NFO-264 (AV10765): US Farm Report: Dairy Farming N.E.

[music] hi everybody and welcome to us farm report our US farm report crew has just completed an extensive field trip through portions of the Midwest east northeast and south the scenes you are now watching were filmed in New Jersey and this week's show will acquaint you with dairying and other types of agriculture in the states of New Jersey and Maine on future shows we will present on the scene farm reports from Illinois Indiana Kentucky Ohio Pennsylvania New York the New England states as well as Virginia and North and South Carolina New Jersey is indeed the Garden State agriculturally famous for its canning crops such as tomatoes string beans cucumbers peppers asparagus sweet corn and many others and the Garden State is proud of its outstanding dairy production and boastful of talented dairy farmers like Hiram Strang Hiram I want you to know how very much we with us farm report appreciate the fact that you've taken about two days of your time to show us around this part of New Jersey we appreciate it very much this is fine farming country through here you know we think so anyhow you know on this tour we have been through a number of states we started through Illinois Indiana Ohio Pennsylvania and worked on up in the New England and now back to New Jersey and I must say that outside of Illinois the crops through this part of New Jersey look at the very best it's been a good year evidently yeah we've had a wonderful year as far as rainfall goes and and whatnot we had an awful late spring we didn't get anything done in April we had so much water but since then it's been a it's been a wonderful year we had a nice weather to get our hay and a nice lot of rain to grow the crops you and your sons Warren and Lee have a family business going here you all farm together don't you that's right yeah it's a three-way setup and we all chip in and work together and try to do everything together well now how widespread is your operation well our farm here in Woodstown and one and surely is about nine mile apart altogether were operating between six and seven hundred acres you know and of course it's all dairy and grain and we grow everything for the cows that we grow is fed to the cows practically we have to buy some grain but the most of what we raise herself well now Warren and his family live here at the Woodstown yeah they live here or where the dairy is and Lee I guess then lives at Shirley he lives on the Shirley the home farm how many grandchildren do you have iron I have eight five grandsons and three granddaughters well I would presume that it's a real pleasure to you to see your two sons involved in the farm and all three of you then can have some good outlook in terms of the farm eventually one day going on to these five boys these grandchildren well we're kind of looking forward to it anyhow I hope they see fit to to become farmers of course nowadays it becomes a matter of whether or not you can make a living on the farm doesn't it that's so that's correct I don't know if there's work enough for all of them but I don't know if there'll be money enough for all them or not Hyrum what is the size of your milk herd we're operating with about 250 head of dairy milking cattle and dry cattle together and we have about a hundred and fifty head of heifers and steers we have a few steers we raising around steers for our own meat well now in this pasture down to the left what are these cows oh these dry cows they're dry cows and they're down there they're resting pretty easy right now I believe they've had enough to eat and those birds is a bird that come in here a couple years ago and they seem to like the flies on the cows and the cows don't mind them at all we noticed although our cameras unfortunately didn't catch the act that some of these birds actually get right on the backs of these cows to get the Flies yeah they sit on the back and pick the flies right off the cattle well now you have some Bulls in with these dry cows don't you yeah we have them in there we do use them later on this fall and winter but the two of them are whole Holsteins pure breads one of them was from one of our good cows and one of them is the one we bought about a year ago and then the white face ball we use for breeding heifers with let me get back to your Bulls and the subject of artificial insemination in a minute but over across the fence in the pasture next to where we've been looking this is your milking herd at the present time isn't it that's right there all the milk cows that's in that field Warren I understand has one cow in there that is a real dandy in terms of daily production yeah well he was he's been trying to get a hundred-pound out over but the weather got awful hot and I don't think he quite made it I think he got hurt around 96 pound yeah that's a lot of farmers has them that makes a hundred pound but we don't feed him and take that much individual care of them we were amazed really to see how calm and contented these cows are they they they really look like they're cows that have been raised properly in a proper climate would you say that this is true I think so because the way we raise them we start raising them in those small stalls and we feed them by hand right out of the bucket and they're just pets right on through and once in a while we get one that gets a little nervy but the most of them is very quiet what is your milk production total at the poor cow I don't know we haven't DHI tested since 1966 but we have the wage ours in the parlor and we can tell what each cow is giving and the herd average from our milk production that's sent into the plant