200k Q&A with Dad

hey everyone my name is Eric and I'm the temp generation dairy man and I'm here with my dad Dennis and we're gonna do a Q&A here to celebrate two hundred thousand subscribers just hit it a week or two ago so thank you everyone got a bunch of questions you guys gave us and I wrote a bunch down here guess we'll start off with some easy ones and see if we can answer these so where are you located good all right we are located in southern Pennsylvania Southeast Pennsylvania in Lancaster County and how many cows will be milk we're milking 170 175 is our max and we formed 250 acres a bunch of that is run aground we don't own a whole background next question how did you get started farming let you answer that all right well actually I got this is the farm where I grew up on and Eric actually is the 10th generation dairy farmer here on the 9th my dad was was the 8th so I got I grew up in the farm I learned learned dairy farming from him and and actually I moved away from the farm for a number of years after I graduated from high school I was working away and then I was actually formed on my own for maybe 7 years the other side town here and I had an opportunity to move back home again and in 1998 I brought my herd of cows back when we combined them with my brothers and and so that's how I got back here I've been here ever since then so next question is how old are you I'm 24 years old and I'm actually married I've been married for almost four years now I'm very in 2016 and my wife her name is Emily she doesn't work on the farm at all she is a ER nurse so she works off the farm that's most of her time right now she's a stay-at-home yeah she's I worked at too much right now Oh away from home siblings I have three siblings two sisters that you've seen a couple videos and I do have a brother he was really interested in helping out the farm he's a welder talked a little bit about the history of your farm and generations Eric has a picture of a farm on on his channel of how it looks now and this is actually a picture of probably taken back in that that doesn't say what Dave but I'm guessing maybe in the 70 60 70 s and okay it's it's a lot different a lot of changes were made over the years and some of the barns are gone so yeah here if looking at this picture right here our milking parlors right here right now free some wines out here yeah commodity barn Chloe born a shopper in this area a lot of changes and so yeah I'm the Eric actually it's the 10th generation dairy man I'm the ninth and we bought the farm from my dad the 8th and it goes our farm deed goes the whole way back to William Penn that's the guy that found in Pennsylvania so lose a lot of history here though our ancestors would have moved here from over in Europe way back and maybe in the 1600s yeah so there was four brothers that came across yeah and got a chunk of land it was bigger than this farm but that's original this was part of that land originally so Swiss German ancestors and say yeah that's our roots yeah so I'm not sure how far back the dairy man goes I kind of doubt the first as we're dairy farming they're probably just hunting and gathering or something like that so but yes it is a saturation of our family here yeah there's two there's two farm houses on the on our farm Eric lives in the one and I live in the other and that works really well we can both live here and and operate the farm what is your favorite and least favorite thing about forming Wow I always loved work outside I love working in God's creation I like working with the animals it's just very satisfying to be able to see progression if you have problems or you want to improve something or you want to just continually do a better job to see you making progress and that's satisfying to me it's where I feel God has called me to serve into eleven interesting it's also a great place to raise raise our family turn what's your least er Wow I think Lee's favorite would be not just when it's really really busy it's it's sometimes it's a seven day a week job and it's a can be very tiring times when it's busy especially and sometimes it wears you down after a while physically but also sometimes the stress of it just if the weather's not cooperating and get those crops in in general justice and stress and milk prices that that can be just be wearing wearing long intervals you can't control valuables that you can't control yeah so yes so familiar my favorite thing oh I'd like working outside I like the variety different types of jobs we get to do some consistent chores along with different challenging things every week that come up so it's a good mix I also just like the business side of things just trying to work on how I can increase profits there's always room for improvement and it's it's always changing so it stays interesting my least favorite thing would definitely be dealing with sick animals I would say that's for me that's my least part of the job what are your hobbies so I enjoy playing sports you see me shooting hoops a couple times I like playing basketball I get to get with friends Friday night for the last five eight years we've been playing in an automat Frisbee League so that's one of my favorite things to do and yeah I just like hanging out with friends even get food oh yeah things like that about you yeah well I like the course with my family and my kids and but I enjoyed sports always like sports but softball in particular I played out of that over the years and now I enjoy is going out in nature and like fishing and going for hikes favorite things how many hours of sleep do you get per night well I get about