Caring for Cows, Plus Bookkeeping and Breeding : Some Determined Women Take On Dairy Farm Ownership

Dawn breaks on a damp, overcast day, and Gwen West already is hard at work, scooping powdery meal onto the ceramic floor in front of 20 black-and-white dairy cows.

While the Holsteins eat, West wipes one cow’s udder with a disinfectant-soaked paper towel. After giving a gentle pull to each teat to make sure that the milk has dropped, she applies four vacuum milking tubes, pats the bovine’s rump and approaches the next cow.

“I like to milk,” says the 29-year-old woman, wiping stray hairs with her upper arm as a cow’s tail slaps her smudged face. “I have a college degree. I could have done something else, but nothing appealed to me.”

Few women own and operate a dairy farm; West is one. As hired milkers, herders, or farm spouses and daughters, women are heavily involved in most of this country’s dairy operations.

Owners and Operators

But they are noticeably absent as owners and operators. According to the U.S. Census for 1982, the most recent year for which figures are available, women run only 3% of the nation’s 164,472 dairy farms.

Officials say that’s partly because most dairy farms are family operations and ownership is often in the name of the male head of the household.

“A dairy farm depends much more on family labor, constant family labor. You need someone there seven days a week, morning and night, and then you need somebody to do the crop stuff in the summer,” says Carolyn Sachs, a professor of rural sociology at Penn State University who wrote a book on women farmers called “The Invisible Farmers.”

“Basically you just won’t find one person who is doing it, man or woman,” she says. “Most men would never start a dairy farm until they were married.”

Twice a Day

“On many farms the woman is the person who takes care of the herd,” says Pam Karg of Wisconsin Dairies, a dairy cooperative based in Baraboo, Wis. “She’s often the one who’s out there twice a day doing the milking, and the man will do the field work. While he may make the final decision, she’s got a lot of influence.”

About midmorning on a sunny day in Walton, N.Y., Arlene McClenon drives a load of freshly baled hay to the barn on her 126-acre farm. In the summer, after the morning milking, McClenon spends most of her time making hay and harvesting other crops.

The 52-year-old woman has been running a dairy farm alone since 1962.

“It’s just what I wanted to do, and I’m not sorry,” says McClenon, who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture for 11 years before becoming a farmer.

McClenon milks 33 cows and has 15 head of young stock. Her father, who’s 76 and in a wheelchair, can drive a tractor and do some of the field work, and teen-agers are hired to help bale and stack hay. But for the most part, McClenon is on her own.

“It’s hard work, there’s no two ways about it,” she says.

Feeding Calves

In the middle of the afternoon in Roseau, Minn., Marsha Dahlgren pours milk into about 20 half-gallon bottles and fastens a large rubber nipple on the end of each one.

Working quickly, she places the bottles on a rack before a group of bawling calves, who become suddenly quiet as they suckle the warm milk. It’s a scene Dahlgren enjoys, a constant, pleasant reminder of why she resigned six years ago as a physical education teacher to go into the dairy business with her brother on the family farm.

“It was a lifetime dream for me,” says the 35-year-old Dahlgren. “I started with 4-H work when I was 11 and always liked cows a lot. All the time I was teaching I’d come out here and help with chores.”

Dahlgren and her brother began their business when her parents retired. The two borrowed $300,000 to buy about 50 cows to add to their parents’ small herd of 20 and build two silos, a calf barn and an insulated dairy barn.

Brother Farms

The duties are pretty evenly divided; Dahlgren is in charge of the cows and her brother farms about 800 acres of crops, about one-quarter of which will be used to feed their cows through the long, bitter Minnesota winters.

“I’m not married so I know I’m not depending on my husband to accomplish what I have accomplished,” says Dahlgren.

Dahlgren supplements her income by working for American Breeders Service. As a breeder, she is responsible for artificially inseminating beef and dairy cows in a two-county area in northern Minnesota.

“I’m into genetics and into getting calves out of cows,” she says.

Later in the day, when most people are having dinner, Fay Dickey of Leonard, Minn., is cleaning cow stanchions and laying down fresh straw bedding in preparation for the evening milking.

Ex-Opera Singer

As she milks, she sings to her cows with the strong, trained voice of an opera singer, her profession until she moved to Minnesota in 1970.

“They milk better,” she says simply. “I could be dancing to them, whistling, playing the violin. It’s the attention they get that they like.”

In 1970 the German-born Dickey gave up her singing career to become a farmer in Minnesota because she and her husband were “looking for a different life style.”

The two began raising beef cattle at first but switched to dairy cows in 1976.

“I had the feeling the only way you could make it in farming was with a dairy operation,” says Dickey, 50. “I watched my neighbors milk cows one night and I thought it was what I wanted to do.”

Teach How to Milk

Dickey struck a deal with a farmer who was selling a dairy herd: She’d buy his cows if he would teach her how to milk.

“It’s still the chuckle of the area,” she says. “You just don’t go into dairying without knowing anything about it.”

When Dickey and her husband separated five years ago, she kept the farm and he moved away. He still comes back in the summer to help harvest the crops, but responsibility for 42 cows and 40 head of young stock is shared by Dickey, her 17-year-old daughter and a hired hand. An older son and daughter have moved to other parts of the state but return home occasionally to help.

“The problem with these family farms is that you just can’t generate enough income to keep the offspring home,” says Dickey, who works as a public school teacher to make ends meet. “You have to have an outside income to support the farms nowadays.”

Breeding, Bookkeeping

An active woman in Minnesota dairy organizations, Dickey haggles prices with equipment and feed dealers, handles the bookkeeping, shovels manure, unloads grain silos, and milks and breeds cows.

“I spend a considerable amount of time looking through the bull catalogues,” she says with a hearty chuckle. “It’s like choosing a husband for your daughters. You want the best.”

At the end of the day, just before midnight, Gwen West returns to her barn in Slippery Rock to begin another milking.

Most farmers milk twice a day at 12-hour intervals, but West found that she could increase her production by 20%--and help pay off a $30,000 loan--by milking three times a day at eight-hour intervals.

After graduating from Penn State University with a degree in dairy science, West worked briefly as a laborer in a suburban Pittsburgh dairy and then was a herder for 3 1/2 years in Maryland.

Returned to Family Farm

“I was happy with my job, but I wasn’t satisfied, and I just up and left,” says West.

She returned home to the family farm, which had been idle for years, bought a herd and converted the barn to a dairy operation.

Except for haymaking duties, which she shares with a brother who raises beef cattle nearby, West is on her own, unable to afford hired help.

“It’s bad when you’re sick because you just have to keep going,” she says. “And there are times when I have trouble. They’re big cows. I had one with milk fever once, which means she can’t get up. I had to get help to get her out. I can’t do things like that. I can’t lift a cow. But any man would need help too, I think. They can’t pick up a cow either.”

“I think they still laugh at me, but I don’t care,” she says. “I’m milking three times a day, and I am doing it myself. I think they’re just watching me. They’re just watching, waiting and wondering.”