Often during the winter months when we’re not in the fields we take the opportunity to get off the farm. This year, my brother Darin and I went with two other employees from the farm to World Ag Expo in California, and then to visit some dairy farms.
We attend World Ag Expo every year. Even though it’s the same event every year, there are always different things to see. New equipment and new technology to use in the dairy industry. We not only learn about new things we can do on our farm, but new things that people in other parts of the country are doing. It really opens our minds to different ways of thinking.
While in California, we had the opportunity to visit some dairy farms. Even though we’re on the other side of the country, we share similar issues. Typically, farmers are transparent. We talked about how they’re tackling the challenges versus how we’re handling them. Are there commonalities? Will their solutions work for us? Most of the time, farmers are willing to share what they learned, their struggles and their successes. If they can help someone else along the way, that’s a definite plus.
While we were visiting a friend’s farm in California, we learned that he had a neighbor who was in the process of putting in robotic milkers. So, we went there to talk to him about the experience. The timing was perfect because we knew we were going to start construction in a few weeks on our own robotic milker project.
You just never know what you’re going to come across when you go on these trips. We went to a farm to visit a friend, and we ended up going to another farm, bouncing ideas off each other and learning something completely different.