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Otte Family: Blake and Chicky, Tyler and Kelsey, Bret and Kayla, Eric and Laura Banner Square Deal Dairy LLC | Randolph, Minnesota | Dakota County 660 cows, milking and dry

How many times a day do you milk, and what is your current herd average, butterfat and protein? We milk three times a day. We have a rolling herd average of 29,927 pounds milk, with 4.5% fat and 3.3 protein on the year. We fluctuate a little bit with the weather, but we are trending up right now in those two components as we are taking advantage of good feed quality and time of year.

Describe your housing and milking facility. We started investing in cow comfort heavily in 2019. In 2020, we finished a tunnel-ventilated barn that houses 400 of our milk cows. We tore down the previous structure to just cement and doubled the size of it. In 2021, we renovated our hospital/fresh cow pen to tunnel ventilation and updated the holding area and parlor. In fall 2023, we renovated and added on to the last barn left on the farm to be updated. That is a natural ventilated barn with chimney fans to allow fresh air exchange in the winter.

The whole farm was built in 1997, and now we have renovated all the facilities in the past three years. The barns were shot. Previously, we never had insulation in the roof and the manure gasses were rotting everything.

Who is part of your farm team, and what are their roles? Blake and Chicky are both full time. Blake feeds cows every morning and is in charge of the crops. Chicky is in charge of the calves and financials. She feeds calves every morning and most afternoons. Tyler is the herdsperson as well as in charge of the employees who milk the cows. Eric is on the farm full time and does day-to-day feeding, bedding and health on the young stock. He is also the crop guy. Bret is off the farm as a nutritionist. He helps out with youngstock and feeding cows on weekends and any other time needed as a fill in.

We have eight full-time employees, four part-time employees and six seasonal employees for our harvest because we do some custom chopping.

What is your herd health program? Every Monday the vet comes. We pregnancy check milk cows, walk fresh cows and walk calves just to make sure we are all on the same page. We pregnancy check heifers every 2-3 weeks. We vaccinate all year long with a protocol built into DairyComp. We use DairyComp pretty heavily to build protocols for our yearly vaccines to the cows as well as dry-off vaccines. We vaccinate calves at birth, 45 days, weaning, six months, seven months and a year old.

What does your dry cow and transition program consist of? Our cows get dried off about 60 days prior to calving. We move them off the farm for five weeks and then they get moved back here to a pre-fresh facility for the remainder of pregnancy. They are dry-treated, and given some vaccines at the time of dry-off. When we move them back to the home farm, we give them their booster of ScourGuard. We operate both farms so they are under our care the entire pregnancy. The pre-fresh cows on the home farm are walked every hour and our employees are trained to help with calving. The fresh cow pen has about 40 cows. They are there for 14-20 days post calving.

Off the farm, their ration is corn silage based with triticale added and a custom dry cow mineral mix. At the home farm, the diet is similar except the triticale is switched out for long-stem dry hay and they receive a different mineral mix.

What is the composition of your ration, and how has that changed in recent years? Our forage ration consists of 2/3 corn silage and 1/3 haylage that we grow. In addition, we add purchased dry hay, distillers grain, corn gluten, soybean meal, delactosed whey and a protein/mineral/vitamin mix. Our challenge is to accommodate our ration to the market value and the availability of byproducts.

Tell us about the forages you plant and detail your harvest strategies. We raise all our haylage and corn silage and purchase additional dry hay. Our biggest push is focusing on making the best forage we can. We plant 50% Enogen with the remainder being silage corn varieties. Enogen silage has shown us to be more digestible. All forage is stored in piles except some alfalfa that is put up as baleage.

What is your average somatic cell count and how does that affect your production? This is a work in progress. Yearly it averages about 250,000. We bed with green manure solids. Manure solids work great nine months out of the year, but during the summer they are harder to manage. You have to demand excellence from cows, equipment and employees to get the SCC through the tough times. We work as hard as we can to get it lower.

We don’t think SCC affects our milk production directly, but it does affect the immune system of a cow, so there are secondary advantages that you can gain from a lower SCC.

What change has created the biggest improvement in your herd average? By renovating our facilities, we have greatly improved our cow comfort. We have big cows and to expect a lot of fat, protein and milk production out of Holstein cows, they have to be comfortable all day long. We are able to deep bed in our solids. All of our feed alleys are under cover. Our feed is consistent and cows want consistency. We are able to provide quality feed with the environment-controlled barns. The cows are never uncomfortable because we blow so much air through the barns.

What technology do you use to monitor your herd? We use Dairy Herd Improvement Association monthly testing, and we have worked with Minnesota Dairy Initiative since 1997. Last year we got SenseHub, a Merck Animal Health collar system that gives health, rumination and heat detection information on all cows. We have used Feed Supervisor for over 20 years. Our parlor uses RFIDs to identify the cows and meters to monitor daily milk weights.

What is your breeding program, and what role does genetics play in your production level? We love genetics. We have used a lot of beef on dairy for the past three years. Across the herd, we are 80% beef bred. We use sexed semen on all our heifers and sexed on about 10% of the cows. Our goal is to produce good cows with the sexed semen being used on our highest genetic valued animals and production animals using DairyComp. We use the parent average net merit as well as our relative value of the cows based on herd mates to pick out our top cows. We credit much of our fat and protein levels to our breeding program. Since 2016, we have been focusing on shipping solids.

List three management strategies that have helped you attain your production and component level. Our nutritionist, vet and MDI team. You have to have a good relationship with all three to get out of the cow what you want. You can breed the cows the best you can, but you have to feed them correctly. You can only use the feed that you make, so it is trying to first make the highest quality feed and then feed it in the right way to get the most production as well as performance out of that feed. From our vet, it is healthy cows. Healthy cows make milk. Cow comfort and health have always been a big focus for us, and we don’t struggle with that. We are very preventative so we can keep cows rolling and doing what they are supposed to do. With MDI, it is the team management. They help us so that we are all on the same page to accomplish whatever we implement.

Tell us about your farm and your plans for the dairy in the next year. Tyler, Bret and Eric are the fifth generation to milk on the farm. Our parents are the fourth generation. They started in 1997 with 250 cows. We have done three expansions since then. We milk in a double-11 parallel parlor. We ship our milk to Plainview Milk Products Cooperative and also supply the milk for CannonBelles Cheese. In the coming year we have no big plans. We are wrapping up the building projects by getting dirt moved, etc. There is always a project list. We want to maintain, keep the barn working for us and continue working on management. We are only a few years into the expansion so there are always changes.