High-Tech Dairy Farm Milks Success From Modern Innovation
Calvin DeGolyer savors memories of his boyhood on the family farm, back when horses pulled every plow, cows were milked by hand and caring for 200 chickens was his 4-H Club project.
Farmers like his father raised a variety of livestock and crops and sold surplus meat, eggs and cream in the village. Neighbors relied on neighbors, and the Fourth of July celebration started with a community prayer.
Then Calvin and his two brothers went off to fight in World War II, the eldest never to return. When he and Avery came home in 1946, the first signs of the monumental change in agriculture over the next 50 years awaited them.
“Dad had a little tractor and a milking machine,” DeGolyer, now 74, recalls with a soft chuckle.
“We kinda hooked our tail to a wildcat. Mechanization was what really changed things. We had to learn to adapt to it and go with it and not let it get the best of us.”
The drift toward bigger, fewer and more specialized farms, driven by rapid advances in science and technology, carried the DeGolyers along with it.
At crucial points along the way, three generations of the family tried to steer an innovative route at Table Rock Farm. Sometimes that meant latching on to new ideas--planting corn in narrower rows, injecting manure in the soil, more judicious use of pesticides--that strike a balance between conservation and commerce and invoke the common-sense practices of a long-ago era.
It was 1915 when C. Scott DeGolyer, an engineer for the U.S. Geological Survey, fell in love with the 600-foot-deep gorge near this western New York village and bought a tract of gently rolling upland nearby.
The old 115-acre spread--an apple orchard, wheat, alfalfa and bean fields, 30 ewes, 10 cows, four horses and a chicken flock--is now a 1,020-acre, high-tech dairy with 900 Holsteins, a dazzling array of harvesters and milking gear, and more than $2 million in annual sales.
“In my grandfather’s time, the concept was, ‘Don’t put your eggs in one basket,’ ” says Calvin’s nephew, Willard. “Now, you put your eggs in one basket, but you make sure it’s a pretty good basket.”
Even here in the forward-leaning, big-farm country of Wyoming County, Table Rock Farm stands as a model of efficiency. Each cow delivered 24,000 pounds of milk and each acre produced 22 tons of corn silage last year, both one-third more than the statewide average.
Hybrid crops, fertilizers and pesticides have sent yields way up, just as artificial insemination, computer-calculated diets and airy, stall-free barns designed to minimize stress have transformed animals into super performers.
In New York, half as many cows (703,000) are producing twice as much milk (11.6 billion pounds) as a century ago.
Because only the best farmland is needed, each year about 100 square miles of land revert to forest or wilderness or are gobbled up by urban encroachment. Half of New York was farmland in 1956; now, just a quarter is.
Although dairying accounts for 60% of the $3 billion in annual sales, farming remains diversified here. New York is the nation’s cabbage and cottage-cheese king and trails only Michigan in harvests of tart cherries.
But while most farms remain small or medium-sized, big is winning out: Of 7.9 million acres, 4.2 million belong to farms with at least $100,000 in sales.
As productivity improves, prices
climb slowly. Milk has gone up less than 75 cents a gallon in 20 years. Thus, farms are having to become ever more efficient to stay ahead.
All too often, those that fail to invest heavily in new technologies, and get bigger, are failing.
“I don’t know how much harder it can get,” laments Ed Wright, whose 550-acre dairy and maple syrup farm is hemmed in by hills in Cattaraugus County south of here. “You’ve got to work just about every minute to get your money to pay the expenses.”
“There’s more of a spread between the top and the bottom,” said John Lincoln, president of the New York Farm Bureau.
In the next decade, however, the deregulation of global markets could slow or even reverse the precipitous slide in the number of New York farms--from 136,000 in 1950 to 36,000 today, Lincoln says.
Similarly, the gradual elimination of federal subsidies, a legacy of the Depression, could invigorate agriculture by giving farmers a better chance to make more money.
“It throws them back on their own capabilities, and hard work should always be rewarded,” says Calvin DeGolyer.
Although he still helps with bookkeeping and buying supplies, DeGolyer leaves his nephew to manage an enterprise that resembles an industrial park. The barns take up a dozen acres; the milking parlor is used round-the-clock.
In the 1960s, soon after the DeGolyers gambled all on dairying, theirs became one of the first farms in the nation to try group feeding: distinguishing the diverse nutrient needs of cows at different lactation stages.
Lately, using sophisticated manure spreaders, they’ve been injecting the herd’s manure in the soil before spring planting, virtually eliminating the need for fertilizer and thwarting complaints about odor.
Most farmers till in manure or lay it on top, even in winter, losing valuable nitrates to the air and increasing the risk of runoff that pollutes streams.
Last year they planted corn in 15-inch instead of 30-inch-wide rows, and expect the higher yield to quickly pay off the costly adaptation of planters. Extra ground-cover also reduces soil erosion, but weeds are a problem because of the difficulty of spraying in the narrower rows.
The new practices “make not only environmental sense but tremendous economic sense,” says Willard DeGolyer, 49, a father of five whose eldest, Meghan, returned home this summer to try agriculture as a career.
The DeGolyers want to do their part to avert the need for stricter environmental regulations by trying out ecologically sound practices that might catch on everywhere.
“Almost all the larger farms that are going to survive are taking this kind of attitude, which it seems is very important for all of us,” says Bernard Stanton, an agricultural economist at Cornell University.
“Most farmers are not exploiters; they’re stewards. And they’re learning to become better stewards.”
Every day demands flexibility, business acumen and a degree of risk-taking. Increasingly, farmers are relying on outside specialists--breeders, extension agents, crop scouts--to get it all just right.
Agriculture is running headlong into another revolution: In the 21st century, every aspect seems likely to be transformed by computers, portending change on a scale likely to surpass even that of the last 50 years.
Whatever the future holds, Calvin DeGolyer knows he must embrace the changes, and mold them.
“I look back on my wonderful childhood and try to apply the principles to our present living,” he says. “Family and faith in God are stabilizing influences, really more important than how big an operator you are.”
