Composting Andy – A Percheron Gelding

[near horse]

Howie,

It’s sad to hear that your friend got rid of his cows but subsidizing the grain market isn’t how most dairymen want to spend their efforts.

I’ve noticed (even through the classifieds ads mentioned by Erika http://www.leepub.com/classified%20files/samplewebpage) a lot of brokers looking for dairy cows (I assume for resale) as well as others looking for dead and downers for rendering. With milk prices in the toilet and money tight, how are some dairies able to justify adding more cows to their string? Is it just to slow the slide and perhaps weather the storm of low prices?

As I’ve mentioned before, its’ sad to see someone drop out of a business that they have a passion for (my assumption that your Amish friend liked dairying) while the “big guys” that are still going strong could just as well be producing Milk Duds instead of milk. It’s just a business for them.

[dominiquer60]

I know some of the “big guys” in my area, they are real people too, in it for generations, it is their way of life. Most dairies in the NE are not businesses that people start, they are usually something that get handed down and continued by the next generation. I am sure that they are all business minded, they have to be, some are certainly more industrial than others. I am sure that every one of them is loosing money everyday at less than $11/CWD. So many of them send their kids off to places like Cornell that preach, get big or get out, I mean drill it into their heads and test them on this theory. They come home and “save the family farm” by listening to what the big mouths with their corporately sponsored research have to say. It is all about how much labor, acreage, debt a farm has per cow, and those numbers are less the more cows you milk. They teach you that you are not an efficient farmer unless you use BST, silage preservatives, and keep your parlor running around the clock.

It is a sad state of affairs for the people here that care about their land and their cows, and maybe they don’t follow the same practices that many of us subscribe to. They could be more “green” and think outside the box instead of being lead into debt like sheep to slaughter, but despite that I hate to see any of them go under, they are vital to the rural way of life and agricultural infrastructure. I have been in the belly of the land grant, and I used to be an AI technician, I knew many of my dairy neighbors, it just hurts every time I see an ad for an auction or an empty barnyard. What makes it worse is when the land is lost to industry or houses. I am not too ashamed to admit to pulling over and crying at the sight of an 1800’s barn being bulldozed and burnt. I wish that there was more that I could do to help besides writing to representatives and buying local when possible.

Erika

[Carl Russell]

I spoke with my neighbor today. He’s been dairy farming for 30 years, with a very sharp pencil, just a reasonable herd of Jerseys, paid as they went. They will ride this out, but I told him about this discussion, and he said that sometimes the bull calves actually cost him to ship. He also volunteered that he’d probably be smarter to just pop them and compost them, but he has a really hard time justifying the killing, even though he knows the animal is going to be under-utilized. He offered that he would love to see those calves go to an operation raising beef for people who need the quality food, but with limited resources that have to be prioritized for the cows that are keeping the cash flowing, it just can’t be him.

Anyway, back to the calve composting. Seeing as the portion of an animal that is yielded for consumable meat is about 30-40% of the body weight, and seeing as when the animal is sold, all the energy and nutrients in the offal is also lost, I still think that there is a much higher recovery to composting, especially if the value of that meat is near, or below zero dollars.

I am not assigning that value, it is a product of the market. And the market for these animals is in fact not a group of interesting people who want to see the animal raised into a valuable resource and shared with people in need, but multi-national corporations that take advantage of the producers and consumers as they create a homogeneous low cost product with very little nutritive value sold in fast food restaurants. Nothing against ground meat, just the marketing strategy that uses it in this case.

[OldKat]

@near horse 6264 wrote:

Howie,

It’s sad to hear that your friend got rid of his cows but subsidizing the grain market isn’t how most dairymen want to spend their efforts.

I’ve noticed (even through the classifieds ads mentioned by Erika http://www.leepub.com/classified%20files/samplewebpage) a lot of brokers looking for dairy cows (I assume for resale) as well as others looking for dead and downers for rendering. With milk prices in the toilet and money tight, how are some dairies able to justify adding more cows to their string? Is it just to slow the slide and perhaps weather the storm of low prices?

As I’ve mentioned before, its’ sad to see someone drop out of a business that they have a passion for (my assumption that your Amish friend liked dairying) while the “big guys” that are still going strong could just as well be producing Milk Duds instead of milk. It’s just a business for them.

A few years ago I was in Sulphur Springs, Texas an area formerly known for a great number of dairy farms. By the time I was visiting there, about 25 years after my first visit to the area, most of the local dairy farmers had gone out of business. However, there were several foreigners starting up operations there … mostly Dutch people I think.

Then I saw an article in a magazine a year or so later that said the area was experiencing a renewal of sorts in the dairy industry with people that were using a grass based, seasonal approach (milking from September through May, then drying the cows down for the summer) rather that feeding large amounts of concentrates. The main guy they were talking about was not a foreigner, well at least not from overseas … he was from Iowa!

Anyway, he had relocated there to escape the cold winters and had paid his place off in just a few short years; set up his oldest son in a nearby dairy and they were just about paid off on it, too. At the time he had just set up his youngest son, as well. No word on whether the Dutch in the area were using this model or not. He was planning on retiring in just a few years, but already he was taking the summer months off to visit cooler parts of the world. I guess he had someone watching after the cows while he played tourista.