six hours a night usually get a bed around 10:00 and get off the floor to milk but I only know for morning's a week so the other days I'm sleeping a little longer that's really not too bad six or seven hours I would say did you get enough sleep done yeah sometimes yeah it's probably about what I get it about the same thing I guess sometimes less where do we store the milk well we milk those into a four 4,000 gallon tank ready to milk house here and it gets cooled down to 37 degrees within an hour and then it'll be stay there every other day the milk truck comes and picks it up so it goes to the milk plant yeah I should try and do a video showing that I did sure the milk tank a while back but it's been a while yeah you may not see the milk truck too much on videos because he comes at about 1:00 in the morning and every night so we hardly rarely see them I guess I could try and get up on time to show you guys but have me said that's worth it what is the difference between a cow and a heifer so well a cow would be a milking animal heifers before there you have the first half it's a female and then once they have a care for consider I'm a cow yeah there we also called the first lactation sometimes we call them first calf heifers so they would be young cows but generally if you generally when they have their first calf and are milking there would be a cow what do we ever consider a robot milkers oh I I think it's something to be looked at I think some of the robot milkers are really getting good now if if we were in that position where we had to build a barn or something I think it would be something to consider in this area I will say that we have a lot of help good help generally and a lot of young people looking for work that we hire and we have a very good full-time milker right now she does a tremendous job did you consider when you bought the farm no we never really did you had built this new barn in 2004 and he didn't really consider it no yeah I personally nothing you'd rather work with people more than computers if I could choose but if you have trouble finding people it's a good option okay we always enjoy over the years giving people a job and we have any good friendships and relationships built over the years from that so we enjoy that okay here's a good question if we could change your upgrade one thing and it didn't cost us anything what would it be well there's always things that we can improve on I owe some that came to mind would be a half a barn we talked about that and a half of our facilities are getting kind of worn out so yeah if we could build a nice have a barn that Bribie on that list what else do you think oh yeah I'm not sure I could use another tractor a hole in the door but I'm not sure how to eat ours just working fine I'm gonna hold a normal day that Trek is a little bit rough so it's a little hard on the back so mm-hmm I don't think we're investing a new tractor but it'd be nice sometimes we're gonna have to get a new feed mixer and add another skid later that would be something that would be on our list for the future what camera do I use for filming I use a GoPro here seven black and I have a little magnet for it here it is right here so I'm filming with that GoPro right now but no I have it in this case this is a little magnet on the bottom so I'll just hold it fill myself like this or I could stick it to anything metal and I can fit this in my back pocket so it's real handy to carry around how much time does it take to milk and mix feed takes like two and a half three hours of milk and yeah I do most of the mixing right now I most every morning and a lot of the e means it takes about an hour half to two hours to mix depends how fast I'm working but or if there's any extra stuff but yeah generally that's what yo takes a mix and then the heifer at the half performs like 20 minutes to a half hour so if someone asks how much rain do we get per year Keywest about irrigation sometimes so I looked it up our County gets forty three inches a year on average and yeah we're very blessed to have consistent rains throughout the summer we don't that your gate and most years we don't have too much drought stress although we cannot the drought has happened but mostly Eureka trust we're gonna get a decent crop anyway yeah it's very rare in this area to get crop failure this actually last couple of years for wetter than normal and that that gave other other issues but we did have good crops we didn't have this bad some guys out west seem to have it so can't complain alright question for down here in your lifetime of farming what change in the business has improved the day to day efficiency the most well in general the only more automation less physical work and more automation but I would say the single biggest thing was when we built our milking parlor and increased our barn here that was in 2004 we went from a stall barn that we were milking we had a 78 cow stall barn and then we were switching around about 50 cows so we were milking about 9:30 that was very physically taxing a lot of physical work there so that one and then we went to the milking parlor and preached up on that really cut a lot of daily chores out skull barn wasn't very hard on our knees getting up and down a lot and this is much in that way so I would definitely say that was a biggest thing yes if you're not familiar with the tie stop learn a lot of older well there's still a lot of form to have tied stalls but it's basically the cows are inside tied in stalls you can't get big machines in when you go to milk them you gotta carry the milkers in set the milk crop at each cow and I