“Our assets are our livelihood on the farm, and we take that very seriously,” shared Adon Farms’ Nick Gilbert. “Dairy farming is a commodity business, economies of scale with small margins, and none of us actually make that much money.”
The New York dairyman said, “If you let the little things slip or don’t protect the big or little things, that is your profit margin that you’re risking. We take care of our assets because they help us take care of our animals.”
Three additional farms shared insight on “How they protect their assets” in this Hoard’s Dairyman Intel as well as the Round Table found on pages 726 to 728 of the December issue of Hoard’s Dairyman.
Here are additional responses to the question, “Why do you work so hard to protect your assets?”
Hempel Dairy, Lebanon, Mo.: Having built this operation from the ground up, the assets on it are incredibly important to us. Farming is what we always wanted to do, and it is my passion. We want to build a secure future for our family and, hopefully, our children. If we have protections in place, we all sleep better. We then have peace of mind knowing we have fewer surprises. If we are proactive dealing with problems, things go much better.
Meier Dairy, Palmer, Kan.: We chose this occupation, and it’s a 24/7 job that takes a lot of work. As parents, we were trying to raise a family and we had to work hard to provide for them, so we knew that we had to do everything to protect our farm from disaster. It’s also important to us because we love these animals. We try to do the right things all the time to protect our farm and learn from the mistakes we have made.
Wayside Dairy, Greenleaf, Wis.: There are a lot of assets here. They’re important to us to run the farm to keep people safe or to keep them employed and, obviously, to make a profit at the business and stay in business. We want to protect them for that sake and also for the next generation. Our people are important here, the community is important, so anything we can do to protect these assets, anything around us, that’s what we want to do. That describes our attitude toward the obvious things, but also things like the groundwater or the roads, and so forth.
