With ‘Friends’ Like Millie, Velvet, Nell and Tulip, Who Needs Uncle Sam? : Why a Kansas Farmer Chose Not to Send His Cows to Slaughter

Bud Wohler stood with his overalls stuffed into rubber boots watching a calf suck milk from a plastic bottle through a nipple the size of his thumb.

“The last straw,” he said, “would be sending that calf to slaughter. Her and about 140 other heifers.

“Makes no sense. The slaughterhouse doesn’t want her. It costs as much to slaughter a little one as a big one and this one isn’t worth her weight in meat.”

Besides, he said, it would be cruel.

“I would have to brand a three-inch X on her cheek. They say I don’t have to use a hot iron but could use a ‘cold brand,’ whatever that is. Either way, I believe it would make it hard for her to eat.”

“So,” he said, “for these and other reasons, I decided to pass up this opportunity.”

Knows a Good Deal

Myron Wohler, known as Bud to his neighbors, is not one to pass up a good deal or to let sentiment intrude unduly on efficient farming. Not out here on the plains of northeast Kansas, not in these hard times.

Like all dairymen, he routinely culls the poor producers out of his herd. “Milk the best and sell the rest.” He also, as a sideline, keeps the bull calves his cows produce and raises them for the beef market.

No, Bud Wohler is a practical farmer with a sizable dairy herd--90 cows on the milking line--and the opportunity he chooses to pass up is the government’s offer to buy him out.

All he had to do was sell his whole herd at a price he felt fair and stay out of the dairy business for five years. Meanwhile, he could continue to produce anything he wanted on his 900 acres except milk.

Tempting. For a farm couple like Bud and Lucille Wohler, their children grown, themselves at an age when most couples begin to think seriously about retirement, it would seem like the chance of a lifetime.

Others apparently thought so. Nationwide, 40,000 dairy farmers jumped at the chance in the first few weeks of the program. Before the buy-out ran into some legal entanglements, the Agriculture Department had accepted about 14,000 bids.

Cut in Milk Output

The program’s aim is to reduce U.S. milk production by 12 billion pounds a year by killing or exporting 950,000 dairy cows and 600,000 heifers and calves. The program will cost $1.8 billion, part of it to be raised by assessing dairymen, like Wohler, who choose not to participate. Dairymen who participate set a price on their herds that the USDA accepts or rejects.

“In the mid-America region,” Wohler said, “they accepted every bid from $22.50 on down. Only one farmer bid $22.50, a guy over in Manhattan. We figure he must have known something. The lowest bid was $3.40. So it was sort of a crapshoot.”

He asked Lucille for the calculator--as important an instrument to today’s farmer as a hayfork--and, over coffee at the kitchen table, did some figuring.

“That’s $22.50 per thousand pounds of average production. A gallon, by the way, is 8.6 pounds. Let’s see. My average is 3,000 pounds a day, times $22.50, times 365 days. That comes to $246,375. That’s what that bid would net me.

“But I’d probably have bid about $15.” He punched more buttons. “That would come to $164,000, still a pretty good reason for a 55-year-old dairy farmer to quit for five years and do something else. And that doesn’t include what my cows and heifers would bring at the slaughterhouse.” The heifers, once bred, become the replacement pool for his milkers.

It All Hinges on the Bid

“If you bid right,” he said, “and your bid is accepted, you should have no argument.”

Beef producers, who include Wohler, on a smaller scale, did have an argument. No sooner had the buy-out started than they sued the USDA in federal court complaining that dairy cattle flooding the market were depressing beef prices.

That was resolved by the government agreeing to buy up enough extra beef (for the military, for domestic food programs, for export) to offset the cow influx, and to see that the cows are slaughtered gradually over the 18-month life of the program.

The face brand is to make sure none slips back into production. Is Wohler’s objection to the branding, which is the same as that of the Humane Society, all that is keeping him from an economic windfall in these hard times for American farmers?

“The branding, yes, and the slaughtering of calves. They won’t even let you give the calves to somebody not in the milk business and let them grow up. It just seems wrong.

“If it were just Lucille and me I might have made a bid. I say that, but I’m not sure. Even if I thought it was the best thing for us, I’m not sure I could bring myself to it.”

Bud Wohler is a big man with a big voice. Some might say gruff. But if you watch the Wohler operation at the evening milking, watch his blue eyes light up as he moves among his cows, you get a sense of what he means.

Annette Leads Pack

“The first cow in line will be number 66,” he said. “Annette. She’s a good old cow, but she’s slowing down. I guess she’s going to have to go to town soon. The last one in will be 121, Holly.”

Sure enough, the cow with ear tag 66 shouldered her way through the lumbering Holsteins and stood on the milking barn ramp, first in line. Number 121 moseyed around outside, holding out until last.

As the cows went through the milking barn, six at a time on the milking machines, Wohler knew the eccentricities of each one as well as their production charts.

“Here’s number 6, Janice. She will kick at me once. Just playing.” She did. “Here’s Little Dolly, 33. If this were a big dairy, she wouldn’t be around. Marginal, but I like her. Some of them you get attached to.”

The parade continued: Millie, Velvet, Doris, Liz, Josie, Nell, Tulip . . . until all 90 cows passed through, an earthy and satisfying ritual done twice a day, every day.

Wohler’s daughter, Ronda, works alongside him in the milking barn. She lives on the next farm over. Her husband, Bob Kopfer, works in town but also helps Bud in the grainfields.

Bud’s oldest son, Jim, is with him on the farm full-time. Jim’s wife, Cindy, sees to the newborn calves. Bud’s second son, Larry, raises hogs nearby but often drops by for the evening milking. Under a shade tree near the house, seven grandchildren make their own fun.

The only one not present was Doug, the youngest son. Doug had gone off to college, longing for his graduation and return home to work the dairy with his father and brother. Holly, the last cow in line, was one Doug had raised as a 4-H Club project.

Killed in Truck Accident

Doug was killed last February in a pickup truck accident. It devastated Bud and Lucille, of course, and seemed, when the government buy-out offer came along, all the more reason to accept it--”Just quit for a time,” as Bud said, “and try to get over this awful thing.”

But, no. The milking done, the barn hosed down, the children and grandchildren gone home for supper, Bud Wohler stood in the dooryard and surveyed his domain. The only sounds were those of a distant tractor and of meadowlarks nearby.

“When the children were little,” he said, “and we took them to the county fair, I always told them: ‘If you get lost, go to the cow barn. You will find good people there who will know you and help you.’

“If I ever do retire, this is what I would want to retire to. I don’t know any other way of life, or any better one.

“Some time ago Lucille and I picked out our cemetery lot and selected our gravestones. On hers, we had them carve a rose. She loves roses.

“On mine, I had them carve a cow.”