Anyway, interesting to note that some people can take the same set of variables and figure out a completely different outcome.

[OldKat]

@near horse 6173 wrote:

Kudos to you, Robert!!! Killing healthy bull calves is not being a responsible herdsman. And neither is starving them. I really like your community level idea(s). To paraphrase Reagan:eek: “we don’t have a food shortage, we have a food distribution problem.” There are those that make things happen, those that watch things happen and those that wonder what happened.

In another month or so when things start to green up, lots of folks start looking for something to graze. The buyers who come around and buy all the bull calves when prices are good should have to forward contract those purchases so when times are lean, they can’t just walk away and leave the dairyman with kill ’em or starve ’em as the only options. This is another “problem” w/ the agribusiness model. People jump into an ag enterprise when it gets hot, end up flooding the market, drive prices down and then jump back out. Meanwhile, the guys that worked their butts off to build the market barely get a return before the prices drop. I’ve seen it with everything from hay to organic veggies and CSA’s.

This is another “rabbit trail” off the subject of composting, but it is related to near horse’s comments so here goes. In the late 1960’s when there were still large dairy farms in Central Texas (mostly gone now) the same situation was occurring. A guy I came to know later in college was just in early junior high school when he said “This is crazy, there has to be a better way”

He started picking up these Holstein and Holstein cross bull calves for literally a dollar or so each, always under $5.0 per head. He brought them home, castrated them and raised them until they were about 90 to 120 days and then branded them and turned them out on the Fort Hood military reservation. I am not sure if he had nurse cows or how he did this, but he had some sort of system he was using.

Also, he was fortunate in that when Ft Hood was established his family received “animal unit grazing rights” when their land was purchased by Uncle Sam. He knew that several family members were not using their rights so he “leased” their rights from them. When beef prices soared in 1972 or ’73 he sent about 4 or 5 “pots”, or pot belly cattle trailer loads of 1,600 or 1,700 pound steers to the sale barn. These big guys were in some cases 6 or 7 years old. They didn’t command top dollar, but there was a lot of pounds of them. Probably boned out for the hamburger market.

Anyway, he stuck tens of thousands of (1972) dollars in his pocket as a senior in high school. I always told him that college was probably holding him back, he had too good of a head for business to be wasting time with the likes of us!

Not saying this could be repeated, and not everyone has access to free grazing … still he found an underutilized asset (or two) and turned it into something of value. I sure admire people that find ways to do things like that.

[near horse]

Farming is a brutal “business”. A good quote from JFK that puts it into perspective “Farmers are the only businesses that sell wholesale, buy retail and pay the freight both ways.” Not to mention that we often don’t even get to set our own prices.

Bret4207 –

[at the height of winter and when prices for milk replacer are highest./QUOTE]

We feed replacer all year ’round and never see a seasonal shift in price. It’s always too high.

Had to put a mare down this winter. I drug her out in the back pasture and have been killing coyotes off her. I don’t know about the rest of the folks here but I’ll be darned if I’m going to sacrifice lambs, sheep, calves and small game to the coyotes if I can kill them off. That may not be PC for some of the people here but I intend to shoot or trap every one I can find.

1) You guys must have some pretty large coyotes in NY to kill calves. We have plenty around here and never have lost a calf to one. Feral dogs, yes. Coyotes, no.

2) You’re wasting your time trying to eliminate coyotes in your area. They are density-dependent breeders. Litter size increases at lower population levels. And hardly worth the cost of bullets.

Erika and others – it seems that aren’t many options to choose from in the agricultural business world.

If you want to be in the “game”, you have little option but follow the “rules” which do say “get big or get out” because they get price breaks based on scale. The other choice is foresake the “game” and then you don’t have to follow the rules. Unfortunately, if you’ve been in the game for awhile, it’s hard if not impossible to get out of it.

An example of a big dairy here – feeds 25 tons of cull onions per day to dry cows and heifers as part (~10%) of the ration. This guy is from a historical dairy family but sees this as THE way to stay in the game. But it’s not anything close to what his predecessors would call dairying.

Carl – how much do you guys pay for calf carcasses and offal for composting? I imagine you pay nothing. So then, the market value of the calf carcass is also $0. I know that you can possibly offset some fertilizer costs but that is pretty miniscule.

[Robert MoonShadow]

Geoff ~ There’s one sure way to get rid of coyotes in central/northern Idaho: wait ’til the wolves get there! We had a bluetongue outbreak here that killed off an estimimated 60,000 whitetail deer (the muledeer and elk weren’t nearly as affected) about 6 years ago that led to an exposion of coyotes the following 3 years. Numbers were steady when I got here 2 summers ago… they just did their aerial count of wolves – 27 in 3 packs hereabout… nearest one only 2 miles away on the other side of the Salmon – and no coyotes there, when I could hear them all night 2 summers ago. I think I’d sooner have the coyotes.

[near horse]

Hey,

Bringing us back around to the “Composting Andy” topic of this thread, I found some stuff in my saved “Favorites” that addresses farm composting, including carcasses. So for anyone that’s interested the link is below.

[HTML]http://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/livestock/composting/com02s00.html[/HTML]

[Author]

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