Curt Arens / New Holland News Magazine / September-October 2004
Five years ago, brothers Kelly and Kirk Bruns operated the highest producing Jersey dairy herd in Nebraska. Although their B & B Jerseys had a wall full of production plaques to prove their success, Kelly's wife Cindy and Kirk's wife Kristi - like so many farm spouses - worked at off-farm jobs to help make ends meet and their children spent their days with a babysitter.
Success with production wasn't translating into financial stability for the two families. With a dream of making their northeast Nebraska dairy farms pay enough to fully employ their spouses as well as themselves, the Bruns brothers made changes in their operations that most dairymen would call drastic, toward seasonal, grass-based dairying.
With plummeting commodity milk prices and expensive feedstuffs, the brothers challenged themselves to simplify what they were doing.
They began seeding all their row crop ground to grass and forage grazing crops and sold off their top producing Jersey cows - those cows they felt wouldn't be able to maintain health and production when they had to graze for their lunch.
The brothers and their families each run separate herds, but worked together toward a coordinated future. Over a three-year period, Kirk and Kristi and their three children, Kara, Paige and Ben, seeded seventy acres of former row cropland into a mixture of orchard grass, meadow brome, creeping foxtail and red and white clover. Using electric high tensile wire, they divided fields into seventeen paddocks for their 50 milk cows.
Kelly and Cindy and their children, Kali, Cole and Kate, run 86-head on 156 acres of native grass and inter-seeded alfalfa, divided into 22 paddocks. They have pasture and grow grazing and silage crops like forage sorghum on eighty acres around their farmstead.
Bruns' move their cows twice daily to new paddocks, after morning and evening milking. "During the peak growing season in June, July and August, we often move the cows at noon too," Kelly said.
Each paddock is allowed to rest between a month and a half and two months, allowing for regeneration of root structure as well as foliage and recycling of nutrients before the next grazing. They built a watering system with hydrants in alternating paddocks, allowing them to move portable water tanks along with the herds.
Kirk and Kristi graze and sell 400 Jersey and Jersey-cross replacement dairy heifers each year as a way to utilize extra forage. Manure from over-wintering the heifers provides fertilizer for their pastures.
In 1999, Kelly and Cindy built a small, New Zealand-style, open-air milking parlor in the middle of their pasture. To top it off, Kelly and Kirk crossed their beloved Jersey cows with other breeds like Normande to produce cows with a little meat on their bones that would better fit into their grazing system.
And they started drying up their cows so they only had to milk the entire herd seasonally, avoiding Nebraska's bitter winter months. After five years, the great experiment is paying off and new projects are in the works.
Kirk has nearly completed an $80,000 on-farm cheese plant that will convert milk from both brothers' grass-based herds into a healthful product that consumers are hungry for and willing to pay a premium to get. The plan is to process all the milk from both Bruns dairies as well as other grass-based dairies around their part of the state.
The changes in the operation for Kelly and Kirk have been almost philosophical. "We're getting control of our lives again," said Kirk. The families' efforts are changing their positions in the marketplace from being price-takers in commodity markets to price makers through direct relationship marketing of milk and now cheese.
The expansion of the operation and move to seasonal status was not only in response to low profit margins for small dairy farmers, but also to their quest for long-term self-reliance.
Tired of the old days hauling hay and grain to their cows for feed and hauling it all back out of the yards and barns again as manure, they wanted a future where the cows did the work.
"The cows are healthier and fitter on grass," Kirk said. "We've just about eliminated milk fever and feet and leg problems."
From the road, Kelly and Cindy's open air milking parlor looks like a little metal shed. But their low cost alternative to building a new high-tech confinement facility has turned heads around the state's industry.
"We've had almost every milk inspector in the state through here," said Kelly. They all want to see how this open air milking works. Doors and windows all need maintenance and repair, so their open-air parlor - built for only $35,000 - doesn't have any. The building was inexpensive to build and is cost effective to maintain.
The inspectors had never seen a facility without doors and windows and they'd never dealt with a milking parlor that didn't have challenges in dealing with manure.
Finally, after discussing the facility at length, the inspectors told Bruns they had never seen a cleaner, manure-free dairy. Kelly said having the parlor open to airflow keeps moisture out and lowers milk bacteria count. Most of the manure is left in the pasture when the cows walk down a lane to the parlor.
The actual parlor opens to the south, with a wall on the north side as part of an enclosed room housing their milk cooler, bulk tank and cleaning equipment.
The milking area is pole-barn style with ten milking units swinging in from the middle. Cows come into the parlor from the pasture, entering on the west side and standing side by side on either side of a lower area where Kelly and Cindy work.
They leave on the east side of the structure and walk around the barn to a new paddock of fresh pasture. According to Kelly, their cows know the routine and seem to look forward to traveling through the milk parlor, because they know a fresh salad bar awaits them.
Bruns can milk 100 head in an hour with one person. Kelly milks their 86 head by himself in the mornings. Cindy cares for their bucket calves during the day and helps with the evening milking. Kirk and Kristi continue to milk their own herd in a traditional barn at their farmstead a mile and a half down the road.
Production isn't the focus of these family dairies. Kirk said his production in a grass-based system dropped from 19,000 lbs. per cow per year on a 305-day lactation period to 8000 lbs. per cow per year on a 270-day lactation period. Although milk production dropped, their butterfat average still runs between 4-6 percent with Jersey-cross cows. The upside is that financially, they've never been more comfortable.
Grass is really their key. They don't feed grain to their animals. By relying on fresh pasture, stockpiled winter pasture and baled and ensiled forages, they keep feed costs down. The lack of grain in their rations also reduces fly pressure around pastures and milking facilities.
They are able to sell their grass-fed milk to health-conscious customers who travel up to seventy-five miles one way to purchase milk at a premium price directly from a farm family they know and trust. Before the cheese plant, their extra milk was sold every other day as a conventional commodity to a Wells Blue Bunny dairy plant in northwest Iowa.
Kirk and Kristi feed corn, alfalfa hay and some of their excess milk to their small hog herd, directly marketing more than a dozen milk-fed butcher hogs to their customers. .
They milk the entire herd from March or April to early December and dry up their cows through the winter. Kelly and Cindy milk a few cows in a traditional barn on their farm over the winter to satisfy the needs of their direct milk customers.
When things get rolling, the Bruns' cheese facility will be the only on-farm plant making cheese in Nebraska with milk from only grass-based dairies. They've hired a former master cheese maker from a local plant that recently closed. The Bruns plant houses a big cheese vat, steam pasteurization equipment and a cold room for aging molded cheeses. They will begin by producing basic hard cheeses like cheddar and colby, but plan to work into specialty cheeses as well.
For a seasonal dairy, cheese is a natural because it will store longer and is easier to transport than other dairy products. Kirk said they might also make spring butter.
Both families have an eye on agritourism opportunities too. Because their dairies are so unique, Kelly and Cindy have already hosted several farm and University groups, scheduling a few motorcoach tours for folks interested in their low input, grass systems and dairy products. They've also sponsored pasture chats for their customers, informal lawnchair meetings around the dairy barn with health care professionals who promote healthy, locally raised food. Cheese making opens up even more opportunities for tourists and visitors.
For Kelly and Kirk and their families, their self-designed grass-based system and on-farm processing have actually simplified their lives. Both families are now fully employed on the farms and they have been able to financially garner more of the profit in the food chain for themselves by keeping costs down and directly marketing to customers, building relationships with the folks they feed.
"We've put things in perspective," Kirk said. It's just ice cream on the cake for them to make a living in a business both brothers love. "When you wake up in the morning, you actually enjoy what you're doing," he said.
