9UNP1245_Zen_Miller

- Good evening, everyone. My name is Ian Meeker. I work with the University of Wisconsin-Extension Office in Bayfield County as the 4-H Youth Development Educator. And it's my pleasure to introduce to you Zen Miller. He's the dairy and livestock agent in Outagamie County with UW-Extension. And he lives in Appleton, Wisconsin. He is coming up to teach us what he knows about CAFOs, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, which has created quite a bit of interest as of late in this area, where, about five miles from here there's a proposed CAFO to be built, and the community is looking to the university to try and learn from what's best practices and what does the science say to us.

So I want to welcome Zen here, and he'll take it from there.
[applause]

- Thank you, Ian. 

I appreciate the introduction.

The previous speaker said that we import 90% of our fish. Well, we export, we make 90% of our milk and the cheese, and export 90% of that. So that's the backside of what we do and how we move food around in the world today. I introduce myself as a guy who loves cows and loves sows. So I work with animals and have all my life, and I'll talk to us a little bit about why we have modernization or changes in our livestock infrastructure, what that might look like. I do have a little information about the proposed Bayfield Swine Operation that Reicks View is proposing. So I'll cover that a little bit and through the process, I'll tell you things that you may think are pros or you may think are cons, and it may be the same thing for two different people in a room. So I'm going to start tonight with the profit triangle. Something I learned years ago, and that is as a business person, particularly as a farmer, I was told that in that triangle, there's three ways to make it bigger. 

We can produce more, have more volume. And as a dairy farmer, or as a pork producer, raising more animals, producing more milk. It increases our volume. We also can get more margin if we want more profit. And some people will work at that by direct marketing. We have some people putting factories on their farm to process milk, either bottling or making cheese. And then of course, one that some people are very good at is that we can reduce our costs. As we do any one of those three things, our triangle can become bigger and thus, we have more profit. So those are three things that people work on in the animal industry.

I'd like to start now by talking about why people change their farming operations, Why they get bigger and so forth. 

So we have a survey of 30 counties that responded from 104 surveys sent out, and we received 99 surveys back in this data set. As you can see, from the map, they are clear across all the parts of Wisconsin, where we've done some of this work, and I'd like to share some of that with you. Now this is mostly dairy-related. So before people modernized their dairy farm, the herd size in these 99 farms was 82 cows. Their production level was a little over 20,000 pounds of milk. They farmed 350 acres. They rented land as well. And then their cows per acre, they had, acres per cow, is six and a half acres. They had full-time equivalents there of 2.3 people, and the cows, milk cows per full-time equivalent was 35. You can see afterwards that their number of cows in their herd increased, and that's been an ongoing trend in Wisconsin, I'll speak to that a little later in a slide. 

Their production level actually went up a little over 1400 pounds of milk. They rent and own more land after they modernized. They actually have more cows on their farm, so their acres per cow went down to a little over three and a half. And then finally, they have more labor, but they milk and care for 50 cows per full-time equivalent. So you can see there's some labor improvements after they do this. So this is a kind of a handy little slide that talks about milking systems. Usually in the change or modernization, they're going from a tie stall barn or stanchion barn and moving up to some type of parlor, a swing parlor. Now some of them are kind of switching and going clear past that. I'm working with a young couple, young men who are milking in a tie stall barn, and they're going to put in robots. And it looks like they'll put in two robots, and they'll grow their herd size, not quite double their herd size. 

So here we have cows milked per person. And you can see the blue bars are telling you how many cows per person on the average they milk and the frequency of that. So you can see in a tie stall barn somewhere between 15 and 20 is where the most people were milking cows per hour per person. And then as they put in a parlor, that jumps way up. And then most, most people were getting up close to 40 cows. But you can see some that get clear off to the right hand side of this chart that are milking up close to that 100 cows per person per hour, which is moving cows through the parlor very efficiently.

