Farmer learns on his pasture walk
By Heather Thorstensen
hthorstensen@agrinews.com
Date Modified: 05/19/2010 3:40 PM
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WAUKON, Iowa—As John Palmer led a group of people around his organic dairy farm, he asked about their operations in between explaining his own practices.
John and his wife, Meghan, have been dairy farming near Waukon since 2004, and hosted a pasture walk May 5.
They are still establishing how to run the farm. John's philosophy is it's always good to ask questions and learn from others.
"There is nobody better to learn from than people who are doing things," he said.
The visitors were other farmers or people involved with farming. They saw a part of the pasture that was re-seeded last year.John also showed the group an area he isn't sure is worth grazing, and he asked if any of their cows walk under a hot wire to move around the pasture. It's a practice he would like to start trying.
The group discussed exactly how they lift hot wires for cows and different paddock shapes to encourage cows to trample the plants after grazing. Trampling adds biomass back to the soil.
They visited the 80-cow herd, which is mostly made of Holsteins, but also includes some Brown Swiss,Holstein-New Zealand Friesian crossbreds and Jersey crossbreds.
"I want to have a black and white herd," John said.
The family is reaching their goal for milk marketings. They plan to market more females and black and white cows seem to be easier to sell, John said.
The herd spends their days on pasture. They are also fed oats and corn silage year-round. In winter, their diet consists of high-moisture corn and balage. The Palmers made 1,000 bales last year and fed 800 of them.
Six to eight inches of lime screenings were added to lanes in the pasture last year so the cows stay clean as they walk to and from the pasture.John wants to add more lanes to make it easier to control cow movement and how long cows graze each section.
The Palmers currently use sand bedding in their free-stall barn, but John is looking for ways to limit or eliminate the farm's use of sand. They expect to build a manure pit this summer and don't want to deal with cleaning sand out of the pit. John is thinking of switching to lime and straw bedding. He can make straw from the oats he already grows and he figures lime and straw would break down into fertilizer once it's spread on the fields.
"I want something that will benefit the land," he said.
The first big project the Palmers took on when they moved to the farm in 2002 was converting an old stanchion barn into a milking parlor. They used Extension recommendations for a New Zealand-style parlor.
At first, they used an Ecolite stall barn milker, but John didn't like how the system came off the cows. They switched last winter to a WestfaliaSurge swing 10 system with automatic take-off.
"I'm happy," John said of the set-up. Generally, he can milk 60 cows in an hour by himself.
He always has to guide the cows into the parlor, so he would like to get a holding crowd gate.
Coincidentally, the family is farming on the land that had been owned by Meghan's family since the 1880s.
Her ancestors, up until her great-grandparents, farmed there. In the 1970s, the farm was sold for the first time to someone who wasn't a member of the family.
The Palmers took over from that owner. They bought nine acres where their house and farm buildings are, and continue to rent 205 acres from the former owner. They grow corn, oats and make hay from their alfalfa-grass mix.