By Annie A-W

“Summertime, and the living was easy….”  That’s how the song goes, but it doesn’t seem to be actually true at Dairy Train!  Suzanne is trying to keep the lawn mowed, and make a new flower bed by the lilacs, and ship out all the orders (business is good!). Mark hasn’t been seen at the office in weeks: he’s in the fields and milking now three times a day. Our newest employee, Wayne, is busy in the barn where we keep consignment inventory, counting and re-shelving and finding a few mystery parts that challenge our research skills! Donna continues her inventory-correction project while she copes with her grandson’s changing schedule – school is out now, but summer T-ball has started. Annie is busy weeding her garden and planting potatoes, remodeling the chicken coop, and setting up a new parlor-ads questionnaire form.  Whew!  At least the rains have been coming on time and the weather hasn’t been in the high 90’s…yet.

According to a recent The Country Today our state, Wisconsin, just achieved a historic milestone: the number of dairy farms is below 10,000 for the first time since the late 1800’s.  And the number of cows remains stable!  This contradiction seems to be explained by the growing number of “huge” dairies, milking a thousand or three thousand cows in rotary parlors, and feeding the girls with crops grown by farmers who have left dairying.

You’ll see that in our ads on dairytrain.com and dairytrainclassifieds.com: “Our seller has left dairying.” We are selling more parlors than ever before, and most of them come with a note “will consider best offer.”

We have buyers who are trying to expand their dairies on a budget.  Those buyers need only four milking units, or just the computerized feed system with a flexible auger.  Can you help us help them?  You’ll make some money on the sale!

We are the place for you, if you are selling or buying, for just one or for a whole package.  We take parts in on consignment.  We sponsor classified ads – we’ll write the ad and post it on the web, take the calls with questions or offers, and arrange the shipping!  On your behalf, we’ll call the potential buyer, and keep the deal both transparent and trustworthy, and anonymous and secure for both parties.  Our business is successful because we care about our reputation: you’ll get what you believe that you bought.

Dairy Train is successful, too, because, as reported in that same The Country Today article, “about half the farms in Vernon County [Wisconsin] are Grade B farms, shipping their milk in cans.”  We sell cans!  And tie-stall detachers, older models of meters and pulsators, and glass pipeline!  Whether your farm is a big 1000-cow dairy, or a mom-and-pop 50-cow dairy, we can be your source for replacement and surplus parts.

We’re going to have watermelon at lunch today. There’s a sign of summer! Give us a call and tell us about your dairy equipment, and while you are lounging in the hammock, under the shade of your big maple tree, we’ll make a sale!

 

By Annie A-W

Over a month ago, the boss put a copy of an article from Hoard’s Dairyman in our pay envelopes – and

I just got around to reading beyond the headline. The headline was “Is your state a friend or foe to

agriculture?” The details include that South Dakota is the friendliest state, to agriculture in general, and

at Number 49 on the list was New York – the largest dairy state in America.

WISCONSIN – our state – is ranked as “the friendliest dairy state” by the first-ever Agribusiness

Friendliness Index, created with thirty-eight variables by two professors at Colorado State University,

Greg Perry and James Pritchett. Some of the variables include tax policy, government regulation and

oversight, and the overall business climate of the state.

The 2014 “Review of Wisconsin’s Dairy Industry” reports that this year there are 10,860 farms

registered or recognized as “dairy farms” that are raising, milking, husbanding, selling, buying, and

culling 1,271,000 cows! There just 134 cheese plants, 13 butter plants, and 12 yoghurt plants in the

state (we have two on-the-farm processing plants for sale at dairytrainclassifieds). You can read the

entire 12-page review at http://www.wmmb.com/assets/images/pdf/WisconsinDairyData.pdf .

That same Hoard’s Dairyman page included a feature-box about Canada. Did you know…. that two out

of three Canadians are NOT getting their daily requirements for milk? As proof, the short article reports

that milk sales have fallen two percent (by volume) in the last year! So, what should they do about that?

The Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) hired registered dieticians, who created an app to help individuals

monitor their daily dairy input – and the DFC started a Get Enough campaign that includes a donation

of $1.00 (Canadian) for every use of the app, to be directed to either the Heart & Stroke Foundation, a

group called Osteoporosis Canada, or the Colorectal Cancer Association of Canada. Now, that’s using

technology in the dairy industry!

