Majestic Crossing Dairy

By Darin Strauss

Our cows’ diet is developed by a nutritionist in order to feed them the best diet possible. It’s a better diet than I eat, actually. We feed our cows like elite athletes. That way, they produce fresh, high-quality milk. Our cows eat a mixture of corn, hay, grain and nutritional supplements.

The nutritionist knows exactly how many nutrients are in our crops and how much the cows need.

For example, we grow hay. There is a sugar component in hay. Sugar is energy. If you get a big crop and then it rains, it can wash a certain percentage of that energy away. That’s why farmers work hard. They work late into the night to beat the next rain storm. We need the sugar in the hay to help it go through a curing period. We need certain numbers to meet a cow’s nutritional needs in a cost effective manner. If everything goes right, there is a nice fermentation process. If you don’t get the sugar in the crop, you don’t get fermentation.

When we grow a crop, it is based on getting that crop to a certain quality. None of it is in our control. We won’t know the nutrient content until October. Farming requires an optimistic attitude that Mother Nature will cooperate. It’s always a gamble, but it pays off when we see our cows enjoying their fresh, high-quality feed every day.

I am Dean’s mother, Sandy Strauss. As his Mother, I wanted to share some news about Dean’s health for everyone who cares about him. In July, Dean experienced sudden cardiac arrest while driving home from a dairy meeting in St. Paul.

Dean’s last blog and Facebook post is titled, “No One Does It Alone” and is about how farming takes a team. It is also about remembering to thank the people who got you where you are and expressing gratitude for your team every day. It was posted on July 17th. Little did Dean know how much his life would change the next day. Dean loved everything he did each day. He loved his family and let it show.

We all went 36 hours without sleep as we went to St. Paul with the help of our son-in-law, Rick, daughter, Sara, and Jen Walsh. The first 24-48 hours were critical. This was the magic timeline to see if Dean would survive. He was at Regions Hospital in St. Paul for many weeks. He is now at Select Specialty Care Hospital in West Allis. We hope he will be transferred to a rehabilitation center in the near future. Hopefully closer.

Through all of this, we have had many calls, texts and messages sent to us on Dean’s behalf. We have also met many new people filled with love and concern for Dean, mainly in prayer form. If you ask what can be done? Prayers for healing and patience.

While traveling to see him this week, I wrote “The sky is bright and the clouds are white, yet nothing is right.” We are going to hold our shields together in prayer and believe the Lord is going to make things right in time and patience. Our strength comes from Heaven Above.

Dean’s office is empty now, but his presence is there. The farm goes on with his team he has always expressed so much gratitude for.

As the four families who run Majestic Crossing Dairy, we have decided to continue the farm’s blog and Facebook page. It is what Dean would want.

Thank you so much for your thoughts and prayers. We will continue to keep you updated on Dean’s health.

Farming takes a team. There are no true solo acts. My guys who work here are dedicated, and I can’t say enough about them. When we were planting, it would rain for four days and then stop. We would have to go like crazy. Some days we would head out to the fields at 5:30 p.m. and plant until 1:00 a.m. That’s a run.

We chose this profession, so I’m not complaining. I had a wedding to attend on June 8^th and couldn’t help with planting. One of my guys planted for 23 hours straight. He sat in the tractor for 23 hours! Thankfully, our tractor is high-tech. It has auto steer, so you are basically watching monitors and gauges, which minimizes operator fatigue. Before the high-tech tractors, your brain would start to hallucinate staring at the line in the field for hour upon hour. Now, drivers can look around. It really helps.

Technology today has made farming less labor intensive, but you still have to put in the time. Remember to always say thanks to the people who got you where you are going. I have gratitude for my guys every day.

We finished planting on June 22^nd. We are usually finished 10 days to two weeks prior to that date. This spring, most farmers — like us — were three weeks behind schedule. 