So here we show the pre- and post-labor requirements, and this is the average per cow, per day before they modernized and put in some new technology, whether it be mostly a parlor. But even in the current time, where they're putting in some robot milking, you can see that they are feeding cows more efficiently. There's less hand work there, usually using some type of portable TMR mixer to feed cows and driving by and placing it in the bunk. Their time handling the cows goes down, and their manure handling also improves. 

So there's less hand scraping, whether they have an automatic alley scraper or they're using a skid steer and pushing manure down the alley. They can do it more efficiently per cow and per the man doing it. This now talks about the average cows milked per day and the labor requirements. You can see here that they're, the blue bar went at about half so they doubled the cows' milk per hour. Their maintaining stalls went down. When you go to some type of free stall barn, there's less scraping, although most people have a pusher. They call them, "Bringing cows to the parlor," and then that pusher would rake the stalls if they're sand or scrape the manure off as they go by. And then the clean-up and set-up of milking actually becomes faster as well as they modernize and use more efficient techniques. So we wanted to put some type of money values to this, and this is kind of a busy slide here, but you can see that their hours, we use $12 an hour for their workers as far as their price use, and then you can see that the time that they reduce per cow per year and their savings then is a little over $300 per cow. Now in a lot of food production systems, we're now a mature business and so being effective with our cows, being a little more efficient and saving labor is one way that the owners can make more money. 

So this gives us some value here of about 26 hours per cow per year, and that translates to a little over $300. In this survey then, we asked the people, well what did you observe? What did you observe about cows? What did you observe about owners? And so these are the things most frequently mentioned that as they switch from tie stalls, stanchion barns to free stall barns, they thought that, 85% of the people said that their overall cow health was better. And of course, a healthy cow, or as people in California would say, a happy cow, actually produces more milk more efficiently, lives longer and is more effective for us. Feet and leg problems are less. Having been in many different types of cow facilities over my lifetime, that's a very important one. A lot of times, in a stanchion barn or a tie stall barn, you'll see the hocks get abrasions, sometime swell up. They see less of that. 

Their cell count went down, somatic cell count. It let us know that there's less white blood cells in the milk. The cow's healthier, she's not fighting infections in her mammary system. Increased production. 74% of the people said they had an increase in production. They had lower cull-rate, which means the cows stay around longer. And most animal systems, the longer the female stays in the herd, the better it is for the farmer and the better the production is. And then they had increased conceptions rates. We've had some hot days lately, and that's usually one contributor of lower conception rates in our animal facilities. They also mentioned people benefits. 

There was reduced labor per cow. And you know, having worked with farmers, people get my age and sometimes they need knees replaced or hips replaced. And farmers tend to walk hunched over, so this is a better working environment for the farmers as well. So there's improved milker conditions, they're not squatting by the cows, getting kicked or pushed there. So their safety is better. They're allowed businesses to continue. Many farmers get to a certain age in their mid-50s and they say, well, I either have to quit milking cows or I have to find an easier way to do it. And the parlor helps them do that. 82% they increased, said they increased their profitability. 80% of them want the, provide an entry for the next generation. 

With land prices being so high, it's hard for people to know how they're going to transfer the farm or how they're going to start farming. And this helps them find a way to bring young family members in because now, there's more income generated on the farm. And then most farmers like to work really hard, and some of them even brag about that or brag how long it's been since they missed a milking or something like that. 78% of the farmers said it increased their family time. They really had more time to be with their family and do family activities. So again, this is a little dated, but we covered a 10-year span, a 15-year span. We've updated it, we have a new survey maybe coming out soon if we get enough help to do that. This is the total investment of these 99 farms. It ended up being over $65,000,000. So people invested a lot in the dairy industry in Wisconsin over this time frame. 

It is broken down here by parlors and housing for dairy cows and dry cows, Heifer housing, calf housing. A lot of people switched their feeding system when they went to a new facility, and therefore, we have total mixed rations or TMR feeding. They improved their feed storage. When you add lots of cows, particularly as you get size, where you might be a CAFO, a thousand animal units, the feed storage needs to change because the old tower silos are a little too slow and people don't want to wait for that. Their nutrient to handling, manure handling, they spend a lot of money there and in storage as well. So these are the impacts that we see, this is production increases, average herd size increases. The total pounds of milk increased on those farms as well. Of course, when you add cows and they milk better, you get more production. And you can see the increase of production there. And then in the other animals, the dry cows, heifers and calves. 

All of those are impacts that happen because people modernize, and the Extension service helped them with their planning. Here's a little bit of the economics. Some older prices here possibly, but increased in milk per cow. Use 17 cents a pound on that. It's $245 that we, the number of cows, so the gross income was 466,000 average there. The increased annual milk income for the state was $45,000,000. So this helps our state stay in the lead in cheese production and to improve our facilities, both in the processing side and on the farmer production side as well. And finally then, the economic impact from more cows in the state comes to a little over $2,000,000 on those 99 herds.

Another thing we ask the farmers is, what would you change if you had to do it again? And I've heard this myself, and you can see that 14 of the farmers said they wished they'd done the expansion sooner. 

Now I've had farmers tell me that too. I wish I'd switched to a free stall and parlor sooner than I did. They wish they'd been bigger. And there's lots of paradigms that change when you switch from an old system milking in a tie stall barn and go to a parlor free stall. And so they wish that they done that, but a lot of people are real hesitant, and then there's a lot of financial constraints that happen as well. Farmers said that they would like to spend more time planning and seeking help in design before they did it. It usually takes a couple of years of planning before they're ready to modernize, and a lot of people hurry into it and then they wish they have done a little more time. They mentioned hiring more experienced contractors and other things, switching to sand, which is hard to move sometimes. That would have, they would have changed that if they'd have done it and planned more. So that's one reason why the dairy farmers expand. 

They're accepting some new technology. They're finding some efficiencies in labor and so forth. And now, this brings me to a map of the CAFO units. And I want to just see if I can bring... There we go. This is where I live over here. You can see that there's a lot of cows here and in fact, I tell people the cows in Wisconsin form this backwards C around the central sands area. You can see over here, in northeast Wisconsin, a large amount of CAFOs, a large amount of dairy cows. Here, we get some cool breezes off Lake Michigan that help with this as well, and have highly productive land. Over here, we see that you have a large amount of poultry operations. 

Those are the triangles. And those are the CAFOs in the poultry business. The other thing you can see is there's some clumping of these as they have a processing plant here. We have several processing plants for milk over here as well. If the proposed CAFO is built up in Bayfield County, there'd be three new barns. There'd be 30 to 35 jobs created, and it's estimated that the economical impact for construction would be a little over $3,000,000. The annualized economic impact would be just slightly under $3,000,000. So that could be something somebody would be really happy about. Some other people may see that in a different light. These are the CAFOs with Wisconsin permits. 

You can see that most of them, Wisconsin from the map and from this chart, are dairy, as this is a large dairy state. You also see that the CAFO permits for the other species of poultry, swine, and beef, are pretty stable and somewhat smaller than the dairy. Dairy has kind of taken off on this. And I'll show you a slide that will show that the dairy farms in Wisconsin keep decreasing, but the number of cows stay stable or climb. So that gives you an idea of who's applying for permits in Wisconsin. This is a chart then, that I thought I'd mention and show us, and this is the dairy herds. This is shown over a five-year period, and this same trend is continuing. So we see that the blue bar are herds, different stages, from one cow to 29 cows, and we still have those size herds. I talked to a lady in Outagamie County yesterday on the phone who had 15 cows and was milking. Then you see the 30 to 50 and the 50 to 100, the 100 to 200, 200 to 500, and the 500 plus. 

In 2007, that's the number of farms. In 2012 then, that's the red bars. You can see that the shift is taking less, smaller herds, more larger herds is taking place. Thus, why the permits are climbing in the dairy industry. You also can see that that 50 to 100 herd size is the one that lost the most dairies. They're either getting bigger or are exiting the business, one way or the other. But the number of that size herds has gone down.

I have a friend that let me get an aerial of their dairy farm. This is a 1,000-cow dairy, 1,200-cow dairy.

Here we go. 

