Two-a-Day Milkings Kill Joy of Dairying for Most Families

By Robert Appleman and Kenneth Thomas.

Part-time dairy farming may involve milking a small herd morning and night in addition to holding a full-time job in business or industry. Or replacement females may be raised to be sold as bred dairy replacement heifers, thereby eliminating both the labor and the equipment required in a milking operation. Some youth projects (4-H or FFA) would fit in this category.

Other operators have a cow, or even a few cows, with the family consuming all or most of the milk produced.

A dairy enterprise may be for fun, food or profit. But in any case it requires intensive management, an inflexible daily labor schedule, and a higher per unit capital investment than most other part-time farming enterprises.

Because of the management skills required in keeping even one cow, and the need to milk her twice daily, a dairy cow will seldom be selected as a family fun project.

Since a dairy cow's milk production varies so much during the year (depending on when she last freshened or gave birth to a calf), balancing a family's relatively constant demand for milk and dairy products becomes difficult. Thus, a dairy cow as an economic source of family food may also become questionable.

Therefore, the major focus of this chapter will be on the part-time dairy operation as a source of profit. An alternative program of raising replacement stock for others is also discussed.

When considering the dairy cow for profit, you need to realize that a reasonable level of production must be achieved just to cover feed and other operating expenses. Such levels of production per cow usually require management skills normally beyond the abilities of younger family members. In addition, part-time farmers face the further dilemma that the dairy cow is very demanding of their scarcest resource labor.

Dairy farms can be labor efficient, but this usually requires a size operation beyond the desires and capability of most part-time farmers. The comparative advantages and problems with part-time dairying are outlined in the table.

Breed Selection

The most important consideration in choosing a breed of dairy cattle to establish a dairy farm is the present and future market situation. Most areas favor breeds that produce the largest volume of milk. This undoubtedly explains why 80 to 85 percent of the dairy cattle are Holsteins. There are regions, however, where special milk markets have been developed and other breeds, especially Jersey and Guernsey, are common.

Other factors to consider include:

Personal preference. What breed have other members of the family been associated with?

Resale or salvage value. Larger breed animals are usually worth more when their useful life as milk producers is ended.

Suitability for meat. Half the calves are males. The surplus calves from larger breeds are generally considered superior meat producers, although tenderness and taste evaluations of meat from the smaller breeds have been outstanding.

Temperament. When young family members must handle cows, consider this factor: Holsteins are generally superior in this trait but all breeds are acceptable if cattle are handled with gentleness.

Calving difficulty. The Jersey breed has fewer problems with difficult calvings.

Dairy farming seldom is a good enterprise for the part-time farmer unless he has an abundance of family labor. Labor requirements can be reduced some with mechanization, but small herds normally operated by part-time farmers seldom justify the expense of much mechanization beyond installing a milking machine and bulk milk cooler. Even then, to keep costs down most part-time dairymen should be adept at purchasing good used equipment.

The approximate number of cows and replacement females that can be maintained by a part-time dairyman are illustrated in a table. A typical dairy herd consists of 55 percent cows (85% in milk), 25 percent heifers over 10 months old, 12 percent heifers from 6 weeks to 10 months, and 8 percent calves

up to 6 weeks of age.