remembered a little bit I was nine years old when we built this barn so I did help a little bit old barn but I wasn't really doing a whole lot of work just kind of having fun I thought it was fun but he thought it was a lot of work I would say for me I'm not right now looking to expand at all I can't say we never will but I think I think a farmer size can compete with a big farm as far as efficiency for me I enjoy the work being able to do a lot of different jobs being able to milk and everything once you get too big you don't really have the time to build up spend five hours milking and then do your other stuff too so you know I kind of like our size come right in the middle yeah I would say we are right in the middle if you get a lot bigger and you're you go to more managing people and less the physical work and our size it's we're managing but yeah and the other thing is an hour right in our area it's it's really hard to when you if you would want to get more cows and you got to think about feed for them and then places to haul the manure and in our areas it's not that easy to get more land that land is very precious and expensive and hard to find sometimes if we have a neighboring farm that was up for rent like 50 acres or something we'd probably take it but I would say no more than that probably we really just need to grow our forages and it doesn't really profit us to grow grain that much I don't think we think it's so important as forage and if we high-quality forages I mean like that's not really a secret that's a one of the keys to have successful dairy and so that's what we try really hard to do or forage isn't something you can just go out and buy a commodity like grain corn B so that's something we have to make sure we can do grow ourselves what times do we milk we milk three times a day so 4:30 in the morning 12:30 in the afternoon and eat it and I eat a lot of farms about two times a day why we milked three down today well we get we we started that years ago and we get about eight percent more milk production and also the cows they don't get as full of milk and so they will not leave the milk out on the beds as much now you have to have the help to do it that's one of the biggest drawbacks but so far we've been able to do that okay so did you ever think about doing something else or have you always wanted to farm so for me ever since I was a kid I wanted to stay on the farm that was kind of something I was wanted to do and I wouldn't say I ever got serious about anything else maybe if an MBA career was an option I like to sit at blood pretty much always one to farm I when I was growing up I didn't really think too much else there was a period I was older that I I would did some church with our church did some mission work and I thought it may be there for a little I would do some more some more of that but I believe this is where I'm supposed to be why do you grow crops and strips so I had to talk about this in the video but I get this question a lot it's just a reduce erosion they come to our along the hill and when you have every other crop in the different fields it helps keep the ground in place so it doesn't run off in the rain a big thing for around here is that our water from our area all ends up in the Chesapeake Bay or the Chesapeake Bay watershed and they they're trying to clean that up so they want farmers to feel like as farming we need to do our part we do a lot of the soil conservation practices and farming practices like new till and so forth we're trying and we do our part it affects us too it gives us good crops but we don't want to have a lot of runoff into the streams do we buy cows no we don't buy cows we sell cows so we we raise all our replacements all the heifers you see me taking care of all the time those are the future cows coming up and yeah we the majority of our cows are herd end up getting sold at the end of their lives we don't have too many that die here a lot of them are sold for beef we saw some for dared to do cows always use the same stall when they come back from milking I think sometimes they do a little bit in the same area but not always no what do you do with the male calves oh the male calves get sold around a week old yeah usually get about $100 for them around a week older we're a little less and they get raised for beef how many hours do you work a day or a week I would say when we're not real busy I don't work more than ten hours most days I would say ten hours five days a week and five to five hours on the weekend one day is probably known a week I don't know yeah and then when it's real busy then it can be a lot more yeah our families are important to us and we want to make sure we are not always working that's kind of how we try to design things do you have employees yeah me and Dad full-time and then Megan you see milking with me in the morning she's our other full-time employee how many part-time employees do we have I might have ten to fifteen part-time so they base the milking team calves and a few other jobs we have a couple guys doing around the farm why did we put in a swing parlor versus a like a double parlor yard milking parlor the mokra swing across a lot of parlors will have numbers on both sides yeah I mean there's it's not there's a lot of good partners just a good job I would say our parlors not the most efficient as far as I love them have the rapid exit so the whole front open up and they can all walk out we're probably not the fastest parlor out there but for our herbicides we're just fine yeah it works good day one probably the biggest bottleneck in our partner is after they exit we