The calf huts are here. That's the other thing that you'll notice about the dairy, the larger dairies, is these calf huts are now being moved from this area, and they're coming over here to this area, where they now have one calf barn that's an automatic feeder, but that won't take care of all their calves. And the hutches are going over in this area. And then once that's done, this will become another barn over here for mature cows. Now I will mention this, and then I'm going to talk about some technology. This is their lagoon system here. So this is their waste or manure, liquid manure, in these three lagoons here, which will be pumped twice a year. And either injected after corn silage, is made into the land or put on top after haylage is made. One of the things that, that brings farmers to do is change their technology as well. And I have a few pictures I'd like to share about technology and some of the things that are being adapted. 

So this is a picture of a free stall barn. You've probably seen many of these. They have high side walls. They open the curtains in the summer so they can let the air in. In the middle of the right-hand, right-hand barn, you see the feed alley, so they can drive by and feed cows. They can push it up. And the most, newest technology out there is they actually have a robot called Juno that Lely has made. And it travels up and down the alley on, on however many times you want it to in a circular motion, pushing up feed. And then each time it goes by, the cows have eaten more, and it'll creep a little closer to the stub wall, where the cows put through, and it'll push the feed up again. We had breakfast on a farm, on a farm that has four robots and the Juno pushing up feed. 

This is something that is an issue for dairy farmers and swine farmers alike. It's a little different in both species, but here you see manure separation. This is a large animal feeding system there that has manure separation, so they get some solids. We have farms that will use the solids to bed the free stalls with. This farm just uses it to separate out the liquids so they can haul the solids farther away. People do experiment with using the manure solids to make press board, to make different fertilizers and so forth. The other thing that comes with this, of course, is a certain amount of smell. And so odor becomes an issue, and odor is a little different on a dairy farm than a swine farm. And how you store your manure makes a difference on what type of smell you have a little bit as well. I have a trained nose. 

I can drive down the Interstate 80 in Iowa and I can say, there's beef cattle on feed, and they're on a high corn diet by smelling. And you can also drive down the road and you can say, somebody's feeding pigs somewhere close here, because I can smell them. So there is smell associated with this, this type of livestock operations. The Bayfield unit does plan to have an H-E-P-A filter, the air going into their barn. They're very concerned about getting some swine diseases. They also have an odor control or an air scrubber on the air going out of their barns, which, when they apply, they get some credit for, because they do that. The nice thing about having manure from your animals is that there is a certain amount of phosphorus in it. Some of the soils, as you get in northern Wisconsin, are very low in phosphorus. I'm told that the soil close to this farm proposed is running three or four parts per 1,000,000 phosphorus. And lots of the soils down where I'm at run 20 to 30. 

So they have some opportunity there, but it depends on the texture of the soil. If the soil is clay, it can hold more phosphorus. And if it's sandy, it's going to go through faster. And I don't know the soil texture here. So something to think about as well is where is the phosphorus? Where is it going to go? We have improved feeding less phosphorus to dairy cattle. We use phytase and swine rations to help them increase their digestion of phosphorus. So we're becoming a little more careful with the phosphorus that we feed. Here's a picture of a big pile of corn silage or haylage. 

That's the white plastic covered with the half-cut tires there to hold it down tight. And then the picture of the scale. One thing that happens when we increase our size, we can start buying everything in semi-load lots. So the dairy farmers will buy their haylage or corn silage or bring it in, in semi-load lots. Most of them have a scale to weigh it on. In the swine industry, the proposed site would sell mostly or travel with their wiener pigs, which are 12 to 20 pounds size and take them back to Iowa or southern Minnesota for finishing. They're planning a multiplier, gilt multiplier up here, so they would have some larger gilts that would travel. It takes 180 market hogs to fill a semi-load. So the distance from here to there would be travelled in semi-loads. So semi-loads are important, feed coming in, in semi-loads. 

That's about as effective as we get. And animals going out or milk going out in semi-loads seems to be the way of technology that helps us save in transportation costs.

