Grass-based dairies hold promise for southern Iowa producers
By Laura Miller
Newsletter editor
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Tim Ennis visits a participant's dairy. |
A Leopold Center-funded project that followed 15 young or beginning dairy operators over the past two years shows promise for grass-based dairies in southern Iowa as well as economic benefits for rural communities.
The work was conducted by Ag Connect, a nonprofit organization based in Lenox that specializes in rural economic development. Its goal was to help current and future grass-based dairy operations by collecting and sharing the records and experiences of the first few new dairy farms that had located in the rolling hills south of Interstate 80.
“Grass-based dairies have a lot of potential for the communities in this area, plus there seems to be a lot of interest by people from Iowa and other states who want to get into agriculture,” reports Tim Ennis, Ag Connect executive director. “When we began, people were wondering if we would find the 12 new dairies needed for the project, but now we know of at least 30 other families who want to pursue similar opportunities.”
As part of the project, Ag Connect collected records on milk sales income, feed expenses, grazing rotations and other information from 15 participants who had recently set up family-owned dairies within 75 miles of Osceola and in two counties in northern Missouri. Because participants lived in counties with few or no other dairies, Ag Connect identified established operators in other parts of Iowa as mentors. To protect the identity and privacy of participating families, information about each dairy is available only by an assigned number.
“We found that it is possible to enter a grass-based dairy business with as little as $50,000 on as few as 40 acres,” Ennis said. “We believe that grass-based dairying has exceptional potential in production agriculture today because 160 acres may reasonably produce a gross income of up to $1,000 an acre.”
Ennis reports that the 10 dairies participating in the project in 2002 generated a total gross income of $942,596 from the sale of milk, which in turn, is used to buy feed, services, and building and production supplies from local businesses. He said that new dairies similar to those in the project are likely to generate more than $110,00 gross income per year.
“We also found that each beginner experiences a steep learning curve in the first two years of operation,” Ennis said. “The opportunity to communicate with other dairy operators was very helpful for these families.”
The project tracked dairy operations in 2001 and 2002. Nine of the 10 families in the last year of the project were new to the dairy business since 1996. The average milking herd size was 60 cows, and the size of farms ranged from 40 to 270 acres. Each family received a stipend to attend regular meetings with other participants and to provide monthly information about their operations. Several families also hosted field days.
“When we first moved here, people thought we’d never make it, but we’ve passed everyone’s projections,” said one participant who came to Iowa from a factory job in another state. “We’re not here to show up anybody, we just want to make a living and raise our family.”
Another participant left a successful career because he’d always wanted to farm. He’s an enthusiastic supporter of the benefits of rotational grazing, and has converted the hilliest portion of his cropland to quality forage.
“I’m hoping that what we take away from this is that grass-based dairies will work,” he said. “There are so many costs in the conventional system that you cannot change but this system has more variables.”
Ennis said one family has left the dairy business since the project began, another has quit farming, and others face challenges. “All are works in progress,” he said, “but over the long term, the operations that survive can be a great benefit in their communities, bringing new families to the area and producing more income from the land.”
Key factors that threaten the survival of new dairies are market price of milk, the cost to produce milk, and the labor requirements of the milking routine. “Although beginning dairy operators can do very little to change the market price of milk,” Ennis said, “they can do things to reduce their cost of production and labor requirements, such as moving toward a grass-based system that uses management intensive rotational grazing.”
Management intensive rotational grazing divides larger pastures into smaller paddocks so that animals can be moved from one area to another to help promote maximum forage growth. This grazing system also can be a better use for highly erodible land that is less suitable to continuous cultivation.
Farmland in the southern third of Iowa appeals to would-be farmers from eastern parts of the United States where land costs are considerably higher due to urban encroachment into rural areas. The southern Iowa farmland is considerably more productive than what is available at the same price in Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia.