“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” Charles Dudley Warner, novelist and good friend of Mark Twain, once said.
Steve Strickler and every other farmer would love to do something about it. Drought and heat, in a combination of ways, have made it difficult this summer to make ends meet on the farm, much less turn a profit.
STRICKLER Dairy has 290 cows in its daily milking cycle that give an average of 55 pounds of milk. That’s 15,950 pounds a day and at $18 a hundredweight, daily income is nearly $2,900.
Sounds good until the cost to produce that nearly 8 tons of milk is added to the equation.
“I was talking to a farmer in Missouri this morning about a bull,” Strickler said Wednesday afternoon. “He’s a lot better than I am with a pencil and he figured it was costing $21 for his cows to produce 100 pounds of milk.
“I haven’t figured our costs, but I imagine it’s at least $20 a hundredweight,” Strickler groaned. “We’re losing $2 for every 100 pounds of milk we sell.”
Drought isn’t the problem, he continued in a matter-of-fact discussion of farm economics. “It’s the heat and humidity. That’s hard on cows, just like it is with people.”
A second element that causes dairymen and farmers with livestock woes is the cost of feed grain and forage, pushed to historic high prices by unfavorable growing conditions.
“Corn is headed to $10 a bushel and soybeans are $16,” he said. “I just talked with Doug (his brother, a row crop farmer) about when his beans might be stressed enough so they could be baled.
“You grind up soybean hay and it makes pretty good feed, with a lot of protein.
“We put up twice as much corn silage this summer as we usually do because the alfalfa was short, but we’re going to have to watch feeding it because of high nitrate levels,” Strickler said, which means corn – with its price jumping almost daily – will have to be added for a healthy mix.
A LARGE POND Strickler built on Coon Creek’s headwaters, just east of Kentucky Street about 25 years ago and enlarged in recent years, has alleviated concerns about water.
“Harry (Clubine, farm foreman) said we have plenty of water,” Strickler said, which translates to about 100 gallons a day for each cow.
“Milk is 86 percent water, after all,” he noted.
“We process the water and use some of it domestically, as well as for the cows,” Strickler added. “We also have rural water.”
While water on the main farm isn’t a problem, and doesn’t appear that it will be, Strickler recalled heifers kept a mile to the west along Rock Creek suffered from bad water.
“We lost three heifers and it took us a little while to figure out that it was from them drinking water after the creek had stopped running. The water was contaminated with blue-green algae,” he said. “We had a tank of fresh (rural) water, but they wouldn’t leave the shade trees along the creek and drank the bad water.”
Once the problem was found, the heifers were brought to the main farm and in a matter of days “looked like different animals, having good water to drink.”
Others farmers have had problems, including deaths, with livestock drinking foul water in creeks and ponds, many nearly dry after more than two months of no rain.
“WHEN YOU have high feed cost, transportation costs pushed up by high fuel costs and utility costs, it’s not a healthy equation” for making money milking cows, Strickler said.
“I’ve a friend in Hillsboro, a good dairyman, who told me he was losing $30,000 a month milking 300 cows,” he said. “He has $100,000 worth of corn in bins, but he’s decided to sell his cows rather than feed the corn and lose more money.”
Clubine is cutting corners anywhere he can to save money and keep profitable figures straying too far from the milk parlor.
“I haven’t told you yet that I’ve been talking to the people at Louisburg about apple cores,” from the cider mill, Clubine told Strickler.
“We’re even feeding straw,” Strickler chimed in.
“There’s going to a lot of crappy hay fed this year with farmers looking wherever they can to find forage,” he continued. “They’re baling grass from the highway rights of way. It’s going to have cans and cigarette butts, who knows what else, in it. There’s going to be hardware in cows this fall and winter.
“But, you’re going to have to have something to feed.”
Aflatoxin, a poisonous product of corn ear fungus that surfaces in plants stressed by heat and drought, is another concern, but one that Strickler said was controlled by vendors, such as Piqua Co-op with whole grain and distiller’s grain from an ethanol plant in Craig, Mo.
“They test every load, so we don’t worry about it,” he said.
Aflatoxin can taint milk and be deadly for livestock.
CORN ISN’T the only high-priced feed Strickler cows eat to produce milk.
“We have a contract through September for wet distiller’s grain at $92 a ton,” Clubine said. “My broker told me the next contract, to run through March, will be at least $148 a ton, maybe higher.”
Distiller’s grain is a corn-based byproduct of ethanol plants, essentially mash that’s left after ethanol is produced.
“We’re paying $325 a ton for soy hulls (soybean processing residue) and not too many years ago the price was $45 a ton,” he noted. “Go back 20 years ago and they were giving soy hulls away if you’d haul them.”
Alfalfa is prime forage for dairy stock, but it has just about been priced out of the market, “if you can find it,” Strickler said. “The price right now is $250 a ton and I’ve heard of some for $300 a ton.”
The mix of dry feed varies by whatever is available, but a cow’s appetite remains constant.
“They eat 50 pounds of dry feed a day and drink 100 gallons of water,” Clubine said, no matter what the cost or how much milk fetches.
STRICKLER doesn’t depend completely on milk production for the dairy’s bottom line.
He also is, literally, in the bull market and sells other stock, but milk drawn daily from the cows is the farm’s bread and butter. With costs rising and milk prices not keeping pace, the bread is getting mighty thin and lightly buttered.
