Dairying in a retrofitted turkey barn

DALLAS, Wis. — Brad Borgen became enamored with dairy farming as a child, and in 2015, he decided to begin following his own path to dairy farming.

Along with his wife, Jenna, who works full time off the farm as a registered nurse, and their four children — Nora, Rhett, Gunner and Liam — Borgen is milking 82 cows with two GEA robotic milking machines. Their Barron County farm, which is where Borgen grew up with his parents raising turkeys, is located just inside the village limits of Dallas.

Borgen’s dairy farm exposure came from visiting his grandparents’ dairy farm near Prairie Farm as a child.

“My grandparents sold their cows when I was maybe 6,” Borgen said. “But by then I knew I liked it. When I got my driver’s license, I started working on dairy farms. I eventually decided I wanted to run my own farm and not just work on farms. So, for a few years, I kept my eyes open for farms and different things to come available.”

The barn on the farm that had belonged to his grandparents became available for rent in 2015. Borgen launched his dairy farming career, milking 70 cows in the rented facility.

“When the barn became available, I bought the cows and purchased all my feed,” Borgen said. “I rented it for two years and then the owner said he wanted to sell. At first I said I didn’t want to buy it; it didn’t have much land and the house wouldn’t have passed any kind of inspection.”

After weighing their options, Borgen and Jenna decided to purchase the property and build a house there.

Borgen forged ahead with his milking herd at the tiestall barn near Prairie Farm, and his heifers and dry cows being housed in one of the turkey barns on his parents’ farm in Dallas. When the opportunity to farm land near the farm in Dallas presented itself, Borgen reevaluated his operation.

“I was hauling feed back and forth and animals back and forth,” Borgen said. “Other than not having a house or a manure pit here, everything else made sense. I was already considering a retrofit of the tiestall barn for a robotic milker. I started thinking, why not just move everything here, to be near the land we’d be using to grow feed?”

Retrofitting turkey barns into dairy barns took some planning, but Borgen said he was able to do a great deal of the necessary work himself. He opted to house his cows on a composted bedding pack, with free-flow robots.

Borgen studied and evaluated different brands of robotic milkers, trying to decide what he should go with.

“I was actually sold on a different brand at first and plans were drawn up,” Borgen said. “At the last minute a GEA guy reached out to me and said he wanted to talk to me about them. I hadn’t been impressed with what I’d heard about their previous models, but the more I heard about their new models, the more I decided I liked them.”

Borgen said the machine’s ability to separate quarters within the milking system is something he appreciates.

“They’re a lot more individualized — I can separate everything by the quarter, including milking quarters separately,” Borgen said. “I can get the cell count by each quarter, live with every milking.”

He said he also appreciates that pre- and post-dipping is done inside the inflation, requiring the unit to find each teat only once.

“The cow walks in, it puts the claw on and everything happens in there,” Borgen said. “It’s faster.”

With the necessary barn renovations completed and the first robot installed, Borgen began the robotic milking chapter of his dairy farming career just after Thanksgiving in 2023. Rather than feeding pellets in the robot, Borgen opted to feed a meal-based grain.

A second robot was added in July 2025, and Borgen plans to continue to expand his herd through internal growth. However, a second robot was not initially part of his plans.

“I started with 70 cows in the robot when we moved, and I was thinking it would be fine,” Borgen said. “Things were going OK, but it never went awesome. Then I had a bunch of cows go dry and a couple I was thinking of culling. I decided to drop down a few cows and see what happened.”

At his low point, Borgen said he was running 62 cows through the one robot.

“My number of fetch cows went down, but both my number of milkings per day and my bulk tank stayed the same,” Borgen said. “I decided I was either going to drop to 60 cows and stay there, or put another robot in. I would say my capacity is 120 cows with the two robots.”

When he added the second robot, Borgen also added a buffer tank — something he wishes he had installed with the first robot.

“It lets the robots keep running when the milkman comes and the tank is washing,” Borgen said. “Otherwise, the robot was being shut down for an hour. I noticed a lot of cows were getting deterred from the robot because of that, and then they wouldn’t come back for another six hours. I was also trying to time my scraping with when the robot would be shut down, but that was hard to do with the variations in the milkman’s schedule.”

As he enters his third year of robotic milking, Borgen continues to expect forward progress.

“The cows are averaging just over 2.5 milkings per day, which is a little lower than I’d like it to be,” Borgen said. “They tell you when you move into a robot barn, it takes a year before all the cows really figure it out. Well, during the first year I made some pretty drastic feed changes, and then I added the second robot, changing things pretty drastically again. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s another eight months from now before everything is really how I want it to be, but the important thing is that every month, everything just gets a little better.”