Weilers Rev Up With New Facilities, High-Tech ID

By Jane Fyksen Crops Editor
Thursday, November 27, 2008 8:39 PM CST

Marshfield dairyman Russ Weiler and his son, Elliott, like nothing better than to hop behind the wheel of a Super Late Model stock car and break from the pack. Recently they’ve been sidelined from their favorite, shared hobby by the pressing business of a major farm expansion.

Last year in October, they moved their growing herd into a new six-row freestall barn, and went from milking with six units and pipeline in a tiestall barn to running cows through a double-12 parlor. This fall, they moved cows into a new special needs barn.

So far, it’s been an exhilarating “race” for the Weilers in terms of management changes needing to be made to keep pace with a complete remake of their operation.

Russ and his wife, Denise, waved the green flag to start expanding after Elliott definitely settled on dairying as his career. Elliott, who’s 21, single and living in nearby Marshfield, worked construction after high school, before returning full-time to the family farm about a year-and-a-half ago. While Elliott is their only son, the Weilers have three daughters, Dakonya, Deahlee and Gabrielle, and three young grandsons, Carston, Brant and Daden. Gabrielle, the youngest, is a high school senior.

The Weilers own 200 acres and rent another 200. To accommodate the increasing number of mouths to feed in their herd, they’ve also been buying standing hay and corn (usually high-moisture) from neighbors. Their cropland situation, Russ admits, is in a state of flux, as they accelerate to feed more cattle.

Prior to putting the pedal to the metal on milking more cows, the milking string was 85 grade Holsteins at Weiler Dairy. They bought springers and several herds of cows to fill up their new unit freestall barn, put up by R Z Builders, Loyal. Acutely aware of the need to fill the new facility as quickly as possible, Russ says they made sure they started the race with upwards of 360 head. They’re up to around 420 now, and added a third milking about six months ago.

Though very happy with their two new barns and parlor complex, the Weilers don’t pull any punches about the difficulties involved in bringing in unfamiliar cattle, getting their own into the parlor for those first couple milkings and even adapting themselves in terms of management style.

“An empty barn doesn’t make any money,” states Russ, remarking that the switch from a closed herd to bringing in new cattle was “where problems came in.”

Denise says they must have had at least two dozen people on hand for that very first milking in the new parlor. “Everybody showed up,” even their lender, she grins.

The Weilers were grateful for every extra hand, too, as it took a half-dozen guys just to push cattle that stood there with legs locked. Now, notes Russ, new cattle easily “go in with the rest.”

Russ confirms they like milking in a parlor compared to a tiestall barn. Russ, who just turned 50, says besides Elliott coming on board, his own “bad knees” were also reason for making the switch. The life-long dairy producer says he’s seen way too many older farmers who can hardly walk. Ironically, now that they have a new parlor, neither he, Denise nor Elliott do any milking anymore. They now employ eight people, full-time and part-time, for milking.

Denise takes care of calves and bookwork. Russ and Elliott work together, with blurred division of labor, to oversee general operations. Elliott, however, does all computer work on the cows.

Seehafer Refrigeration, a Bou-Matic dealer at Marshfield, put in their new rapid exit reel parlor, which is fully computerized, with sort gates, too. They say their herd is one of the first in the state to wear SmartEID ISO ear tags. It’s a slick system, Russ and Elliott confirm. Cows are easily sorted out. Production is monitored and deviation reports generated. Breeding information and a myriad of other useful statistics and records enables them to really fine-tune management. Further, if a cow is somehow missed, based on production histories, the system locates her.

They’ve stuck with AI through the transition. They tail chalk and check cows daily. If any get too far out, they’ll be synchronized and bred that way. Their technician comes in in the morning and punches in the cows in he needs that day. Those cows are automatically separated out into a side pen during the second milking, for the technician to breed that afternoon.

“We were worried about keeping track of that many cows,” admits Russ of what’s turned out to be a completely unfounded fear.

They went with the more sophisticated ISO ear tags because, Russ remarks, when they were touring dairies prior to their own construction project, that he’d often see a couple people looking through the cows, trying to locate certain ones. All they have to do is punch numbers in and they end up in one of two pens (one on each side of the parlor).

They use it for vaccinating and drying up cows. Cows fresh so many days can easily be grouped. “When we trim feet, we can get them at so many days (generally 150 to 180 days in milk) and sort them out,” Russ continues.

The Weilers built their new dairy a quarter-mile to the south of their old one. The soil was suitable for a new clay-lined manure pit. There was plenty of water and three-phase was handy. Stalls are sand-bedded, and manure goes into a gravity flow channel to a manure pump into a sand-settling pit, which overlows into a larger pit (which can accommodate nine month’s of waste from 450 cows).

One feature of the main barn Russ definitely sought was an insulated roof. There are no exposed rafters for birds to sit on either, mentions a producer who toured about a dozen barns before settling on the design and builder they did. “We were going to build a ‘T’ barn, but we went with a ‘H’ barn,” notes Russ. “The special needs barn connects really well to the parlor by another hallway.” They were after more flexibility for further expansion.

“Everybody we visited told us they built too small,” he says of a first boost in numbers to a couple hundred head. The producers he’d visited told them they’d expand again in a few years if they followed suit, so the Weilers decided to go bigger right off the bat. Russ says when “you get into a system like this,” it’s pretty easy to add more cows.

This summer, as noted, they added a special needs barn, again from R Z Builders at Loyal. There are 60 sand-bedded stalls, and three maternity pens in which they use sawdust. There are also seven little stalls for newborn calves, and a heated room for washing up calf bottles and other equipment and for respite for newborn calves in the winter if need be.

Now that they’ve put cows (including dry cows) in the new special needs barn, Russ says they could use more in the main barn, which he says would max out at around 430, with overstocking. They’re milking right around 370 of late.

They also built three bunkers last year and added another three this year, along with a slab on the side for additional storage and expansion. Their feed storage center included a NRCS-designed leachate collection system to prevent runoff. The cement is pitched to a tank, and runoff is pumped into the manure pit. Rock and tile on the perimeter of their new barns handles roof runoff, too.

They remodeled their old dairy barn with individual stalls for calves. After weaning, they’re in group pens. Their older facilities have a cemented cow yard with a feed rail. The Weilers suspect that six months down the road, they may be out of room for heifers.

It’s not surprising that these father and son race-car drivers like the ability to do things faster. They like the fact wheelbarrow and shovel has given way to skidsteer. (While they fed out of silos with a feed cart in their old milking barn, they would clean out ahead of the cows by hand.) Russ adds that he doesn’t miss filling silos either. They filled one this year and it was “a lot of work,” he says, compared to filling bunkers.

Hay-making is also faster, using two haybines now and hiring a custom chopper. They bought a merger and a truck and hire a few more trucks. They can be done with a crop of hay in three days, where they used to “mess around for weeks” filling silo.

Now that the dust is settling on their construction project, the Weilers are hopeful they’ll be able to get back on the track again. This was the first year in a long time neither raced.

Russ has been racing since he was in high school. He started on dirt and then went to Legend cars on asphalt and then Super Late Models. He has state, regional and track championships to his name. Elliott has been racing since he was 14. He, too, has track and state championships to his credit, along with being named state rookie of the year. Elliott has, in fact, finished a very respectable ninth racing against big names in NASCAR.

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