I would say runs around 13 14 thousand a year per cow and probably 450 to 475 pound of fat that's not exact figures but that's our only thing we have to go by now how long would you say it's taken you to build this herd up to the quality that it possesses at this time well we started with pure breeds back in the 40s so therefore I would say we've been working on this herd for about 20 to 25 years and of course for a good many years we only had about 40 or 50 head of milk cows and we had pretty much all pure breeds at that time and we have been breeding and whatnot but we don't have too many pure breads to help got bad short a few years ago and we just didn't have time to go into all of that but they are all from pure bred cattle well now I know that you employ artificial insemination with your herd but you told me earlier that there are some weaknesses and negatives to it well some of the artificial efforts we find that their utters and their hind legs don't hold up like I would like to see the Holstein cattle hold up because I've bred for 25 years and most of that we've used their own both and I always went for a good top-line and a good utter and a good straight hind leg and some of the artificial boys haven't pushed that too much and we feel as if that's one of their weakness in some of the artificial breeding although they have helped the production awful lot well now about this one bull you have or had this bull you told me has been dead for what three years three years yeah yet you are still using the semen for that we still have semen from that we're using ourselves and it's he's a son of a whistle eater bull at great-west leader bull out in the midwest a few years ago we don't hear so much about him now because he's gone but he does a lot of sons and grandsons and and daughters all over the world I guess and and then we got quite a bit of this Lucifer blood this was a great blood some 15 20 years ago in Pennsylvania and that is the main blood that our herd is built up from is that Lucifer and the whis leader blood now you have some real good looking pasture out here and you put these cows out to pasture in good weather and you told me that the weather here holds pretty good up through the last of November early December right well they'll be out in the field till that time but there's not too much pasture after we might probably October yeah but it's more of an exercise lot than as a passion right well now in bad weather how do you handle them we've all set up with free stalls we have two big barns with free stalls in and something over 200 free stalls for the mill cattle the dry cattle is still using a loafing shed I say they're in I'll open shed but the mill cattle has free stalls well now tell us about your feeding system for this herd iron well our program has been for the last few years that we have used corn silage we've we never missed a day from one year to another but what we don't feed stock corn silage now in the spring we feed corn silage once a day we start off green chopped and rye once a day and we're going from rye into barley and barley into wheat and wheat into alfalfa hay and today we've quit green chopping alfalfa hay and going into green chopped and corn twice a day well now this chopper yours really does a great job of chopping this green corn and it looks to me like this would be a most palatable feat for those cows they like it don't they yeah it is and the farmers have tried all kinds of silage and there's never or anything come up the corns good corn silage yet well now Hiram after the corn is chopped by the chopper and of course blown right on into the wagon how is it handled from there well it's one we green shop direct from the field and peed in the bunker we feed the wet bird strains that we get from the brewery it's a waste from the beer and we dump about two to three ton of that right onto the corn silage and then run it out into the long bump feeder that we have set up on the hill out in the field yeah and that's about the easiest way and delicious handling and manpower that we can get away with this this mash from the brewery I understand that after they get through with it and take from it what they need for brewing beer but it still leaves most all of the nutrients within the grains yeah there's there's a good part of it in there it's it really helps about two year ago we quit feeding it and we just couldn't get no production like we did with it so we went back to feeding it again you don't suppose that has anything to do with the fact that you have a herd of happy cows very good well it could it could happen you know we noticed as Warren was chopping corn that there's a lot of cane mixed in your corn what's the purpose of this iron well we call it a silo maker it's it's a special seed for to plant with corn it is supposed to sweeten up your silage and whatnot for you or we have had quite a bit of trouble with cows with a lack of sugar and so that's the reason we we put it in there we've have used it for several years now we have had very little trouble with her cattle since then and I think looking at the cattle maybe you can kind of tell that they're getting something what they want that sugar is helping a lot some of the years of corn have been pretty severely damaged Hiram what's causing that that's the Blackbirds we had to have a lot of black bird trouble we're only about eight to nine mile from the Delaware River End where they have an awful lot of blackbirds down there and they come in on this corn when it's in the milk and they do damage it a lot they take as much as sometimes as 75% of it is that right and it really hurts we've got about 150 