Small is still beautiful

Day township dairy meets life needs of local farmer

These days, dairy farms just keep getting bigger and bigger.

There is one town of Day grazing dairy farm, however, that wants to get smaller.

That’s a 100-acre dairy run by one woman, Jennifer Kaufman. She told a Marathon County Conservation, Planning and Zoning Department pasture walk group on Thursday that she’d like to thin her herd of 50 Jerseys and Brown Swiss cows, if she could. “I have too many cows,” the dairy farmer admitted.

Kaufman said she is able to handle the dairy herself, grazing cows on paddocks during the summer, feeding them stored hay over winter and them in a compact eight-unit parlor that sits adjacent to a sawdust bedding pack in a red barn where the animals take shelter. The operation has a single tractor.

Many farmers complain about high stress. Kaufman, however, told the 17 pasture walk visitors that she turned to the dairy as a stress reliever.

“The best thing I like about the farm is that it keeps me home,” she said. “I was an emergency room nurse who worked nights and weekends with three little children at home.”

Kaufman, who owns the farm with her truck driving husband, Kip, by design doesn’t do it all. She buys corn and soybeans from area cash grain farmers. She has another grazing operation in Neillsville raise the heifers.

Kaufman told the group her dairy farm is a lifestyle choice, if anything. She is not interested, for example, in following current trends and convert her 100 acres to a cash grain operation.

“I’m not a crop person,” she said. “I am a cow person.”

Kaufman said she is happy with the sawdust bedding pack in the barn. She adds sawdust, brought in by a local Amish business person, to the pack daily. In the winter, the pack, which is composting, keeps her cows warm.The pack is laid out in a windrow for compost in the summer months.

Kaufman said she is not fussy about her grass paddocks. The fields were seeded by Grassworks back in 2010. Since then, she hasn’t done a thing. Yet they are lush and green.

Kaufman said her strategy is to try and make cows last as long as possible. Her oldest cow is 15 years old.

“I want my cows to last 10 years, rather than be two year wonders,” she said.

Kaufman said that a grazing operation helps cows stay in production longer. “It’s better for the cows,” she said. “They don’t have bad feet or bad legs. They just last so much longer.”

Milk from the dairy is shipped to Dairy State in Rudolph.