This is a large dairy barn, it's a cross-ventilated barn. The air moves across it. You can see all the fans. So this barn happens to be on the north side. And then this is what's on the south side. On the picture on to your left is kind of a cardboard web thing where they run water through and they pull the air across it so that water can cool the air as it goes into the barn. Then I'm showing a picture of a water cooling system where they sprinkle the cows and let it evaporate off. So some new technologies that we use when we have a little different system like free stall barns allow us to do.

Most large operations will have some type of generators, back-up generators. I do some training for pork quality assurance and for a national dairy farm, and both of those systems ask farmers if they would have generators, and not only ask them if they have it, but when was the last time you turned them on and used them? So they want to make sure that they're just not a trophy out there, but that they're usable. We drove through a little storm coming up today and the temperature went from 82 or 84 down to about 63, and that was a good improvement. But sometimes, we lose electricity during those storms, too. So this, because the animals are confined, these back-up generators are needed. I want to show you a few pictures of a swine CAFO. This one's in western Wisconsin. This is from a distance, but you can see there'll be a series of barns. There will be three barns here in Bayfield if it goes through. 

And they will have this associated, too, some type of feed processing. Swine producers are very careful about the size that the corn gets ground into. They want it to be about a score of 500, and that's running it through some sieves, so you can see how finely ground it is. And the pigs can use that. If you get too fine, you get some ileitus problems. And if you get too course, they can't digest it as well. This is a look at the nursery barn at the other CAFO. And here's another look at some modern barns, and you can see the dark on the end of the one barn, and they're letting, pulling air in through that gap there and the barn second down doesn't have the curtains down as much there. As I understand it, the proposed barns here, there would be three. The gestation and breeding barn will be 900 feet long and 120 feet wide. 

So they're fairly big. The farrowing barn will be 700 feet long and 140 feet wide. And then there will be a gilt developer barn. I don't know the dimensions of that, but that gives you some idea of the size and scope, and the picture gives you a little idea of what they might look like. I want to show the inside of the barns a little bit. Here's a finisher barn, I guess. You can see that they have fans coming out. The pits in this system would be underneath, inside the barn, underneath the animals. If, well, maybe some of you have been through a barn like this. It's a little bit hard to get in swine barns anymore to see, 'cause of the disease control and the bio-security. 

This keeps animals very clean because their urine and fecal material fall through the slats, and they're away from them, but you have to keep the gasses that the manure generates in out of the pigs' air, so that they're healthy.

So we have several different types of farrowing systems or swine systems now.

So we have a farrow-to-finish, farrow to nursery, which is a sow unit. The unit in Bayfield is a little bit like that, although they'll have some growing of the gilts. Farrow-to-wean, wean-to-finish and then finishing farms.

Now just a little background here. Breeding and birthing, a sow's pregnant for 114 days. My old FFA advisor told me three months, three weeks and three days. That was the way I remembered that. Over the years, we're getting more pigs per litter. 

When I was younger, quite a little bit younger, we would average maybe seven or eight pigs per litter. Now we're up to 10-13 pigs born per litter, and we used to wean at about 56 days, and now some people are weaning at that 21-day period. So much smaller and much younger. Here's a picture of some nursery pigs. You can see the plastic slats here that lets the manure get away from the pigs. You notice how clean they are. One of the things that's happened over the years is our pigs are becoming leaner so we don't produce as much fat on the swine that we raise now as we did in the 1950s.

So this is a picture of what I would call a finisher, but because the buildings up here are going to be a gilt developer unit, this is what they would look like when they're raising their pigs or their gilts, and I think this would be, you can see here, they have drop feeding that comes into that feeder. You can't see the nipple. Yeah, there's a nipple water in the back there. 

Pigs will nurse on a nipple water when they need water. And so again, a very clean environment for these pigs. That helps them grow well and keep disease at a low level, which is one of the reasons why we're finding people looking for places where there's isolation, is because of the swine diseases we have. My son is a veterinarian, worked out in Utah, where they had several units by Beaver, Utah with sows in them. And that was because they would raise the little pigs there and then send them someplace else to finish. We've done that in Oklahoma, and now someone's thinking about doing it up in this area. And, of course, to keep disease out, they are filtering the air, they're doing things, keeping people off the farm unless you have permission to go in.

