Lloyd Farm

Dick Lloyd, Larry Maule, Aaron Maule

Dairy Farm

Lloyd Road, Chatham

 

 

Description:  The farm has 126 acres with about 20 acres in woodlands. Although milk is their primary product, the Lloyd/Maules rent another 800 acres nearby where with their own acreage they grow 340 acres of corn (40% to sell), 200 acres of soy (65% to sell) and 28 acres of wheat and 8 acres of barley that they sell. The rest is in hay that they sell to the mushroom industry.  The cash crops augment the milk production.

They milk 120 cows twice a day.  Each heifer will produce approximately 10 gallons of milk a day while consuming 45/50 pounds of feed a day.  They are kept in a feed barn and will weigh up to 2000 lbs.  They will be artificially inseminated (for safety and genetic control) each year for a production period of three to four years before they are sold elsewhere usually for slaughter.  They are kept in the feed barn because the limited open land is more productive for crop growing and the feed barns control the diet for the cows more closely.

 

CALFS: Because the milking cows generally produce a calf each year, there is a development sequence for new milking stock.  The newborn female calves are immediately moved to a separate barn for four months where they are fed powdered milk, grain and hay.  The calves are then moved to the calf barn at the top of the hill where they will develop until ready to be impregnated at around 13 months.  Then they are moved off site to another farm where  they remain for eight or nine months until they give birth. The male calves are sold and the females with their mothers are moved back to the Lloyd Road farm.

 

FEED: The three silos contain Haylege (a fermented mix of hay and grass), fermented corn silage, and high-moisture shell corn respectively.  The silo contents are grown on the Lloyd farmland, then chopped, mixed, and loaded into the silos where the moisture content  controls a fermenting process that preserves and enriches the food. These contents  compose most of the daily feed requirements for the cows though some vitamin supplements are added when required.  

 

HEALTH: A veterinarian makes a regular visit to the farm examining all of the cows and identifying those that may need treatment. The farmers usually have picked up concerns among the stock, which they point out to the doctor.  When a milking cow requires antibiotic treatment, she must be separated from other cows to assure that her milk does not get into the tank.  No antibiotics are allowed in the tanks of milk that are trucked to High Point Dairy in Concord.

 

MANURE: The manure is scraped out of the feed barns several times a day and deposited in a large 0ne million gallon concrete holding area.  Tankers will come in twice a year and draw enough manure off to spread on the fields as is needed in the planning for the field development.  Having adequate fields to absorb the manure is extremely useful.

 

Workforce:  Essentially Dick, Larry, and Aaron do all the work on the farm.  They will sub contract   certain tasks like custom combine work and chopping the hay and corn, but they are the main workforces.  Right now the price of milk is correcting to a reasonable level.

Lew Wilkinson

Crop Farming Operation

Chatham Road, West Grove

 

Description:  Lew is a crop farmer whose farmland is distributed in numerous locations throughout London Grove, West Marlborough, New Garden, and Penn Townships.  Housing developments have erased numerous farm tracts forcing him into operationally less convenient locations to raise his crops. His home and equipment sheds are in a different location from all the land he farms, so transporting equipment, materials, and crops is an added dimension to the farm operation. His tractors and combines must all be road-worthy and sized small enough to move over standard country roads.  When a combine’s top speed is 16 mph, road travel can get stressful.

 

Lew rotates corn (130 acres), soy (100 acres), and wheat (50 acres) in five locations.  He delivers most of this product to Hostetter Grain near Oxford.  He rents 900 acres and shares another 900 acres in the Gum Tree area where he maintains and cuts hay intended for the mushroom production industry in the area.  He also does custom combine work for different farmers in the area amounting to about 800 acres.

 

General Farm Sequence:

January, February, and March are dedicated to refurbishing all of the farm equipment and laying out the maintenance plans for all of the fields.  Soil samples are taken and decisions are made on what should be applied where.   Hay baled in the latter part of the previous year is also being delivered at a rate of about 16 –(20 ton) truckloads a week.

 

March and early April is spent tilling the ground and fertilizing and spreading compost.  The 18th of April signals the time to plant corn and soy, which will go until the end of May.  June 1 brings the first cutting of hay. This requires a sequence of machinery moving over the fields starting with the mower, then the rake, followed by the bailer.  The bails are then stacked or loaded onto trucks and delivered.  The weather can wreak havoc on this sequence. Wet hay immediately loses quality.  Lew will cut approximately 5000 tons of hay in the first cutting.

 

Around the fourth of July the wheat is harvested with a combine that loads it directly into trucks that take it to Hostetter Grain.  The straw is bailed and removed from the field.

 

By the middle of September it is time to harvest the corn and the soy, which is done with, combines loading the corn or soy directly onto trucks that carry the grain to Hostteter Grain.  This work and custom combine work for other farm operations plus planting the wheat continues into December when the pace finally eases.

  

Machinery:

To perform this work an inventory of the following equipment is needed:

                1  combine

                1  planter

                5  large tractors

                2  loader tractors

                3  rakes

                2  mowers

                A chisel and a disc

                2  large bailers

                A tractor-trailer and 10 wheeler

 

Much of the equipment requires daily maintenance and often must be left out in remote fields where it is vulnerable to vandalism and theft. 

 

Workforce:  Lew manages this workload with himself, his daughter who can drive equipment in the summer, his son who is at college (not always available), a young Godchild, and another part-time worker.  Beyond the fieldwork and the logistics of getting to the fields, there is a huge amount of mechanical maintenance that has to be done regularly.  Then the farmer’s burden is coordinating this time and weather sensitive work while providing for the details (bailing twine, seed, insurance & much more). 

 

Farmer’s Challenge:  In 1981 the price of corn was $3.45 per bushel and a combine needed to harvest the corn cost $45,000. Today the price of corn is between $3.75 and $4.00, but a similar combine costs $200,000.  The increase cost of labor, gasoline, fertilizer, seed, and insurance is probably closer to the combine increase than the corn increase.  But the farmer still makes it work?