Advertisement With a price tag of $5.1 million, the new facility can house 500 cows, doubling that of the old Emmons Blaine Dairy Cattle Research Center next door. It will be able to milk 64 cows at once. It features state-of-the-art housing, waste-management and milking technologies that dairy experts say are necessary for producing the kind of research needed by farmers in Wisconsin's $20.6 billion dairy industry.
"We were 25 years behind the industry with what we had," said Ag College Associate Dean Frank Kooistra. "We really needed to be in a facility that matched what was going on in the industry today. "
The Emmons Blaine dairy was established in the mid-1970s, making it somewhat dated now, but the dairy industry in Wisconsin has been in flux for almost a century. In recent decades, the changes have become more apparent and, in some cases, cause for concern.
"We had a time when we were losing thousands of cows a year across the state," said Casey Langan of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation,"and with the loss of the cows, we feared that we would start to lose the dairy infrastructure across the state. "
Since the 1930s, the number of dairy herds in Wisconsin has dropped 90 percent, and the total number of milk cows has simultaneously dropped 40 percent, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
"What used to happen was when you sold your cows they went down to the road to your neighbor's place or at least stayed within a small geographic area," said Langan. "We were losing entire herds and they were being shipped off to Idaho and California. That production wasn't just leaving the farm, it was leaving the state. "
Those herds that remained have generally been growing year by year with more productive cows, as farmers tried to cope with rising input costs and stagnant milk prices.
"We went through (a period) in the last 20 to 25 years where milk prices basically didn't change," said Ric Grummer, Ag College dairy science professor, noting that this is not true of milk prices in recent years.
"So something had to happen, because it just became more and more difficult to make a living when the cost of making your product goes up but you're not receiving anything more for your product. "
Grummer said economic conditions in the dairy industry forced dairy farmers to make a choice: grow their business to get more milk for their buck or call it quits.
The result: There are fewer dairy farms and cows in Wisconsin now than ever before, but many of those farms are increasing their herds and producing more milk than their predecessors.
Between 1993 and 2007, the number of dairy operations in Wisconsin with herds smaller than 200 cattle decreased nearly 55 percent from 29,700 to 13,400, while the number of operations with more than 200 cattle increased from 300 to 1,000, according to NASS statistics.
"The dairy industry has changed so much over the years," said Kooistra. "When I grew up on a dairy farm, my dad had 128 acres and we had 25 cows. You know, you don't find any of those operations anymore. "
The majority of milk produced in Wisconsin continues to flow from herds of 100 or fewer, but the trend, he and other experts point out, is definitively toward larger dairy farms.
Meanwhile, the modern dairy cow is nearly four times more productive on average than her ancestors from the 1930s, which has allowed dairy farmers to more than double the total amount of milk produced in the state.
Today, Wisconsin dairy farms produce upwards of 24 billion pounds of milk a year, or more than 2.82 billion gallons, a figure which has gone up almost every year since the 1930s.
These trends, along with the accrued knowledge of more than 30 years of dairy research, are reflected in the design and concept of the new dairy barn and parlor.
"It's kind of symbolic of what's going on in our dairy industry," Langan said of the new facility. "I think it speaks volumes about the direction the dairy industry as a whole is headed. "
Aside from the increased capacity, one of the most noticeable new features is the change from stanchions to free-stall housing.
Traditionally in Wisconsin, dairy cows that are kept indoors have been kept in stanchions or tie-stalls -- small, evenly spaced stalls that held the cows' heads in line -- to allow for efficient holding and feeding. But, as herds and cows have grown due to economic necessity, farmers have increasingly turned to loose housing -- where cows' movements are not as restricted -- because free-stall barns require less labor when caring for larger herds.
"There aren't any 500-cow tie-stall (barns) because it's just too much work, you can't do it," said Louis Armentano, a dairy science professor at the Ag College. So while it's easier to conduct scientific research in a stanchion stall environment where each cow's food is individually controlled, he said, the sea change in the industry toward loose housing has increasingly made the old facility seem outmoded.
"Clients like to see you doing research in conditions that look like theirs," he said.
Langan hopes that the time, money and forward-thinking that went into the development of the new facility will be part of a broader reinvigorating of the industry in America's Dairyland.
"Within the last decade ... we've seen a greater investment in modernizing our dairy farms," he said. "Therefore, it's really good to see the state renewing its commitment to this facility. "
JUNE DAIRY MONTH
The Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board Web site has a calendar of events for June Dairy Month:
www.wisdairy.com
UPDATING RESEARCH FACILITIES
The UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences will hold a ceremony for the integrated dairy modernization project at 10 a.m. Aug. 1 at the Arlington Agricultural Research Station, on Badger Lane, off Highway 51 just north of the Dane County line in rural Arlington.
The completion of the $5.1 million Arlington dairy research facility is Phase 2 of a three-part project, which represents a renewed investment in dairy research on the part of the state.
Phase 1 was creation of a heifer-raising research center near Marshfield, completed in 2005. Phase 3 will be an upgrade for the dairy research facilities on the UW-Madison campus, scheduled to come up for funding in the 2009-11 biennial budget.
Web site: www.ars.wisc.edu
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