acres of corn here and it can hurt that corn from 50 to 75 bushel the acre anything that you can do about it well we run around with the guns and shoot and scare them out and it helps some but they do do a lot of damage in the wintertime in bad weather you do your bunk feeding and your automated as I understand it out of your silos through these bunks would you tell us how this works yeah well the bunker has a the silo has the unloader in it and of course that runs it down into another auger and that runs it into the other feeders it runs into the cattle we have two feeders it's a hundred foot long each the cattle eat from each side of them and the dry cattle feeder is sixty foot long and they can eat from each side of that dry cattle feeder by the way is kind of unique isn't it I I don't know that I've seen one like that before is this your own idea well that's our own idea I mean the boys built it a little over a year ago so we could run silage right out of the wagon into it and also feed hay we have a hay rack filled over it and it's sod drafted as you may call it so that we can run the bunk wagon right down and run the solids into it yeah tell us about your milking parlor how big is it and what type is it milking power is a what we call it double 8 8 on a side we have a milking cow still time and the other eight is then put in and getting ready and checked and whatnot and fed and when the milkers come off of the 8 on one side they go on the other side and we also have the way jars that calibrate each cow's milk and tells us just what she gives right to the ounce and that in turn tells you how much to feed her that she is being that's right she is fed - according to what milk should get out now in all of our travels around the northeastern part of the country that is so predominantly dairy country yours of all operations has the biggest tank capacity how many tanks do you have and what capacity are they the two of the tanks are what do we call the eighty can tank and the other one is the forty can tank can is what ten gallon that's ten gallons so you're talking about eight hundred gallon tanks two of them that's right and a four hundred yeah this gonna hold you are you gonna grow into something bigger yes well we have another eighty can tank the same as the two that is now in the shed that we will be putting in there in the next few months tell me a little bit about this farm here at Woods town the history of it well it I bought the farm in 1950 and had been in the Hackett name for about 250 years and in nineteen I proposed about nineteen there 1861 the house this house was built by the three brothers and there was two years building it how come it took him so long well they had a little trouble I guess between the cells the family troubles probably and they couldn't seem to see eye-to-eye but they finally the next year they finished it up and I think it was finished in ninth in 1862 just as a point of interest what were your taxes on this the farm in 1950-51 in 1950 the taxes the first year was 246 dollars last year of 1969 the taxes was thirty eight hundred and seventy-eight dollars what's happened in the state of New Jersey the tax is is this gonna push the farms out yeah how long have you been a member of NFO ever since I started in New Jersey when they charter this area we charted this area in May of 1964 and it's going on seven years now so I've been a member and they heard me in this president of NFO and I can't get out of it that's usually the case you get a good horses yeah you just keep working him don't you well we're working for a good thing that's the main thing yes well now I presume that through the past six years you've seen a great deal of change in general attitude toward NFO through this area yeah we've seen an awful lot of change because the six year ago my neighbors wouldn't Harley speak to me now they will and they accepted the NFO very well I'm very well pleased with how they have took on and went along with us farmers that we didn't think ever would is going along wonderful membership on the increase yeah as far as membership goes we here in South Jersey the first two years we just about signed up everybody that was possible to sign up we got a had a good membership of course we're small here in New Jersey but we're I tell them we're small but mighty yeah and we had a very good reception of the dumpin action when we had the North jumpin action here in South Jersey several hundred cans of milk dumped every day and for 15 days straight and the boys run along wonderful and it done an awful lot of good through the past six years for the dairyman of this area arm have there been some marketing successes on NFO's part yes I think there has been every sense the dumping action I think the prices of course no farmer ever knowed the price of milk to go up the first of May before until we had her dumped in action in 67 and that price did go up the 1st of May they took off the 1st of April they took off 40 cents 100 and the 1st of May they give us the 40 cents back plus I think it was 28 cents more I think we got 16 since 100 increase the first day of May after the dumping action and there has been several increases and I believe out in the Midwest the same thing has happened out there and it's it's done a lot of good and I think the voice is really looking up the NFO for to get this job done Don Randle his wife and their three children live in a very old but spacious and comfortable farmhouse west of Charleston main which is near banger main Don Farms 150 acres has 160 head of cattle and milks 110 cows his setup for his cow herd is the free stall confinement type Don is NFO in Penobscot County Maine he's a native of this part of the country having been born and reared on the farm he now owns I visited with Don about farming in his state in what county are we at this time Bob Scott County and how many counties are there in the state 16 now NFO has been doing well through the state of Maine right right how many counties of the 16 are chartered at this time Don we have I believe 14 chatted counties and the other two were about ready to be chatted you think that this will happen in the very near future I think I'm being chatted by fall mm-hmm what predominates through Maine agriculturally Don we do know that it's an Agri or that it's a dairy state as is so much of New England but what other kind of farming is carried on in this state well as you say we got we got dairy some Canon crops not as large in this area they used to be any success with canning drops canon crops i have never known a family to make anything on them yeah now as they break the families in one area they move onto another as it stands now the the pea production is in Aroostook County has come all the way up the East Coast primers going broke as they went oh and blue blueberries in the state of Maine which is probably not known most people 80 percent of the nation's production lowbush blueberries comes from the state of Maine 80 percent of our nation's production this is a wild blueberry yeah which is quite remarkable because most people doesn't realize that NFO has made great gains in the Blue Bay and after we signed our first contract last year at two and a half cents over the open market and they've signed a new contract this year for even larger production at two and a half cents over the last year's contract so this is mrs. Gaines that well the blueberry industry the growers wasn't getting anything for the land or anything and all they got was usually just a bill at the end of the year for the harvest and the pain in the crop yes this way they may realize what a profit this year well now up and down the East Coast Don the consumption of dairy beef is very big isn't it right they tell me it's eighty percent on the East Coast dairy and dairy beef is preferred the NFO beef program here in the state of Maine has been working very well in the past year and a half local prices was 35 to 37 cents a pound we have increased them through the NFO sales to what a peak 50 cents a pound this year and this means to the to the member they're shipping with us 75 to $100 per cow on the average Holstein cactus which is quite a quite a bit over what it was you in have to go this $75 one animal takes care you dose any other outstanding marketing increases through NFO in the state you can think of I believe the one the outstanding increase of this year was the 34 cent increase in milk over the federal auto minimum this is the first time in the history industry that they've ever paid more than the minimum price there's only one thing that is brought up there and that's NFL contracts in the Midwest and is if I understand now the closest note contract to this area is in but I'm not now so it's inching this way very fast yes it is so I look for great success and in the milk industry and all other commodities in this coming year is this considered the potato area of the state of Maine are we on the southern end of it oh this is this is the middle part of state and it's very small potato wise compared to rooster County now that's what north of here is in Bryan is that up around what Presque Isle and in that area there's way to the north right about 200 miles off that you have some good-looking potatoes this year they're just beginning to blossom the potatoes in this area I probably butter for potato chips in some other areas these are chip potatoes most general yes what makes a good chip potato Don well like a storage and weather pretty pretty much they have to have keep it under control storage yeah and the Clanton's that could as I say the climate is the line to do is just a little bit different down here than just mystique honey which helps um you know do you have the storage facilities for your potatoes I don't race baiters myself so uh but the most of them do have about all potato farmers have some storage now now in your facilities here and in your dairy operation you have an outstanding set up what do you call this where the cows are free to roam and the barn and and they each have a stall where they can lie down and sleep and rest they don't have much of a harried life in there do they know they have it pretty soft I only have to do is eat and sleep yeah walk into the pile and when you come to milk name this is what I'm known as the priest all set up I use a herringbone milking parlor which is a double six it looks looks pretty fair it takes a lot of the manual labor out of it but if you get bigger although your automated you got to run pretty fast just to keep up the automation then when you start having breakdowns yeah do more hair we've seen a number of milking parlors and very setups through New England and I think that your tank is the biggest one we've seen what's its capacity twelve hundred and fifty gallon this is we've bought with the idea of a little more expansion to stay in business which is I think is a wrong way of going about it I think NFO way is the best way you get in price for what you do produce and then we've everybody would be on top the whole economy would be better off as I see it this is the only way to go and that's this week's report on agriculture in the Northeast New Jersey and the state of Maine u.s. farm report is seen on this station each week at this time until we meet again so long everybody