Heather Faye said the biggest thing she has learned from her journey moving a dairy with her husband Mark from Port Wing, Wisc. to Udall, Kan. is that farmers and ranchers need community again, “Everyone in agriculture is on a journey and we don’t need to do it alone.”
Faye has a lot of empathy for agriculturists facing change in their operations. While there are challenges when making vast changes, the Faye’s have found there are some amazing opportunities too. This “change story” is about two dairy families, love, hard work, some lessons, and most importantly – hope.
When it all began.
“I was born in 1976 in Port Wing, Wisc. near Lake Superior and graduated in 1994,” Faye began. “My dad was a first-generation dairy farmer. It was something that piqued his interest early on. He told us in high school he would have to use his dad’s ice fishing shack to milk his cows in.”
Like her father, Faye fell in love with dairy life, “I was probably like 8 to 10 years old and back then it was my job to keep the kitchen clean. I honestly got to the point where I was disgusted with that job, so I said I would do the milking if I never had to be in the kitchen again.”
Faye’s father took her up on the offer and so it began, “I started off being in charge of feeding calves every day and quickly moved into milking cows. By the time I was in junior high, I could easily do all the daily chores by myself. My dad did take advantage of this pretty quickly, but that’s okay because it gave him time to be county president for the National Farmers Organization.”
The Faye dairy history and starting a cow herd of her own.
“When the dairy started off, we were milking 30 cows in a tie stall barn. Then, when I was in junior high, Dad bought another farm and we jumped to around a 70-cow herd,” she explained. “We were always a pasture-based operation from the start, and we always grazed cows. When I was a senior in high school, I bought 42 cows of my own and combined the operation with my dad’s.”
Not only did Faye decide to buy a milking herd of her own, she also decided to go to college, “I went to college for animal science but soon it got to the point where I was already doing so much of what they were trying to teach, that I just didn’t find value in the college portion anymore.”
Then there was a love connection, inspired by two dairies.
“I farmed with dad about five years after leaving college, then I met my husband, Mark. There’s a story about all of this too,” she began, laughing a bit about the irony of it all. “So, my dad and Mark’s dad were very good friends. Mark is one of 12 children and was much older than me, so even though I tagged along with dad all the time, I had never met Mark because he was living in the city.”
When Mark’s dad retired, Faye bought his dairy herd and then three or four years went by, “Here I had bought my future father-in-law’s herd but had not met my future husband yet. Little did I know Mark was deciding he was going to quit his job in the city as a car salesman and buy a milk herd and move onto his family farm.”
“When Mark moved cows back onto his family farm, my dad and I were like, ‘This is going to be entertaining.’ Dad and I would go over and visit Mark and his dad. One thing led to another, and we ended up getting married,” she recalled.
New beginnings and decisions to be made.
“When we got married, we had decisions to make, do we combine the milk herd and milk at my dad’s farm or his dad’s farm? We decided to go to his dad’s farm,” Faye explained. “We milked there at his dad’s for quite a long time and when we had our kids it got to a point where we needed to do some major infrastructure updating to the farm.” A lot of the infrastructure for the dairy was technically owned by Mark’s parents. They decided the best opportunity was to look for a new location all together to start a dairy of their own and looked at real estate listings all over the country for a few years, everywhere from Kentucky, to Missouri, to the Dakotas, “Anything in the Midwest was open game. Then a listing in Kansas popped up and it was the perfect size and location. My husband decided to come down and look at it.”
Let the dairy adventures begin.
It was January and the Faye’s still had the dairy to run in Wisconsin, “And, we had little kids. It just wasn’t feasible for me to go along with Mark to Udall, Kansas. So, I stayed home to milk the cows and take care of the kids. We were in the depth of winter with eight below temperatures and three feet of snow on the ground. Mark shows up in Kansas and it’s like 40 degrees out and there’s no snow. He told me he thought it was absolutely hilarious because the owners of the dairy came out to meet him with Carhart pants, winter boots, and hats on. Mark just had a sweater on and was perfectly comfortable.”