In June, the boss gave us all a copy of the an article from Dairy Herd Management headlined “German

Farm will install 44 milking robots for 2,500 cows.” Using technology designed by Lely (the Lely

Astronaut model), the Saxony farm will become over the next year the largest company in the world

using robotic milker units. Yes, of course, robots can solve the problem of finding qualified or dedicated

employees. Robotic milking systems also provides the dairy man or woman with computer-enhanced

monitoring of individual cows: which quarter isn’t milking out, or producing less due to mastitis scars;

the amount of feed consumed during milking; which inflation needs replacing; or foot-health on the

mats inside the stall. Technology can help us keep our cows healthier – and health cows are happy

cows, and happy cows make lots of milk!

The future of the dairy industry, in Wisconsin and around the world, is going to be dependent on

technology – of all sorts! Not every dairyman needs a robot, not every dairywoman wants to invest

the money into a new parlor. For the mom-and-pop operations, the 100-cow dairy farms, the 20-goat

parlors, DairyTrain offers new, used, and hard-to-find dairy equipment at affordable prices. We haven’t

sold a robotic unit yet – but as the research and development speeds up, the big ticket items will the

latest-and-greatest, and DairyTrain may sell this year’s model! Call us first – (608)539-2044 or 539-

2075 – or check out the websites: dairytrain.com and dairytrainclassifieds.com

Annie is an member of the Dairy Train Staff.  She teaches at the local college and works with us at Dairy Train bringing a fresh prospective to the company

Written by Annie A-W

With the sights and sounds of autumn — we work near the Mississippi Flyway, so geese, ducks, and Sand Hill cranes, are overhead daily – there are changes in the staff hours at Dairy Train. The phone still gets answered from dawn to dusk on weekdays (and some weekend days, too!) but the person answering the phone might not be the same from day to day. Call us at 608-539-2044 — somebody will answer the phone!!

School starts this week or next for Suzanne, Annie, Donna, and Cole. Suzanne is almost finished with her college degree; this will be her last semester (Whoo-Hoo!)   Cole is a full-time student, and this year, his grade is the oldest (and wisest?) in the building! Annie is a part-time college instructor, and teaches over the distance-learning networks in western Wisconsin. Donna is a full-time grandma, and school means a daily job of putting one of her grandsons on the bus, and meeting him when the bus brings him home!

The coming cold weather means that Mark is preparing to move his job from the barn, with a pen-on-paper inventory, to the house and the chore of updating the inventory on the computer.

The computers share space with Suzanne’s dogs – and the big table where we work does its daily duty as the lunch room/conference table on work days!

Autumn brings a sense of completion, too — even while we all prepare for a new chapter or a new class. This summer, we completed photographs and descriptions for items that have gathered dust and swallow-droppings for too many years. The new website www.dairytrain.comis up and running, and we add new items every day – from our own stock, and from the dealers and dairymen and women who are our customers. The new business, giving you the opportunity to write your own web ad, is www.dairytrainclassifieds.com. It attracts more and more buyers and sellers – especially since we appeared at Wisconsin’s Farm Technology Days in Plover (near Stevens Point) a few weeks ago! That event attracted 46,000 visitors to the 60-acre grounds, and Dairy Train and Dairy Smarter (hose trees, you know) handed out phone number magnets and an opportunity to guess the identity of some of our antique items. It was a great summer! We learned a lot, we sold a lot, we helped dairies get outfitted, and we helped cows get milked!

Dairy Train offers delivery of new, used, and hard-to-find dairy equipment (and some goat milking equipment!). We want to be the first place you think of as you clean the barn, upgrade the parlor, or need a spare part! The second half of the year promises to be a good one for all of us.

 

Written by Annie A-W

Last week, the Dairy Train staff (all five of them!) travelled several hours west to visit a dealer and start an inventory of the accumulated dairy equipment in his four buildings.  After forty years in business, a good marriage, two kids, an incorporated partnership, and commercial success in that farm town, the dealer is thinking about retirement.  “If I can’t make any more money staying in business than I can getting out, well…,” he said to us.  The dealership’s assets include the buildings full of agitator paddles, barn cleaner chain, tank washers, vacuum pump motors, inflations and shells, about a hundred tanks of all different sizes and manufacturers, and a whole lot of stuff that – speaking for me – I had no idea how to identify and label. What I did understand was that there was history there.