have to do a 180-degree turn and go back the way they came and right there it's a kind of a little bottleneck how much does the average cow produced annually and how much work do they produce a day or a farm he would be producing around 16,000 pounds every day yes we're making about that's about 1,800 gallons a day would be coming out of our farm so we pay the bills average cow right now and our farmers is around 29,000 pounds every every year did you ever think you would have 200k subscribers no I definitely did not when I started I thought a thousand was a lot I'm just trying to know so yeah it's no surprise to me for sure there's a question for Dad how do you feel about the filming for YouTube is it a waste of time or do you find it useful well I don't think it's a waste of time I went here to started to do it I just oh oh that's kind of neat I didn't know too much about it and then it just started to grow and first I enjoyed watching the videos I mean every now and then if it takes just a little time setting up the camera when we're trying to do something hit out suppose this down a little bit but but it's really not that it doesn't take that much time and there it was very efficient at it plus it really does helping with our farm cash flow and of course that makes a difference at we once I started making money it it's worth my time to be done at this point so yeah how much do we get for the John Deere 29 40 in the old box spreader that we sold at the action I never did get around to telling you guys that it's the spreader I think was hosting in 2017 600 and tractor was 29 39 was a 2939 why did you choose a slatted floor barn and set up a cheaper solid concrete floor well that was a big that was a big question that we were working through when we were designing thinking about which barn we're gonna build and we felt like it is definitely more expensive to build initially but then you save over the years you're saving a lot of first of all labor costs you're not going there scrape and you don't have a you're not fixing up scraper alley scrapers you're not going in there with the labor of manually scraping it with the tractor and then also throughout the years you're not hauling near as much water as as if you had an outside - goon you would be holding a lot of rainwater yeah we would have to put a pit in anyway - so it does cost money to put Lagoon in so it's not I've heard guys say it's not that big I mean it's more expensive to put it under the barn but yeah the labor savings what formal education do you have I just went to high school I didn't go to college or anything I had an Ag teacher that wanted me to go to take some classes or whatever and I didn't do it but yeah I learned everything I know from work with my dad my uncle Nelson over the years just being able to be here seeing the problems that we're dealing with fixing things and you just learned through experience but we try to take advantage of our educational opportunities like winter in the wintertime we go to Winter Meetings where they'll have speakers about farming and and the other thing is we don't have to be an expert in every area because we have experts and like a nutritionist that just focuses on these things and has an education so I think if we were working with the right people we don't have to be really not honorable in every area necessarily yeah exactly oh you're not or whatever your vet and people that we have around us if you're not can't be afraid to ask questions and learn and keep learning have you ever visited the UK no I've never we've never never been to Europe I did get to do quite a bit of traveling I did some short-term missions back when I was I guess I was around 19 or 20 and I got to go to New Zealand and then spend some time in China and South Korea so I got to see some cool places around the earth but haven't been to Europe or the Middle East or Africa or anything like that you follow other YouTube farmers has how many of them help inspired you to start a channel yeah so I keep up with the youtubers pretty good I used to watch I still watch something but I'm aligning farmer in Walker farms those guys been definitely influence over me and it was cool to see there's having a new crop farming channels them started up kind of the same time I did and then after Cole the corn star he started right around the same time as me so we both kind of grown he's passed me a little bit now but and then sunny farm was another one that uh he grew the same time with me too so yeah I keep oh I'm pretty good like to see what other guys were up to another channel like his farming fixing and fabricating oh yeah another dairy channel set up the kid he's he's a good good guy up in Canada there's more convention too but I how long does a feed mixer last us well we've had for a while yeah this one probably twelve years put a lot of tons of feed through it and started to show somewhere so it's also maybe a touch small floors the next one we thought if you can have is a little bigger that's definitely less to uh get replaced with something at some point how do you split your responsibilities on the farm well I'm more of the cow herdsmen although Eric helps me to tag we kind of work together on that and Eric is responsibility more with the field work yeah well growing up like what Dad was the herdsmen that my uncle was more the crops and maintenance guy so I kind of I work with that I learned the cows would also learn the cropping so I kind of know a little bit of everything but yeah dad I would say you manage the employees a little bit more - yeah I know that and you're the guy that's making more