A Day Dairy Farming in Wisconsin

[Music] rural heritage on rfd-tv is brought to you by rural heritage magazine a bimonthly magazine featuring articles about farming and logging with draft animal power small-scale diversified family farming in homesteading and other aspects of our rich rural heritage rural heritage magazine borrowing from yesterday to do the work of today for subscription information please call three one nine three six two three zero two seven or order online at wwlp.com if you've been watching rural heritage and rfd-tv or reading our magazine for very long you've gotten to know the Julian family of Medford Wisconsin by a lot of people's measure Jason and Katrina are living the mythical dream they're their own bosses doing what they like to do growing much of their own food working outside side-by-side with one another and their three boys they make their own schedules and are in control of their future well some of that myth is true they do work together as a family they grow their own food in their large well tended Gardens butcher their own beef boil maple syrup tapped from their own trees and consume butter yogurt cheese and milk from their own cows but the rest of the myth is misleading while they like to do what they do most days they work very hard at it yet despite their hard work careful planning and creative frugality too often that hard work is not enough milk prices are now at a near all-time low in 2014 the average price for a hundred pounds of milk was twenty three dollars and sixteen cents so far this year the price is somewhere closer to fourteen dollars those prices are too low for most traditional family dairy farmers to break even much less make a profit 500 dairy farms went out of business in 2017 when I was a kid growing up in southern Wisconsin I was always impressed with how hard dairy farmer families worked all day every day I was reminded of that as I spent a day at the Julian farm starting at 4:45 a.m. when Jason and Katrina prepared to go out and start their day Jason's day started with him unable to find the headlamp he relies on to navigate the farm in the dark early morning hours I would hear one more time be frightfully fun I don't know where'd you hide it oh good right where you put it right here twenty minutes I marked my brain they'll be working unless you go outside and find a crisis then you're wide awake you no doubt the first thing Jason does when he gets outside is check the detached wood-burning furnace which heats much of their home the water in the house and the water used to run clean the dairy equipment have to do much this morning it just didn't sit and simmer it all night usually you know you got a better coal 31 degrees next Jason goes to the barn in the paddocks to check on the horses while Katrina heads to the parlor to get ready for the morning milking I don't really get it five dark blobs coming at ya that nobody's are you doing Hannah you worked hard yesterday Jason opens up their new cow barn and shovels feed leftover from the previous night's feeding so the cows can get at it this is another time to watch for Heat anybody that doesn't come running to feed why come on girdle next Katrina works in the parlor readying the milking equipment while Jason begins hurting the dairy cows torture [Applause] then in the mornings you know the boys come out and Jason's he's mixing feed with the boys and then like tonight I know this group needs a couple bales so he'll do that during milking a lot of chores get done during milking so I'm milking and everyone else is doing everything else while Katrina begins milking the cows Jason uses the skid steer to scrape the aisle by the head loggers [Music] [Music] the plumber carton spreader so I can scrape ball we can haul it all in three four hours you're not having to hitch horses to a spreader every day Saturday looks like bad weather maybe I'll do it on a Thursday on an on logging day try not to work on Sundays all right I'm gonna get Betty I bet it every 12 hours I'll be back [Music] [Music] Jason doesn't use horses to spread sawdust because the activity of spreading the bedding creates too much airborne dust which could cause heaves in the horses [Music] at 5:30 a.m. the Julian boys Aaron Josh and Michael are getting up dressing and heading out to do their own chores they set their own alarm clock Aaron takes over for Jayson driving the Gator put to the ground drive spreader to spread bedding over the manure pack which is done every 12 hours [Music] [Applause] [Applause] Jason then positions the totalmix tration vertical feed mixer in the yard so he can load it with the correct ratio of grain haylage and dry hay the cows that have been milked can now be let out to return to the freshly cleaned and bedded barn and now it's back to the vertical mixer where Aron helps Jason put in the feed while the feed for the milking dairy cows is mixing it's time to feed the young stock [Music] by about 6:30 the feed is mixed and Jason takes it and delivers it to the milking cows now back in their new barn let's say I'm like the head of a pen there's a hundred thousand microbes in a cow's gut so every time you change the ration you have to change the microbe it's the correcta microbes to digest her diet so you don't change her ration if you can help it so the bigger quantities is consistent feed you can make the better you'll do as a dairyman throughout the course of a year so we try to make our first crop in like five six days that's why we mole with the tractor and we rake with a little tractor or the horses and we bail with the horses and we're moving bales of the tractor it's just a madhouse at the end of them five or six days for exhaust to achieve consistency trying to get consistency and people don't people don't realize I think if they're not in the industry when they drive by adjust what's going on at certain times a year if our first crops ten days off because of a rainy stretch we can lose $30,000 in milk that as the sunrise begins to lighten the sky Jason heads to the horse barn to begin the morning chores there [Laughter] by 6:45 most of the morning chores are done the boys head into the house to get ready for a day of school and after-school activities and if it's a Monday Wednesday or Friday Jason begins getting organized to head out to the woods to log with five of his horses you know raising Colts out of mares you don't have to stir up the herd so much like bringing in sale barn horses when Jason is working off the farm Catrina works on the farm cleaning the barn taking care of afternoon milking and handling other tasks when people visit during those times they can get the wrong impression that's so not true you know Jason has does a lot before he goes logging and he has everything ready for me so I just check things and I do book work during the day I do easy stuff and then when Jason comes home from a full day of logging then he's back to doing his own shores so I just want to make sure people don't know that and don't just see a woman outside and think she does it all and that's pretty much true for the entire family nobody does it all but together they get it all done during morning or afternoon chores each individual family member is taking care of a variety of tasks and if an after-school activity prevents a boy from doing his chores the others take care of them it's really something to stand in the midst of all the activity going on simultaneously watching family members working so well together they seem to be doing everything right but that may not be enough the small-scale family dairy farm is being made irrelevant and is being driven out of business and as those small