not going to produce well. In the last 4-5 years, we’ve been using AAA mating for the cows, and that has made a difference.

List three management strategies that have helped you attain your production and component level. The biggest thing is consistency. Cows like consistency, and if you’re consistent with them, they perform. Something we have been doing that has helped has been milking three times a day with my wife, and I do the night milking. What we started doing is dumping off a partial batch of feed at the 11:30-midnight range after we get done with the night milking. It gives them some fresh feed for those hours of the day when I’m not there to push up feed for them. What I always come back to is being as consistent as possible. Cows love that consistency, and it makes things flow a little easier on the farm when you and who you work with are consistent in what they do and how they do it.

Tell us about your farm and your plans for the dairy in the next year. I bought this farm in November 2016 from John Palmer. I grew up on an organic dairy farm about 25 miles away from here, where I farmed with my dad, who is a fourth-generation farmer there. They milk 200 cows organically and farm about 800 acres. My dad and I still farm some crops together, and even with the distance, we are able to make it work. For the next year, we will continue to try to maximize what we have with our facilities and our cows. We will look for ways to improve little things here and there. We like where we are currently, but we are always looking for ways we can improve.