phone calls with communicating with the ordering feed or talking to meeting this guy is parlor maintenance guys and why don't we let the milking cows graze outside the UH the drag cows are with summer out and the heifers bunch of the heifers so we do like in the milk side it is there's some challenges to have cows grazing for sure yeah just this we've always had this doubt dairy where we had more of a confinement off operation and we've been successful with this the issue is you gotta have your you still have to have housing for the cow because it can't be out all year long we have about six months of season plus on the summer it gets too hot out there anyway they want to be inside so I don't know how many months you can really take advantage of grazing and your feeds going to be inconsistent with this type of system we can feed consistently we can milk them three times a day they're right there the cows are healthy and they're happy sometimes we think ideas about maybe have a little exercise lots out outside the free stove arm or the cows could go outing which would be good we haven't exactly figured out how to do that yet but do you see a future in dairy with the local milk prices like yeah absolutely I I think they we definitely have a little milk prices at times we always try to stay positive and ride them out and the price of go out there and I see it as a supply and demand thing I mean there's always gonna be some demand for milk so someone's gonna be able to make money doughnut there's not unlimited amount of people I can make my dairy farm so that's why the the margins are tight you know we talked to our accountant and he says there's guys making good money even in the bad years and then this guy that you aren't so it's there's a opportunity there so advice for someone who wants to get into farming and if you can find out and maybe an older farmer that wants to get out of farming but help a younger guy get started and I would I would suggest you start working for somebody and learning the business and do you own part of the farm or just work for your dad yeah so I started getting into ownership here a few years ago now talking to earning some cows part of the business so it is I'm part under now I was thankful they were well any want to get me into ownership early and start the transition that can be a tough thing for farms so yeah we're trying to plan ahead and start the transition process now yeah we're this has been working out well I mean here Eric has been buying out my brother is uncle share yeah so that's what I'm doing with my my youtube revenues all going straight into that helping me purchase the farms that's kind of what I'm working towards what was your first job on the farm my feet and calves yeah that's what I started doing feeding calves probably around ten years older I mean help helping out with stuff earlier but I I remember I got up before school probably started looking forward to fifth grade infect cancer morning up through eighth grade until I had to get up earlier for high school but that was kind of the first job that I got that was my job to take care of yeah Eric Oh wanted to help in the farm we didn't have to twist his arm he would we have a story when he was in school he kept looking out this the windows of the school at the neighboring farms and he he couldn't concentrate on the school as much because he was watching the neighboring farmers so he always had that in his blood so the question for dad here at what age did you trust Eric with everything I'm not sure about what that's not really a one-time thing you just keep kind of growing into that responsibility responsibility I I will say I mean he always like to drive tractor and and he was you know driving big tractors a pretty young age and doing a great job so we he was always pretty steady with that and so we trusted him out with the tractors and yeah and I'll say now when I go on vacation I don't worry about anything I can get a take off and it's in good hands and that's a good feeling what is the most challenging aspect of buying successful dairy farm well I guess just being consistent I guess it's kind of minutes you can do a good job one day we had a good job the next day and the next year and not worry about the variables you can't control and focus all the things you can't control which there's a lot of opportunities that's one thing I like about dairy farming is just the amount of variables that I think we have we can improve in certain areas like feed quality smoking procedures cow comfort our cropping there's just a lot of areas that there's always room for improvement heifer is a young stock and yeah I don't know where our key successes but um I also want to say that some people in the comments say how I must be proud of my son and I very much am it took took Larry he's very hardworking and took hold and has good ideas and we enjoyed working together very blessed God is the best blessed me and he I was here in the foreman and we want to honor him with God with everything we have well that's all the questions I had a year there was a bunch more but maybe we can do another Q&A sometime yeah appreciate all you guys watching and I got two hundred thousand subscribers I'm gonna try to get to a million I guess that's the that's kind of the next big number so it might be a little while but see if we can get there alright see you guys later

Channel: 10th Generation Dairyman

Views: 224,923

Rating: 4.9781747 out of 5

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Id: S5A7_JeQZ_Q

Length: 29min 14sec (1754 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020