A Year in the Life of a Farmer: Dairy Expo provides opportunity to evaluate machine

Follow the Mitchell family throughout the entire year. Each month, look for updates about the family members and the decisions they make on their farm.

WINNEBAGO, Ill. — Checking out equipment and products for dairy operations and talking with dairymen and industry experts are just a couple reasons dairymen attend the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin.

“Our TMR mixer is worn out to the point that it needs to be heavily refurbished, so I crawled around the new TMR mixers at the expo to see what designs I liked,” said John Mitchell, who together with his brother, Aaron, are partners in Mitchell Dairy and Grain LLC.

“I also quizzed people that I knew about the mixers they run and why,” Mitchell said. “On Monday, we bought a used TMR mixer from an equipment dealer about four hours north of here.”

The Meyer TMR mixer features belts instead of a chain for an unloading conveyor.

“It is supposed to be quieter and smoother feedout,” Mitchell said.

“This mixer has a rear commodity door, so you can open that door at the back and dump feed out rather than having to feedout through the conveyor,” he said. “That should be nice and save a little bit of wear and tear on the unloading system when it’s just ground corn or a premix.”

Delivery of the Meyer mixer should happen by the end of October.

“It has been refurbished with new screws, baffles and door on the front, so we hope it will last for a number of years without having to do much to it,” Mitchell said. “They are adding a new conveyor extension, so we can dump into some of our heifer bunks to reach a little higher and further away.”

The dairymen decided to keep their current mixer, which they purchased in 2014.

“That will be nice to have a backup because we really didn’t have a good backup plan if the mixer went down,” Mitchell said. “Our current mixer works fine — it’s just that the augers are worn out.”

At the expo, Mitchell also checked out a bedding delivery trailer that is designed to transport the manure solids bedding from the production building to the stalls in the freestall barn for the 400-cow registered Holstein herd.

“Right now, we have a truck with an old slinger manure spreader on the back,” Mitchell said. “The trailer is a similar concept, but it uses conveyor belts rather than augers and it’s pulled behind a tractor.”

Original versions of the bedding delivery trailers were designed for sand bedding.

“They have developed ones for lighter materials like manure solids bedding or sawdust that are more likely to bridge up,” Mitchell said. “But the trailer is more of a wish list item.”

The availability of feed that are part of the herd’s ration such as distillers’ grains, corn gluten feed and soy hulls is currently not a problem.

“But prices have been high and not dropping, so that’s a little scary,” Mitchell said. “My nutritionist is going to be here today and he’s got some prices on two different mixes, one with NovaMeal and one without.”

NovaMeal is a heat treated distillers’ grain, Mitchell said.

“It’s something we’re looking at with the high soybean prices,” he said.

Milk prices are also shifting.

“Protein prices have dropped quite a bit and butterfat prices have been historically strong,” Mitchell said. “The cash butter prices are as high as they’ve ever been and now we’re starting to see that for the way we get paid for butterfat.”

As a result, the dairymen are thinking about making some tweaks to the ration.

“We may pull some of the expensive ingredients that favor protein and put that money towards ones that favor fat,” Mitchell said. “Now that we have all our forages in place for the year, we can decide which direction to head.”

Early indications are the quality of this year’s corn silage is good.

“The moisture was exactly what we wanted and there’s a lot of corn, so it should feed well,” Mitchell said. “The fiber and starch digestibility are more dictated after the silage is fermented and it takes three to four months to be fully fermented, so we’ll test the silage a week or two before we start feeding it.”

Rye has been seeded on 135 acres following the corn silage harvest, which will be harvested next year as ryelage.

“That’s similar to what we had this year, maybe up slightly,” Mitchell said. “Hopefully, the rain we got this morning will be good for that.”

As corn harvest is getting started, Mitchell is looking forward to having new crop corn in the bin on the farm instead of buying it from the feed mill.

“Although it is handy when it shows up in the commodity shed and I don’t have to do any work with it,” he said.

The dairymen are now starting to focus on preparing for winter.

“There’s a couple of things we’ve put off like garage door repairs because they stay open during the summer, so we don’t worry about it,” Mitchell said. “There are some lights we are looking to replace and we need to replace one curtain on the freestall barn.”

And before too many days of freezing temperatures, they will also be checking to make sure all of the water heaters are functioning properly.

In addition, they are working on a plan to repair or replace capital items.

“I’m relieved the TMR mixer is figured out, but we have a skid loader and a wheel loader that have pretty high hours, repair costs mounting and functionality diminishing,” Mitchell said.

“I try to gather information and make decisions on what to repair, replace or do nothing, because I don’t like surprises,” Mitchell said.

“We put about 1,000 hours per year on that skid loader, so you can only do nothing for so long,” he said. “And the loader tractor we use as a backup to the wheel loader takes a lot longer, so I end up with an hour less per day to get other things done.”