You may have noticed how plants in your own yard didn’t grow as fast as usual this spring. My wife, Kris, manages the flowers in our yard, and now that it is warm, her plants have really taken off. While we all experience frustrations when the plants in our yards are not growing at their usual pace, for farmers, having our crops behind schedule can have a huge impact on dollars.

Imagine if you had hundreds or thousands of acres. Our first crop of hay that we feed our cows sat in the field and didn’t grow for two weeks. In farming, every crop we plant is scheduled on a deadline based on “typical” weather. We try to get a crop to full maturity before the first frost in the fall. Farmers don’t need a frost in the last week of September. That would be detrimental because it would kill the plants we feed our cows, and our yield wouldn’t be as strong. Wisconsin is technically a grain-deficit area to start with. If farmers have to buy grain to feed our animals, it is expensive. 

This isn’t simply happening in Wisconsin. Farmers in Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, New York and Kansas are facing the same issue. It’s a major concern.

How will this impact you? That’s hard to answer. Milk prices may go up, but it is always a nutritional bargain at about $.25 cents a glass. Let’s hope we have a long growing season so we can keep it that way.

This photo was taken in 1967, the year my dad graduated from high school. In this photo, he is receiving the Outstanding Achievement Award for Agriculture from the Future Farmers of America, now called the FFA. The other person is receiving the Outstanding Future Homemaker Award. I feel honored to have followed in my Dad’s footsteps by being quite involved in FFA as well.

I was an FFA officer for three years and also served as the president of our local chapter. Just like my Dad, I was proud to receive awards from FFA. I went to our State Convention and received the State Farmer Award and the American FFA Degree, nationally.

I asked my Dad to tell us about the photo.

“Working on the farm always attracted me. I didn’t do sports. Instead, I preferred to go out to the barn to help milk our 50 cows before and after school. Farming and FFA were my extracurricular activities. I had a guidance counselor who once told me that if I was going to farm, he would write me off as a lost cause. It was different then — the agriculture courses at our local technical college didn’t exist. If you wanted to study farming, you had to go to Farm & Industry Short Course at the UW, but that didn’t materialize for me.

My dad was 35 when I was born and 52 when I graduated high school. He had a few health issues, so I stayed at home and helped on the farm instead of heading off to school to study farming. My mother’s favorite comment was, “The world will always need food so they will always need a farmer.” Her comment still stands true; however, the world of farming is drastically different than when this photo was taken.”

One thing that will never change: My love for dairy farming that my Dad and I still share.

Imagine if you weighed every bite of food in your kitchen. Then, you did everything possible to make sure every morsel was eaten to conserve costs. That’s what we do on the farm every day. 

We weigh every crop we harvest as it comes in from the field. Then, every day we weigh the wagon of mixed feed we give our cows. We compare feed input numbers to milk production statistics, while continually looking at the energy costs and emissions of how we grow feed, transfer feed and manage nutrients. 

It is important to farmers to be sustainable economically, socially and environmentally. Farmers are so far ahead in the U.S. on sustainability. Part of this is driven by a commitment the dairy community made to help accelerate the adoption of innovative waste-to-energy projects and energy efficiency improvements on U.S. dairy farms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I am on the board of directors of Dairy Management Inc., our national dairy promotion organization. At a recent meeting, I learned that the number of people making food purchase decisions based on beliefs is rising across all ages and incomes. People buy based on the company’s belief system. They call it “ethical eating.” Consumers believe ethical eating is sustainable eating. That’s why it is important dairy farmers talk about their sustainable practices. 

We’ve always practiced sustainability. It’s how we have continued to farm. Using technology like GPS, we are down to one inch of planting precision, which reduces fuel and seed costs. Last year, we installed Lely robots to milk our cows. An unexpected outcome was a decrease in water usage by 30%, equating to less than 20 gallons per cow per day. This saves us $30,000 – $40,000 in manure handling, plus improves nutrient density. 

We always need to look to do more with less. Sometimes our methods don’t work out and we change them again. Asking ourselves questions drives continuous improvement which makes us more sustainable.