From Grass to Glass

On our travels throughout the heartland we’ve visited small farms, big farms, and really big farms. But there are some that, in size anyway, simply defy classification.

One would be a dairy farm that alone produces enough milk for some eight million people. There are so many cows, that an average of eighty calves are born there every day and the public’s invited in to see it all.

Just off I-65, the big barns and the cow on the sign give it away. At first glance, Fair Oaks Farm’s “Adventure Center” might make you think that this was the “Disneyland of Dairy.” There are animatronic figures touting the benefits of milk and skeletons that race up the wall to stress the importance of calcium. It’s all part of interactive exhibits on the process of producing milk.

But Fair Oaks Farm in Fair Oaks, Indiana is not just “info-tainment”. It’s one of the largest working dairy farms in the country. Set on 25 thousand acres, the farm will milk 32 thousand cows a day!

Gary Corbett is the chief executive officer for the farm. He says,” We wanted to give people a snapshot into the world of 21st century agriculture. We wanted to educate people as to what’s happening, but in an entertaining way.” He adds, “We thought it was a really great opportunity to open up our farms, open up what we do here and let people have a snapshot of what farming looks like at least from our perspective.”

After leaving Fair Oaks Farm’s “Adventure Center”, visitors board buses to tour one of ten dairy barns-each milking more than three thousand cows. Fair Oaks farms produces about 2 ½ million pounds of milk a day. That’s enough milk to meet all the fluid milk needs drinking milk needs of the City of Chicago, plus the city of Indianapolis. And how do you milk that many cows?
 
Well, the Holsteins do a lot of the work themselves. Three times a day they stroll over to a holding pen and then walk onto a 72 cow carousel where they’re hooked up, And milked. Corbett says, “The milking time takes about 8 ½ minutes. The carousel makes a trip every 8 ½ minutes. They milk out in about five minutes. They’ll get on, get off and away they go and they start the process all over again.”  The setup brings the work to the workers rather than having them go to the work and it provides “cow comfort” as well.
    
Milking here goes on almost around the clock. After coming off the carousel, cows make their way back to the pens. Each cow consumes about 40 pounds of grain, 50 pounds of silage and more than 30 gallons of water every day.

As you might expect, all of that creates lots of manure. Several times a day it’s vacuumed up and converted into energy in these digesters. Gary Corbett says that provides a resource, “We take the manure off there. Turn that into methane gas. That methane gas then powers our generators which provide electricity for that barn and for all the facilities that we have down here.”

One more note on technology. The cows wear collars with transponders. As they go onto the carousel, there’s a bar code reader just like your grocery store. The cow is read and her number is read into the records and so they have a record of how much milk she gives all three times that she’s milked. In addition, there’s also a pedometer on that transponder so they know how many steps that cow took during the day.

Fair Oaks Farm says it eventually plans to welcome half a million visitor’s year.-farmers and city folks. Victor Rodriguez and his family came from Montgomery, Illinois for a visit,” I’m not a farmer. Think I’ve only been on a farm only once or twice, so this was very eye opening for me.”

One of the most fascinating experiences for visitors is the birthing barn. With more than 80 calves a day being born on the farm, visitors get a chance to witness the experience in a special glass-walled theatre. It’s quiet here almost church-like. Gary Corbett says,

“They sit there with their mouths wide open and their eyes as wide as they can be and watch that process evolve as life is created and a new life comes into this world.” Gary adds that the farm’s approach to agriculture has given them an opportunity:  delivering a message with each glass of milk, “We try to get across three messages to the visitors coming here; one is that agriculture and the environment are compatible; two-agriculture and animal welfare are compatible and three: milk is good for you. So it is truly a labor of love for us.”

Some Dairy Details
A dairy cow will produce more than 2 thousand gallons of milk a year.  There are some 9 million dairy cows in the United States. The majority of them are Holsteins.

Fair Oaks Farm