“Meanwhile I was in the artic tundra,” Faye said laughing. “And then I came down with strep throat. I think it was just the stress of winter, the kids, running the farm, and my husband was gone. When Mark got back from the trip to Kansas, I was in the house, like half dead, and I hadn’t milked the cows yet. We have a really super long driveway, and I also got the truck stuck in the driveway. Everything was a complete disaster. He was like, ‘Oh shit, Heather must be really sick! She hasn’t even milked the cows yet.’”
The scenario above pretty much sealed the deal that Kansas was where they needed to head. A warmer climate and the promise of the plains was enticing, “You know what the funny part is? Mark almost didn’t look at the farm in Kansas because as he was driving down there, he stopped at a little café just south of Kansas City. When he came in, they stopped and looked at him because he was an outsider. One of the guys was like, ‘You ain’t from around here, are you?’ He answered, ‘No, I’m from Northern Wisconsin.’ The man answered, ‘You don’t want to move to Udall, Kansas, that whole town was wiped off the map by a tornado.’ That guy freaked Mark out so badly, so much so, that he almost never finished the trip to look at the farm.”
The new dairy decision was made.
“Our rational was that Udall was already wiped off the map once by a tornado, what are the odds of it getting wiped off the map again in the next 100 years?” She said, matter-of-factly. “We decided to proceed. When we made the decision, everything flowed so smoothly, and we were settled in our hearts that this was the thing we were going to do. There was no hesitation about it. I guess our intuition said that it was the right thing to do, and we were committed to following that.”
The logistics of planning, buying, and moving everything flowed beautifully, Faye noted, “We moved 120 head from adult cows to calves. The old owners of the Kansas dairy helped us settle into the farm which was great as well. We trucked everything. The milk cows took the 19-hour trip down first. I went on ahead to receive the milk cows in Kansas and my husband stayed in Wisconsin. Immediately after milking the cows in Wisconsin, Mark loaded them onto the semi, then I milked them down in Kansas right when they got here.”
The learning curve.
“You can imagine the challenge of learning how to have a dairy farm in a different ecosystem,” she said. “We adapted to the new plant life and environment. In Kansas, we graze some fescue pastures, some Bermuda grass and also have native prairie grass pastures. Last year, we also started cover cropping to extend the grazing season. Last fall, at the end of the grazing season, we planted pastures to barley, triticale, and hairy vetch. We are still learning about the land and how the weather goes. And, we’re still in business.”
Much of that resilience has to do with Faye’s willingness to change and adapt with the circumstances, “When we first moved down here, we were a commercial dairy shipping to the local milk coop. We were milking about 60 cows twice a day, continuing to manage our herd through intensive grazing that involved daily paddock moves for the cows.”
“We have Ayrshire Cows that are notorious for being a hardy cow and they have proven that to be the case. There was a little bit of acclimating the herd to the Kansas environment. Luckily in the first year, the area was cooler and wetter than usual, none of that 115-degree weather kicked in that first year. As a result, the herd handled the move and new area quite well,” she said.
“As far as Mark and me, it still blows our mind once in awhile how short the winters are down here and how much longer the cows can stay on pasture on both ends of the grazing season,” Faye admitted.
Going from commercial to farm-fresh local raw milk.
“We moved in 2007 and our first year was really awesome, then 2008 came and that was the year the economy crashed across the United States. Along with that, the milk price also crashed too. So, we were getting paid way below the cost of production. There we were, just coming off a big move, acclimating to the area, and the milk prices went down and just dive-bombed and never came back. We kept milking thinking, ‘Oh, it will get better.’ Then suddenly, we started to go into debt to feed the cows and to stay in business. We were like, ‘Oh things are not getting better.’”
During the 2008 time period, Faye started making soap, raising meat animals, and heading to farmer’s markets to bring in extra cash, “In 2009, when things were still not turning around, my husband decided to take a town job selling cars like he had before. We had been married nine years by that time and then suddenly, he was going to town every day. That was a big change.”
“When Mark took the town job, I told him, ‘If I’m going to be here running the farm by myself and managing the household and children, I’m only going to milk one time a day.’ No other commercial dairies around us were doing it that way. But, I just laid down the law. At the same time, we also told the milk coop to quit picking up our milk because they weren’t paying enough for it anyway.”
“We ended up dropping the herd from 60 to 30 and put a sign out in front of the farm that said ‘Raw Milk for Sale.’ I also really ramped up the farmer’s market end of things, making a lot more soap, and we had more pigs we were raising for meat, and more meat chickens.”
