Cashing in on calf raising

MONDOVI, Wis. — Tom Brown grew up on his family farm near Audubon, Minnesota, and that upbringing created the routine he has strived for since. Milking cows in the morning and at night provided the stability that Brown continues to enjoy.

After accepting a position with CentralStar Cooperative Inc., he and his wife, Kaila, found a farm where they could continue milking cows, even without a milk truck pulling in the driveway.

“We had been hunting for a farm for a full year,” Tom said. “The first time I saw this farm, I knew we could do everything we wanted here. There’s adequate concrete, barn space and pasture. It has everything we needed.”

Tom was hired by CentralStar as a reproduction consultant in 2023, and in 2024, the Brown family purchased their farm in Mondovi. This allowed them to bring their herd under one roof and  expand their calf-raising operation.

Currently T-K Dreams Holsteins milks 20 cows with a portable milker in four tie stalls. The milk is fed directly to youngstock right after milking. The cows are housed in six  pens with wood shaving bedded packs and pasture access. Brown purchases feed and practices component feeding.

“In 2023 and 2024, with the beef market coming up, we had animals that could feed others,” Tom said. “At that point, I talked to a couple of different creameries, and you have to pay extra if you don’t hit the minimum for the bulk tank. Finishing calves provided the flexibility we needed.”

Tom and Kaila had been raising youngstock with a small herd of cows while Tom was the dairy manager at Mann Valley Farm at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. His new position with CentralStar required he be located in west central Wisconsin, so the family found a farm with facilities big enough to bring their herd together.

“I met with the banker and we started penciling it out,” Tom said. “We realized I just needed to keep doing what I was doing. It was less risky to do this than to go to a creamery.”

T-K Dreams Holsteins purchases calves, raises them until they weigh between 500 and 600 pounds, and sells the youngstock to other dairy farms. This process has given Tom the ability to work his full-time job with CentralStar and not be fully reliant on a fluctuating milk market.

“I don’t want to milk more than 20 cows,” Tom said. “I want to work full time and we need that. We have seven mouths to feed and it isn’t possible to do that with 20 cows. We’ve got some figuring out to do to make things more efficient, but as long as there’s a market for them, we plan to continue to raise calves.”

The number of calves the farm raises depends on output from the milking herd. Tom times youngstock purchases with milk production. At their busiest times, T-K Dreams Holsteins can raise as many as 80 calves. Currently, the farm is raising 53 calves, with some cows being close to being dried off.

Tom and Kaila now raise their seven children on the farm, with the oldest two assisting Tom with some of the breeding decisions for their herd of registered cattle. The three bond over working with cow families.

“My oldest boys might know as much about the genetics of the cows as I do sometimes,” Tom said. “What’s fun for me is having an idea of where you want to go with the cow family and then taking it all the way through. We just had our first homebred cow score Excellent. She’s a 6-year-old with five natural daughters. One idea, if it goes well, can turn into multiple good ideas, and when my kids are dialed into it, it makes for some fun and connection.”

Having an Excellent cow that carries the T-K Dreams prefix is an accomplishment Tom hopes will set an example for his boys.

“I’ve worked on breeding cows since I was 14,” Tom said. “I had come to peace that I was probably very good at making Very Good cows. Over half of our herd was Very Good, but I could just never quite get cows over 89 until this one. Now, my kids have asked, ‘Why can’t we have a 95-point cow?’ I have to remind them that things don’t happen overnight.”

Dairying has been in Tom’s blood since he worked on his parents’ farm. After high school, he went on to play junior college football at Minnesota State Community and Technical College-Fergus Falls but found himself gravitating back towards cows.

“There would be times when I was living in the dorms that I would head down to a sale barn and watch the cull cows,” Tom said. “That’s how much I missed them. I’ve always been a cow nut.”

The calm of the barn and the routine that is created by starting and ending his day in the barn milking cows is a feeling that he cannot replace. His dairy career took him from his parents’ farm in Minnesota to the North Dakota State University Animal Sciences Dairy Cattle Research and Teaching Center.

Brown worked full time as the dairy’s herdsman for seven years. While balancing his full-time position, he also earned his bachelor’s degree, gaining experience in the field while avoiding student loan debt.

After his time in Fargo, he went on to become the dairy manager at UW-River Falls’ Mann Valley Farm. Here, he put milkers on the cows along with milking his own cows at home. Morning and evening milkings have become a part of life for Tom.

“I genuinely look forward to milking cows,” Tom said. “The act of milking I enjoy as much as the cow families. It’s a calm way to start the morning and a calm thing at night. I can’t think of a better way to raise kids than with a good routine, and milking cows fits into that routine.”