Barns & Equipment

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?

Please don’t take the title personally. One of the things I despised the most on the farm was a lying fuel gauge.

Five years ago, when you drove into an ag dealer lot you could hardly turn a car around (let alone a truck and trailer) due to the amount of inventory. It was 2016, 48 months after the 2012 Midwest drought.