Faye said it is legal to sell raw milk in Kansas, but at that time, it was illegal to advertise. The only thing they could have was a sign at the end of their driveway, “With no customer base for raw milk, and just a sign allowed by our driveway, I figured, shoot, it’s not illegal for me to talk about our milk. So that’s what I did – I told stories.”
The milk stories proved effective she said, “I pretty much built my business that way. Now, the traffic coming to the farm to purchase is high enough that four years ago I could drop going to farmer’s market all together. Milk sales are also so much higher now that I do not have to raise any pigs or chicken anymore and my income is just as high if not higher.”
Faye also began uncovering the maternal nature of their herd even further, “Mother cows are perfectly equipped to raise their own calves. We don’t have to worry about the health of calves nearly at all anymore. However, when you bottle feed calves, you have to be meticulous about management. Otherwise, it’s super easy for the calves to be sick. When the mother cow is nursing at her own freewill out on pasture, the calf health concern is not even on my radar anymore.”
“It's also amazing that even though I was a lifelong dairy farmer who grew up with cows, that I didn’t realize until the cows raised the calves on their own that they develop and maintain family ties,” she added. “When the cows are lounging in the pasture, it’s very common to see sisters grazing together – grandma watching all her granddaughters and so on. They truly develop and maintain their families in the cow herd.”
It’s all about offering choices to the consumer.
“There are opposing viewpoints about the philosophy of the food we eat,” Faye admitted. “On one end of the spectrum, you have the people who think all bacteria is bad. They do not know about the need for a healthy microbiome in the gut and they don’t know there are beneficial bacteria that are incredibly important. Milk is perfect for providing beneficial bacteria and is nutrient dense.”
“From a herd health standpoint, I test each individual cow every month. The big thing I look for is the somatic cell count on each individual cow. That gives me a baseline for the health of a cow. That is basically a measure of antibodies in the milk,” she explained.
Changes at the dairy led to personal introspection.
“Changes on the dairy and dealing with COVID really opened a door in my mind,” Faye said. “I started looking at power dynamics in life in general. COVID brought up a lot of power dynamics playing out. Then I started bringing that mindset into the community, farm, and internally. Within our farmer discussion group, we started to talk about farmer suicide rates being so high. We also started having conversations about having to heal the land. We asked ourselves questions like, ‘How can a farmer heal the land if the farmer is not healed?’”
“A group of us started working on ourselves through introspection even further,” Faye went on. “I call it ‘Universe School.’ For me personally, the farm has been very involved with my healing journey. I look at the land and cowherd and they mirror aspects of myself back to me.”
A big problem Faye said that needs addressing in agriculture is isolation and loneliness, “Many farmers are farming by themselves. There are many mothers on the farm raising children by themselves. Oftentimes elders have moved away and become isolated. We are a social species though and we are supposed to be doing agriculture as a community. I am tired of farming by myself. It’s really insane that it has come to this, and we need to take steps to change that.”
It's all about our unique journeys.
“Every farm is on a journey,” Faye pointed out. “Now I just try and look at different farmers and different farms in that way. I try and take the judgment out of looking at them now and appreciate where they are on their specific journey. Everyone has different lessons to learn and is at a different point in those lessons. I think it slows down growth if you look at somebody in judgment and criticism. They will go into their shells even further.”
It really is a personal awareness path Faye said, “Even in my own marriage, for a long time, I busted my ass with the motivation that if I could get the farm built up enough, Mark could come back home to farm full time with me again. That was my major driver. For a long time, I was resentful that he was putting a huge amount of effort into doing a super good job at his salesman job. I was resentful thinking if he would put just as much effort on the farm, man we would be so far ahead by now. Then I had to come to grips with that and work through resentment I held, which I feel I have done. The big part of my new awareness is recognizing that my husband is doing the best he can and what is most comfortable for him to take care of his family. For that, I am grateful.”
Faye said when considering change in any aspect of our lives, it’s really about grace, “My summation would be, just respect people’s journeys and where they are at in their learning. Maybe even more important is to realize everyone’s on a unique journey, and we don’t need to journey alone.”
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