Many aspects of our dairy and ways of thinking have changed here at Hillcrest Farms since moving to a robotic milking system. The work is less physical and more mental
Farm work often requires road travel, whether it is driving equipment from field to field, trucking animals from one location to another, or hauling milk
The other night, our robotic milkers called 36 times with one alarm or another. My dad got an early start on morning milking simply because he had been up since 11 p.m. the night prior tending to the robots
‘Tis that time of year again. Everyone’s on edge for obvious reasons; harvest is a pretty big deal. For a lot of the country, it seems like corn in 2020 will be better than it was 2019, and...
“Never stand behind a horse” were the words my grandfather periodically repeated during my childhood at the farm. Thanks to him, I learned at a young age that I could be kicked and severely...
My parents bought a farm that came with a house. The house ended up being a bit of a fixer-upper . . . I’m talking very little siding, negligible plumbing, and small animals in the walls
We have been milking with robots for three months now. The months of construction as well as the retraining of cows were both stressful and labor intensive
We finally placed two robots in our new main robot barn this week. A little over two years ago at the Western Dairy Management Conference, I was sitting at a table talking to two dairymen from Wisconsin
For many parts of the country, winter teased us with a mild start. Then mid-January hit, and along came snow, frigid cold, record-breaking wind chills, and ice