 

This dealer got into business back in the day of the tie-stall and bucket milker.  He stayed in business through the glass pipeline era (anybody need a weigh jar?), and through the change-over to stainless steel pipeline.  He saw vacuum pumps get larger, smarter, and made with integrated oilers and variable speeds.  The tanks he has on the store’s field range from 500 gallons to 1000 gallons, and from full circles with legs, to oval-shapes, to the flat-top that are easy to clean and finding their way into the maple syrup communities and wine making start-ups.  The buildings were well-organized by category or type.  All the agitator paddles, from a cut-off sphere on a stick to the whirly-gig and four-blade styles, were in one place, standing up out of blue barrels; the milk separators that really worked and weren’t just for flowers, were all in the center of the room; the shells – oh, the shells! – were in rows of buckets and bins and barrels, all by type: the Continentals, the Boumatic flare, the DeLaval lip, the dull Surge oldies.

 

I’m old enough to remember when the dairy farmer up the road, who hired me every summer to ride around on the hay wagon or take my turn loading the loft, would call us up if the electricity failed, and he had a couple of Pine Tree milker buckets handy, just in case. (Do you remember them? Check out http://www.surgemilker.com/history.html). I remember when a “big” farm was 200 cows, and when you raised your own young stock, and perhaps borrowed a bull for a week or two.  I live now in western Wisconsin, and there are still some smallish farms, with “grandma houses” now sheltering the hired hands, milking twice a day. White-painted milk houses are attached to the ends of some barns. Calf huts line up in the side yard and a feed bin stands next to a working silo.  In my neighborhood, too, are corporate farms with giant pole sheds and the smell of manure pits, and milk houses that have tank-docking facilities, so the milk goes from cow to cooler to the truck to the creamery, all in one morning.  There’s not a cow in sight, they all live indoors!

 

I understand the need for cost-containment and efficiency, and I get the math of “Big is Best.”  But the moms and pops are still out there bringing milk to the people.  There are still dairy farmers with tie stalls using portable detachers, with small Jersey herds that give us butterfat using a specially sized claw.  Where will they go for equipment and supplies when that dealer we visited goes out of business?  Who’s got an elbow or the gasket, to repair the pipeline and re-configure it to the new trap?  Where do you find the right bolt, the replacement timer, a filter sock, or a new tank-cleaning brush? Where do you find an inflation to fit that old shell that has served you well these last twenty-plus  years?  If the dealers all get old and retire, where will the dairy farmer go for parts and advice and a little jaw-wagging?  That was not something we talked about as we sat around the table in the dealer’s front shop and ate the banana bread that his wife baked for us.  We had just spent a large chunk of the day contemplating all that stuff, looking at and sorting through all those unlabeled but very important pieces of equipment.  We knew that we were witnessing some sort of an ending.

 

The cows haven’t really changed, and neither has the business of dairy farming:  you take care of The Girls and you sell your product to the company store.  The “harvesting” equipment has changed – there are robotic milkers in my neighborhood – and the number of people who understand how the thing works, or how The Girls will like it, is shrinking.  The dealers are retiring, the dairy farmers are getting old, and the milk check gets smaller in relation to the cost of the dairy barn set-up.  Who will be there when your milking equipment breaks down – and The Girls are letting you know that they are unhappy?  Only a small part of the answer is Dairy Train “bringing you new, used, and hard-to-find dairy equipment.”  The other part of the answer is with you, in the dairy business.  Dealer, farmer, hired hand or corporate manager, cheese-maker, milk-drinker: what’s going to happen to the business when the old world is irretrievably retired?

Annie is a member of the Dairy Train Staff.  She is by trade a teacher who teaches as an adjunct at our local Technical College.  

Welcome to the Dairy Train.   We started our site in 2006 and decided it was time for a fresh look.  This new platform is easier to navigate more customer friendly.

Dairy Train embraces the diversity of our customers computer skills.  If you can’t find what you are looking for or would rather speak to a live person, please contact us at 608-539-2444.  We are willing to assist you with finding that new, used or hard to find piece of dairy equipment.