dairy setups

a few days someone posted on here about dairy setups around here it seems most dairy set ups are still in the 50 to 100 head
some of the older guys are going to robots the younger ones or sons coming back to farm with parents are going to mega dairy size.
those of 50-100 cow size are planing on milking cows for a few more years and don't want to spend a bunch of money to go beyond that time.

Big or small , all dairy farms have one thing in common. There is no guarantee That you will get enough money for your milk to cover your cost. Or that there will be a market for the milk you have produced. Economy of scale only goes so far, if cost of production out strip the price the farmer receives for his milk, big or small you lose money. How long you can lose money sending out milk at a loss, depends on how much you owe,and how much depend you wish to take on , while waiting for the price to come back. The old phrase "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" comes to play here. If you have several off shore workers milking cows at your mega dairy, they still need to be paid. But if it is just you and your wife,one of you can take an off farm job,scale back, and hunker down till the price comes back . Nothing new here,cheap food is just a way for governments to buy votes, and as long as governments around the world are giving farmers money to over produce food, be it milk ,corn , hogs ,whatever, they will distort the true price . What is a farmer to do ? Try to do what will work best for you in the short term to say in the black. If that means milking 50-100 cows in a out dated tie barn, and still be profitable ,so be it. Moderen facilites do not guarentte a profit. Bruce

Behind every successful farmer is a wife working in town. Milk used to be subsidized in Wisconsin. The price would never fall below a certain amount. Usually around $15.00/100lbs.. When the subsidies were done away with a lot of farmers went bust after the first few drops in price below $15.00. There for awhile milk prices took some pretty good swings, but now it seems to have stabilized.

I live in what used to be predominantly a dairy farming are so I thought I would weigh in here. In the last 20 years I have seen the number of dairies in my small area decrease from around 25 smaller farms(100 cows or less) to around a dozen or so left in the biz. Lots of guys updated to small parlor a and free stalls back in the 80s but most kept the stall barns and added a free stall area and simply switch cows. I milked for a guy in high school who had 80 cows in a 53 tie stall barn (the from half was 26 stalls and the back half was 27) and we would start milking in the back of the barn and once we got the last unit to the front, one guy would go and chase cows out of all the stalls in the back and move some gates and chase in 27 more cows, get them in stalls, tie them, and scrape the walks then come help finish milking. Then the cows needed fed, manure needed scraped, the gutters needed run out, then the heifers and dry cows needed fed on another farm. It took 3-4 men 3 hrs twice a day to milk and feed cows. My point to all this is milking cows in a tie stall barn is very labor intensive and that is one of he leading factors that has led to the demise of the 50-100 cow dairy in this area. All the guys who have updated to parlors and free stalls are still in it.

milk price swings are getting more violent. $26/100 pounds last year. $16/100 this year. And on the town job thing, no. My family dairy has 6 owner families who's sole income is the farm.

(quoted from post at 13:49:12 07/29/15)
Behind every successful farmer is a wife working in town. Milk used to be subsidized in Wisconsin. The price would never fall below a certain amount. Usually around $15.00/100lbs.. When the subsidies were done away with a lot of farmers went bust after the first few drops in price below $15.00. There for awhile milk prices took some pretty good swings, but now it seems to have stabilized.

Click to expand...

When was that? Been in the dairy biz a long time and I don't recall ever seeing a guarantee of 15 bucks.
There is a MILC program nationwide that kicks in when the Boston price falls below 16.94 (with some differences based on feed costs)but the program only provides for 45% of the difference and that's limited to the number of pounds it will cover.

Stabilized? mailbox prices are down almost 9 bucks from last year....

(quoted from post at 01:37:36 07/30/15)

(quoted from post at 13:49:12 07/29/15)
Behind every successful farmer is a wife working in town. Milk used to be subsidized in Wisconsin. The price would never fall below a certain amount. Usually around $15.00/100lbs.. When the subsidies were done away with a lot of farmers went bust after the first few drops in price below $15.00. There for awhile milk prices took some pretty good swings, but now it seems to have stabilized.

Click to expand...

When was that? Been in the dairy biz a long time and I don't recall ever seeing a guarantee of 15 bucks.
There is a MILC program nationwide that kicks in when the Boston price falls below 16.94 (with some differences based on feed costs)but the program only provides for 45% of the difference and that's limited to the number of pounds it will cover.

Stabilized? mailbox prices are down almost 9 bucks from last year....

Click to expand...

http://www.jsonline.com/news/statep...nge-in-subsidy-program-ed63rgj-162536416.html

I milked for almost thity years with a herd of 30 -35 cows and made a good living doing so. Bought the cows and machinery from my Dad for the going rate at the time , leased the facilities for 5 years before buying the land again at close to market price, while paying interest on a Farm Credit loan at 16 percent initially. Bought more land and quota machinery etc. and was debt free in 25 years. Then my health failed and I had to let the cows go. The key to staying in busines is to have good contol over your cost of production. In my last year of milking (2005) feed costs were less than 28 cents per litre, leaving the rest (70 cents per liter was what I received for the milk) to service debt and live from. I am still operating the same tractors and equipment I had when milking; there is nothing newer here than 15 years old, and We put three kids through university took some family vacations and had no off farm income. While the scenario may be somewhat different today, if you live a moderate lifestyle, you do not need a large farm to make a living. I have difficulty grasping how those hundreds of cows herds can barely sustain a family.

Ben

Nothing in that article matches anything you posted. You said subsidies had stopped some time ago and when milk dropped below 15 a lot of farmers got out. That article is about the end of MILC in the 2014 farm bill. Which is pretty recent.

Want to see a mega dairy set up check out Fair Oaks dairy in Northern Indiana.
fair oaks