Take a walk inside Jim Davenport’s office, and you’ll be lucky to find a chair to sit on. Papers strewn on desks, supplies thrown in corners, dust and cobwebs everywhere. It’s a not a pretty sight.

Maintaining a spotless office isn’t that important to him. But once you open the office door, hang a left and step into the tiestall area, this is where cleanliness really matters.

"As far as I'm concerned, and I've always said this, the secret to high-quality milk is clean cows," Davenport says. “In particular, a clean teat, a healthy teat surface and healthy skin on the cow.”

Davenport milks nearly 70 head of Holsteins and Jerseys on his Tollgate Holsteins in Ancramdale, N.Y.  

The walls leading into the tiestall barn are filled with milk quality awards from National Mastitis Council, Agrimark and other organizations. In fact, Davenport has won more dairy quality awards from National Mastitis Council than any other farm in the U.S.

In February, he added a Platinum Award from the council — the dairy industry’s “best of the best” award — to go along with his dozens of other awards.

It’s something he does proudly, but it’s also great for business.

Clean teats, fresh bedding

The animals inside Davenport’s barn aren’t spotless, of course, but where it matters the most — the teats — you’ll struggle to find any issues. They are clean, healthy and ready to give milk.

“The first thing to do with milk contact is the surface of the teat," he says. That means a clean, dry surface using a good pre-dip before attaching the milking units. Once milking is done, it’s time to post-dip. The idea is to get the teat wet and let the milky foam drip off, leaving behind a bactericidal layer that enables the teat to close up and fight off bacteria.

The cows lie on foam mats on a layer of kiln-dried pine sawdust and 3 ounces of hydrated lime separated by dividers that go into concrete. The stalls range in size from 4 feet to 5 feet.

Davenport’s done a lot of work perfecting his tiestall setup. He previously put in loop stalls when he expanded the herd, but when a heifer stepped on the udder of an adjoining cow — leading the cow to develop gangrene — he took the loop stalls out in favor of fabricated dividers, which he describes as “the perfect compromise between safety, control and comfort.”

The rubber-filled mattresses he used before were nicer than the foam mats he uses now, he says, but they were a challenge to use in the new stalls, so he switched to foam mats.

The kiln-dried sawdust is more expensive — $95 per cord compared to the $80 per cord he could buy — but he’s willing to spend more money, if it keeps the cows healthier.

“So basically, we have extremely dry conditions,” Davenport says. “The most important thing is going in with the manure hoe.”

Scraping out and maintaining each stall is also important.

“The cow never lies down in anything but dry, clean bedding, and when we milk them we scrape everything out wet, pull back dry stuff,” Davenport says. “And if they happen to mess it up during the process, we'll make sure it's clean. It's all about positioning the teat to be in a place where it will be clean and lessen the chance for infection.”

Lower stress, happier cows

Davenport doesn’t “push” his cows with a high-grain diet, which he thinks is another key to high-quality milk. The cows are fed a high-forage diet from the 140 acres of BMR corn silage and fescue-based grasses he raises.

He averages four cuttings with a 5-ton dry matter yield. He also raises rye and triticale on the corn ground. If all goes right, his Holsteins can make 80 pounds of milk daily at 4% protein.

His herd’s somatic cell count averages 30,000 to 40,000, but he’s gotten it as low as 26,000. The national SCC limit is 750,000, says JoDee Sattler of the National Mastitis Council, although some states have lower limits.

In 2020, the country’s dairy herds averaged an SCC of 178,000, according to the council.

Oddly enough, Davenport says his lowest SCC counts have come in summer, even though that’s a time when cows are normally under more stress because of heat and other factors.

The farm is on a hill with plenty of wind to keep air moving, he says. Several fans in the tiestall barn also help keep the cows cool in the heat. If hot days are predicted, he will go in and pressure-wash the cows to get them cleaned up. The less load of dirt, the better they can cool themselves, he says.

“Basically, it’s keeping the stalls clean, sizing the cows to the stalls, and the other thing is as little stress as possible for the cow,” Davenport says.

Clear payoff

Raising clean, healthy cows is good, but having a premium market for milk is a good incentive, too.

Davenport is a member of the small Hudson Valley Fresh milk cooperative, which markets a high-quality, high-protein milk to high-end grocery stores and restaurants throughout the New York City area.

The cooperative markets milk that has less than 200,000 SCC and is higher in protein. Davenport, who will be taking over management of the cooperative upon the retirement of founder Sam Simon — he is transitioning Tollgate Holsteins to a younger farm partner — says any farm in the cooperative with an SCC over 200,000 loses its farmer premium for six months, and the milk is shipped elsewhere.

The average for all farms is between 100,000 and 140,000.

Not only is SCC a sign of possible health issues, Davenport, who majored in animal science at the University of Connecticut, says a low SCC also means milk will last longer and stay fresher.

The pasteurization process kills somatic cells, but enzymes from the cells remain in the milk to attack proteins and fat. Davenport says this process leads to milk that is of lesser quality and has a shorter shelf life, and years of research supports this. Simply put, higher SCC means a shorter shelf life for fluid milk.

The cooperative was formed by Simon, a retired orthopedic surgeon and dairy farmer, 14 years ago. He asked Davenport, who is a member of Agrimark, to join the cooperative. Most of its members are east of the Hudson River and have small herds. One notable exception is Dutch Hollow Farm in Schodack Landing, N.Y., which has 700 cows and manages nearly 2,000 acres.

The cooperative has a transportation and balancing agreement with Agrimark, which provides milk hauling services and balancing through its West Springfield, Mass., dairy plant.

Agrimark also performs farm inspections and other services for the cooperative.

"It just works out good," Davenport says. “And I think any small producer, if they're going to go down this route with bottling their own milk and they're a member of a [small] coop, you ask anyone who is doing this … fluid milk, you have got to be able to balance.”