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Brothers and sisters farming together can make for many different, interesting and somewhat challenging dynamics.

Dairywoman Jessica Peters works on her family’s 275-cow Jersey dairy in Meadville, Pennsylvania. She regularly keeps Spruce Row Farm’s 5,000-plus social media followers up to speed with straightforward, hold-nothing-back, tell-it-like-it-is farm updates.

I live near Bradford County in Pennsylvania. In 2012, Bradford County ranked ninth in the state and 144th in the nation for milk production. In 2014, Bradford was among the 44 counties nationally that produced 50 percent of the nation’s milk, as reported by the Kansas City Market Administrator’s office.

With low milk prices and tight margins, most dairies might not have much appetite for new investments these days, but that doesn’t mean adoption of new technology has stopped.

There has been much press lately about how our nation’s roads and bridges are badly in need of repairs or replacement. Recent bridge collapses are prime examples of how bad things can get when maintenance and replacements are forgone in the face of financial strains.

There’s nothing more picturesque than a dairy farm with a big red barn on a cobblestone foundation. Many of these barns, referred to as stanchion, tiestall or bank barns, were built decades ago and tell stories of families who have been dairy farming for generations.