dairies go away our nation will lose some of its independence and as a result some of its security a few pack animals or humans or anybody together even too many people in a hot church on Sunday they're under stress they're not happy so how is putting all of our food in the hands of a few with animals that are packed together and the big terms are gonna argue we take the best care because well yeah you have to because you're never all concrete they're always crowded they do take really good care of you there are professionals at what they do if you knew what it was like to manage 6,000 college it's unbelievable that they can even do it I'm not slamming them I'm just not saying it's a great security idea we don't let our troops march together in a huddle we spread our troops out we don't let the convoys drive together we spread the vehicles out so why isn't it good idea to clump our food together if a bug gets in there it wipes everybody else the consumer is the only hope we have left USDA is not going to help us big cars aren't gonna go away they claim you know so how could a consumer support the small family dairy farm far as dairy a lot of states you can't buy directly from the farmer so then you have to do your research on the creameries you know different but you know if you're in a state that you can't buy dairy directly from the farmer then do your research on the creamery for me is a good way why it's a great way to wait to be outside on the nice days and the plants growing and the animals healthy the kids have been running her own kids yeah because I'm a great worker and then people are useful and they feel good and small farms and there's more small as they bought their stuff in the local town and then it built these churches and they built these schools and they bought the building built hardware stores in the large farms they have a hardware store on the farm they don't go to the Linares drivers a semi comes to them neighbors know each other they were to each other right and nobody was so big that two or three neighbors couldn't get together because he broke his leg and finish up finish up his crop yeah it was smaller more nimble safer and in a lot of ways more efficient but if you only look at certain aspects you can make anything sound or look more efficient and I think that's what we're doing we're looking at things one sided it's it's scary times for America it's not a popular hot-button topics so we never make the news and there's never a million man marches over this hey I'm Stacey Lennon and welcome to my compost pile composting is just the natural recycling of organic material such as dead leaves and kitchen scraps into a sole amendment that is really rich and gardeners call it black gold when you compost your soul it's going to become disease resistant it's gonna retain moisture and it's going to have nutrients that make strong plants so it's really pretty simple and it's something that everybody that has a garden really should be doing I have a composting collector here that I got from Lehman's and they have anything you need composting you need to go and get yours there this is a collector where you are gonna empty it into your composting bin outside every couple of days some people will leave it in their homes for a week some people like me I take it out about every three days because we collect a lot of compost it's all ceramic so it keeps the smell inside and it really doesn't start smelling until something gets out of balance you might add too many fats don't do that but it also has this filter that will also keep it from smelling up your kitchen but if it does just take it out and put it in your composting bin outside if you do have a problem all you need to do is put a little brown in it meaning carbon brown is your carbon and so it's paper strips of paper strips of newspaper just don't use anything with ink because you know it could be toxic I have a lot of green material in mine right now and I'm still adding it I've got banana peels you can put potatoes tops of carrots any of your green leafy things that you know you have the end to it onion peels and I also have this which is my coffee filters and I drink lots of coffee so a lot of people worry about this having chemicals and all but if you're using them for your coffee filters the water is going straight through it so you might as well use it in your composting bin you have brown matter with the coffee filter and you have green with the grinds so let's take this outside and empty it into my posting been my composting pile is not too far away from the house but it's far enough that I don't want to have to come out here every day so my collector friend laymen's is just the right size is awesome my boys built this for me about five years ago our family was growing and our garden was growing so we needed a larger compost pile so I'm going to dump this right on top of my composting bin and we have two sections here and I always recommend people have two sides to a composting pile just because they can use one and then they can actually use the the amended soil from one and then the other one they can be putting their green things in so today I'm putting my green into this pile and I come out here every two or three days like I say and I add more green to it we have plenty of the brown material which is our leaves right now because it's in the middle of winter so we have pine straw and we have leaves the only thing you really need to know about a composting pile is that the ratio is important you need to try to keep your ratio either four to one meaning for green to one brown or three to one which is what I would rather have which is three green meaning live I always think of that in my head as it alive you know like it's green and the brown is dead like dead leaves paper stuff like that if you start having trouble with it smelling add more of the brown to it that's all you have to do turning it's very important because it creates heat and decomposition of the soul so turning it with a fork or you know with whatever you've got even a shovel will do but this we use our tractor in the dead of winter you'll see heat rising from it and you'll know that you have a great working composting bin the other thing is we get a lot of deer so we'll put our deer carcasses in it and they decompose really quickly here in the south and as long as we keep it turning we don't have any problem with rodents and things like that coming just like with your kitchen composter you don't want a lot of fat in it you don't want a lot of fat in your big composting bin the benefits of composting and why everyone should do it is that when you have a garden this is going to be like black gold this is what is black gold you're using all of your scraps you use everything in a compost pile to make nutrient-rich soil that's going to make your plants better it's gonna make you healthier because the plants are gonna be healthier it's gonna keep moisture in the soil and it's gonna help you not to have diseases in your plants you put this compost this black gold in your garden and you're gonna have a super garden it doesn't get any better than that for more info check out Gaiman garden calm and thanks for watching I'm Stacy Lynn this program is available for purchase to order your copy please call three one nine three six two three zero to seven or visit www.meliar.com/mpanel.htm [Music]

Channel: Rural Heritage

Views: 32,882

Rating: 4.8650308 out of 5

Keywords: Rural Heritage magazine, dairy, milking cows, kitchen compost, draft horses, small scale farming, stacy lyn harris

Id: lxluUU3i0XY

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 12 2018