A dear friend of mine once told me that anyone who could afford to take a couple weeks away from their work really must not be needed at their job

Uncertain times in the dairy world make our road to robotic milking scary, but here we go. We are finally finished with our plans to add robots on the sides of our conventional freestall flush barn

A big part of my husband’s and my decision to come back to the farm was based on the way we wanted to raise our family. There really is no comparison to the values and lessons that this way of life...

The school bell rang last week and my kids went back to school. Truthfully, it will be an adjusting period for our entire household, as we have three children in three different schools — freshman,...

Our staff is like our family. They might not be related to us by blood, but we respect and care about them like we would our own

It is no secret that the politics in California are a joke. For decades, California’s politics have haunted the agricultural community, but over the past few years we have been able to watch its...

I think we can all agree that we are beyond frustrated with the state of the dairy industry

It’s been a summer where we have found ourselves short on help with a never-ending to-do list

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that what we’re doing right now in the dairy industry isn’t working. If it were, family farms wouldn’t be selling out at such an alarming...

Who in their right mind would choose a career that requires attention and responsibility 24 hours a day, 365 days a year?

“An almond doesn’t lactate,” may be the best statement said in favor of the dairy industry that I’ve heard lately, and it was a quote by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner...

Growing up in the 1980s on my family's dairy farm in central Oregon, I really was unaware of the farm crisis

How many risk management meetings have you been to in the last two years? I must've attended at least three or four and been invited to over a dozen

Dairies normally have guidelines for culling cows, but how many of you have written rules or at least go through and cull calves and heifers on a regular basis?

If you haven’t heard the expression, “It's hotter than Georgia asphalt," then you should take a trip to Georgia in the summer and walk across the asphalt without any shoes on

All the latest research in all areas of our operations, yet I bet on every farm there’s an area where we all could say, “that’s how we’ve always done it.”

Growing up I always enjoyed the time spent off the farm when my siblings and I would go to local and national dairy shows

I spent many hours last week on a bus while attending the National Jersey Convention. Driving through the curving roads of Wooster County, Ohio, to check out Amish Country, farmland, and stopping at several...

As our family travels down the path of robotic milking, we continue to learn lessons that I will pass on to you

I’m one to say that men and women’s role on the dairy farm can be equal. And yet, the differences between genders farming together become very apparent to me in the task of raising a farm family