Barns & Equipment

The July 19, 2021, issue of Progressive Dairycontained an article titled “Robot repairs: The solution or the problem?” The author, Ian Gallacher, brought up many good points from a producer’s perspective.

Situation No. 1

Your brother lends you his 1-year-old ¾-ton diesel pickup truck to use for a few weeks while he’s on vacation. You are considering buying one, so you welcome the opportunity for the extended “test drive.”

Those large flocks of birds on your dairy farm are not only a nuisance; they are affecting your bottom line.

Dairyman Evan Hillan farms with his parents, Eric and Carol Hillan, in northwest Wisconsin. Their farm, Rusk Rose Holsteins, is in expansion mode – but like many other dairies, they are also facing a labor shortage.

Think about a world where you didn’t have to worry about rising energy prices and the negative impact they have on your farm income – a world where you can fulfill your own energy needs.

Especially in northern America, a long tradition has been to keep calves in individual outdoor hutches or to keep them in pens in a calf barn. It is an easy system to instruct employees and to observe calves. You see every time if a calf comes to drink milk, and calf health is easier to maintain when young animals are separated from each other. Due to the increase of automatic calf feeding systems, interest in group housing has also increased. Pressure from consumers to see calves raised in groups is also at play. How can we transition from single housing to group housing?