As mentioned previously, and I'll mention it again, is we're just looking and concerned about how many people we have, and the need to have food for everybody. And as our population increases their income, they want high quality protein, and so we're going to need more food as we go along by 2050.

Some interesting facts here is that a 1/32 of the earth's land is available for farming currently. 

And less than 1/2 or one percent of the earth's water is available for farming. We're lucky here, we have an ample water supply. We have the Great Lakes, and we have a good rain system that brings us moisture. I have a daughter that's in California, where they have water restrictions, and a four or five-year drought now for parts of California. So we have to be careful and justify how much water we use in our livestock systems, because we have 200,000 people born every day. So a little information here. Over the last 50 years, we used less water in our dairy systems than we did before. So from 1944 to today, 65% less; and 90% less as far as the land that we use. So being more efficient. Pork production has followed the same path. 

They've improved the pounds of pork that they raise by our farmers. Here's some of the improvements we've made over 50 years. We've put animals inside, so that they're protected from harsh environments. We do have better genetics, and we keep improving them as we go along. And then we try to match diets better. It used to be, you had a starter, grower, finisher, three different diets. Now you may have seven diets and switch them more often so you're more precise about what you're feeding the pigs. We also use less land in our pork production today than 50 years ago: 78%. We have a 35% smaller carbon footprint and use less water.

In the pork industry, it's very important, like the poultry industry to use an all-in and all-out management system. 

And again, having a group of sows someplace other than where you're finishing pig helps you do that. So you batch your pigs. You make a semi-load roughly of little pigs and move them into a finishing area, and they stay there until they're ready to go to market. So pork has changed. When I was a kid, we raised everything on the farm. We raised pigs outside. We thought our pigs were pretty good and we sold them when they weighed 220 pounds. Now, farmers generally specialize and if you raise pigs you may not raise anything else. They're usually raised in barns. They're leaner, and we don't sell them until they weigh 280 pounds a piece. 

And they're still leaner even though they're 60 pounds bigger. So I'd like to recap a little bit tonight. The trend has been, I don't know when this started, but ever since I've been here, and probably ever since my parents were here, to larger farms. It used to be, a father would try to line up his three or four sons on three or four different farms. Now, a farmer today might line up one farm with multiple enterprises and bring his three or four sons in. It's just a little more efficient for them. There is new technology. Odor is a concern for us. Manure is a concern for us, but those nutrients can be recycled through the land if we're careful. We don't want them to run off, and Wisconsin has a tight system. 

The CAFO farms are highly regulated. People are watching them all the time. I called Kevin Erb, who teaches in this area in Green Bay and Kevin said, "When a farmer has a spill and he's a CAFO, "he's supposed to call in." And everybody has this 800 number posted several places on their farm. He said, "Zen, one of the funniest one "was somebody was fixing something "and had a five-gallon of liquid manure sitting there "and somebody kicked it over. "They picked up the phone and called it in." Probably a little bit overboard there, but they're getting trained so that they call in and let people know. We also have had farms that are not CAFO size, that have had manure spills on a consistent basis. Now the Wisconsin State has put them on, all the rules of the CAFO is on, even though they're 300 or 400 cows.

And the neighbors watch, too.

And so that's a good thing, too. So again, just to recap, lifestyles have changed. People want time off. Farmers are more specialized. That can be good and bad. Running in semi-load lots is more efficient and having systems that are all-in, all-out is a system that is effective. I happen to have a few pigs with a guy, where we're trying to use up some of the whey from his small cheese plant. We do have smell, we do have to clean manure, but it's a system that we use to try to be effective with his cheese plant. But everybody's looking for a way to make that profit triangle bigger. Whether it's more volume, more margin or less cost. 

And that's pushed our farming system to change over the years as we get new technology. That's what I had for you tonight. Thanks for listening and letting me come up here. 
[applause]