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2 DAIRY ST 5R C E L E B R A T I N G
Volume 25, No. 12
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Y E A R S
“All dairy, all the time”™
August 12, 2023
Mysteries Modern technology of milk on Merryville Farm dairy margins 146-year-old hosts eld day Variables in predicting prices By Jan Lefebvre jan.l@star-pub.com
ITHACA, N.Y. – After a year of dismal milk prices for dairy farmers, hopes turn to rumors that the trend might be about to change. With prices wallowing in low numbers in July – Class III milk at $13.77 per hundredweight, a drop of $1.14 from June – better days cannot come soon enough. Yet, with so many factors being at play when it comes to prices and predicting those prices, farmers must make daily decisions while standing on shaky ground. Christopher Wolf, a professor of agricultur- Christopher Wolf al economics at Cornell University Cornell University in Ithaca, has been watching the ever-dropping markets. He said those complex factors make market predictions more challenging today. “With 18% or so of milk equivalents being exported, the marginal unit of milk is priced by international markets,” Wolf said. “The result is that the products which the U.S. exports – especially powders – have prices highly correlated with world prices. Additionally, corn and soybean markets are very international (and) directly impact the cost of producing milk.” At the global level, many more variables are added to the prediction puzzle. “The result is that international weather and, particularly, economic or military conicts can directly affect the farm milk price in the U.S.,” Wolf said. “Weather adds a great deal of uncertainty with, for example, the Turn to MILK PRICES | Page 6
By Jan Lefebvre jan.l@star-pub.com
WAVERLY, Minn. – When Swedish ancestors of Bill and Steve Uter established Merryville Farm near Waverly in 1877, hands and pails were the components of their milking system. Today, Bill and Steve, along with Bill’s son, Mike, milk 285 cows using a DeLaval robotic milking system with four units, which were added three years ago in a retrotted, guided-ow system. Robotic feeders are used in the calf facility, and, this year, a Valmetal automatic bedding system was installed in the freestall barn, allowing the Uters to bed stalls without entering pens. The system is the rst one installed in Minnesota. The Uters’ use of technology was the topic at hand Aug. 1 during the University of Minnesota Extension’s Summer Dairy Field Day at Merryville Farm. During the introduction, Bill explained why the family added specic technologies. He and Steve both worked in agricultural business before
TIFFANY KLAPHAKE/DAIRY STAR
Bill Uter (right) shows a guest how the guided-ow system works in the freestall barn Aug. 1 at Merryville Farm near Waverly, Minnesota. The Uters milk 285 cows with four DeLaval roboƟc milking units and bed the cows using the only Valmetal automated bedding system in Minnesota.
taking over the farm from their parents, Ron and Kay, in 1994. “Then it was the original 40-cow tiestall barn and a hay shed, and we had a little bit of land to work with and some supportive parents,” Bill said. … “We are featuring (how we added) technology to an existing setup.” Bill said lack of labor was a factor in adding technology. “We’ve reduced our labor signicantly and boosted efciency through production per cow,” he said. In the freestall barn, the farm’s most recent technology was showcased – the automatic bedding system. Part-time Merryville Farm employee Dylan Marketon demonstrated the system by running the bedTIFFANY KLAPHAKE/DAIRY STAR ding cart over one Zach Uter (front, from leŌ), Dylan Marketon, Miriana side of the barn usUter and Joe Uter; (back, from leŌ) Lori, Steve, Kay, Bill, ing an application Vicki, Mike, Aria and Megan Uter were on hand Aug. on his phone while 1 to host the University of Minnesota Extension’s Sum- Steve explained the mer Dairy Field Day at Merryville Farm near Waverly, system. Minnesota. During the event, the Uters demonstrated “This is the third technologies added to their family’s dairy farm in recent machine like this years. Not pictured are Miriana’s husband, Nick Uter, used in the United and Joe’s wife, Ellen Uter.
States,” Steve said. The other two are in Wisconsin, and the Uters visited one of those sites. After much consideration, the Uters chose to proceed with the Canadian company. “We do both drop bedding and spread bedding on the cows,” Steve said. “What (the system’s bedding cart) does is ride rails (at the ceiling) that go all the way around the barn on the outsides then curl on the ends and come back over the top of the insides over the cows.” The bedding is made by grinding straw and mixing it with sawdust using a vertical mixer. It is then automatically fed into the bedding cart. The system can be programmed to disperse different amounts of bedding as needed. The barn has a tail-to-tail conguration for stalls. The cart comes back to its base to rell and keeps working until the barn is done for each bedding time, which happens twice a day at 5:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., taking a little over an hour each time. “Before we had this, we were going in there with a cart and a shovel and bedding the stalls – a two-hour-aday job, a horrible job, with the dust and the physical labor and the cows in there,” Steve said. “The reason we used the cart and shovel is we didn’t Turn to UTERS | Page 8