Guest Blog

Every day, dairy farmers go to great lengths to care for their cows. In this series from Dairy MAX, Anita van der Laan of Van der Laan Dairy in Oklahoma shares her story about caring for a premature calf through a snakebite. Can you relate?

Allison was born to a first-time mom on a Saturday morning – about five weeks early. No hair – in February.

Sitting in our combine, harvesting this year’s corn crop, gives me lots of time to think. On a recent pass back and forth down the corn rows, I started thinking about what the rest of my family was doing at that very moment.

If there’s anything that a dairy mama knows, it’s stress. We never have enough hours in the day; sometimes there’s not enough month left at the end of the money. The kids are crying; the cows are bellering; the calves need fed; and the pig is out. (Well, maybe that last one only happens at my house.)

The amount of positive information coming out about milkfat is very exciting. It turns out we knew very little about fat and how it positively affects our bodies. The amount of beneficial bioactive components in milkfat may lead us to someday be proclaiming that milkfat is definitely milk’s healthiest component.

If your dairy operation is like most, leadership is probably not a common topic of conversation at your farm meetings or around the kitchen table. It may seem that things just happen on the farm: Cows are milked, crops are harvested, decisions are made and, before we know it, another year is behind us.

Did you know that if you go to YouTube and search the word “dairy,” the first video that comes up is one titled, “Dairy is Scary”? And if you click, you can watch a video telling you why you shouldn’t drink milk.