Raising 4,000 heifers and 1,000 veal calves must take a lot of work and many people. It can be, but doesn't have to be, with the use of the newest and most up-to-date technology. That is what I have come to learn at my internship site. It is a very different point of view then I'm used to seeing. The fact that I grew up on a 60-milking cow dairy, I didn't have the opportunity to work with such a vast amount of animals.
I grew up on a small farm in the heart of the Catskill Mountains in eastern New York. Due to the rough terrain and small field sizes, it is hard to have a large farm. Since the day I was born, I have always been in the barn, whether it was before I went to school or when I got home. There are so many things that I have learned growing up on a farm, from how to care and treat animals, to potentially getting a return in milk and a friend for life. I also have learned how to work on machinery. I have always liked doing this and now do all the winter maintenance on all of it, and fix most it for my father so he can keep going out in the field. In the view of a farmer, down time is lost time. I have gained more responsibilities every year on the farm, and now that I am old enough and know enough about the farm, when my parents go away on vacation, they just tell me I need to make sure the cows get milked. This is an honor and a curse, and it shows that I can do the job, but if something goes wrong, I'm on my own trying to fix the problem.
I would like to go home when I have finished my internship, and begin to work my way into taking over the farm as my own business from my parents. I would like to then double the herd size to 120 milking cows. To do this, I must build a new milking barn down the road at an old farm where we currently rent the land. I would like to have freestall type barn with two robotic milkers. This way I would be able to double in size but still cut my labor cost. I would still use the current barn we have for housing my heifers and calves. The nice thing about moving the milking cows down the road two miles is that our new site is closer to our farther field, and I will not have to haul crops and manure as far to reach the farthest fields. This will help keep the cost of fuel and trucking down. It will also allow me to get crops into the ground faster, and apply manure faster in the spring to begin planting.
I went to SUNY Cobleskill because of the draw of the Agricultural Machinery program, but by the end of my college career, I ended up in the Dairy program. It is close to my hometown, only 45 minutes away, and its's nice to go home once in a while and help out on the farm. The more I got into college, the less I went home. I was very involved with the college, from working on the school's dairy farm, milking cows five mornings a week, to being President of the Dairy Cattle Club. I only have a short amount of time to have the opportunity to be involved with this, so I spent as much time as I could with it.
This internship has helped me in many ways of my education. The main reason I picked these places is because I feel that at the home farm, we struggle to get heifers off to a good start. I also wanted to get experience working with automated machines, so when I get robots, I would have an idea on how they will be working and how to use the software.
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