Megan Schrupp and the team at NexGen Dairy are building for longevity, and she says a big piece of that puzzle is getting the most out of the cows.

NEW QUEENS: After years of raising and milking Holsteins, Jerseys have become the breed of choice for NexGen Dairy, putting a higher premium on producing milk components that will end up as cheddar cheese at First District Association in Litchfield, Minn. (Kevin Schulz)

“We milk Jersey and Jersey-cross cows and our goal is milk mature Jersey cows,” she says of her family’s dairy farm operation near Eden Valley, Minn., “so we need to do what we can to get maximum health out of our cows.”

She says they are close to achieving the farm’s goal of three lactations on average, but she adds that milking old cows wasn’t an initial goal. “I think we were thinking about calf health, so that our heifers calving were healthy,” she says. “Then, we’re thinking about fresh cows and that transition period, making sure that is optimal, how they’re going through that as best they can. All of those things build to keeping cows in lactation longer — and then also focusing on genetics.”

Replacement heifer costs are huge for a dairy, and as Schrupp puts it, “Old cows are paid for.”

Back in the day, Schrupp’s father, Vern Becker, and his brother Joe Becker milked Holsteins, but since 2016 Jerseys have been the breed of choice. Joe Becker still milks Holsteins at his farm.

A walk through the NexGen barns is proof of the emphasis on milking older cows, as a few Holsteins remain in the productive herd.

“We have one everyone calls ‘Grammy’ — she’s 13,” Schrupp says. “She’s still producing, always breeds back on first service and has good calves.”

LET COWS BE COWS: Three times a day, 1,200 cows pass through the double-16 parlor. The NexGen crew aims to get more lactations out of each cow, pushing for a herd average of at least three. (Kevin Schulz)

She says traditional industry thinking is a push for genomics and heifers, “but there’s something to be said about old cows like that, a cow that’s still here at 13. Why is that cow still here and everybody else has left? I’d like heifers out of that cow.”

Transition to Jerseys

Despite the Holstein history on the farm, Vern has no qualms that the barns are now filled mostly with Jerseys.

“They’re a lot better cow than the Holsteins,” he says. “When you look at fat-corrected milk for pounds of protein and butterfat, you’re not that far percentagewise behind a Holstein cow, but just look at the size difference. There’s 1,800 pounds of weight on four feet [with a Holstein] versus 1,200 pounds [with Jerseys]. That’s a big difference.”

NexGen milk is shipped to First District Association in Litchfield where it is processed into cheddar cheese, thus putting a higher premium on producing milk components rather than just a large quantity of gallons of milk.

Schrupp also likes the Jersey demeanor, joking, “It’s like milking cats.”

Another reason the farm transitioned to Jerseys is tied to the size of the animals. “The parlor is 24 years old, and the modern Holstein will not fit in the stanchions,” she says, so rather than modifying the facilities, they changed breeds.

NEXT UP: All of the replacement heifers are raised and housed on-site, and NexGen uses Jersey sexed semen to ensure the number of heifers to be born. (Kevin Schulz)

NexGen now milks 1,200 cows three times a day in a double-16 parlor.

Tech for replacements

Recognizing the cost of replacement heifers for such a large dairy, the NexGen team uses technology to help along that path with the advent of sexed semen, “About a quarter of my semen is sexed semen, so I know exactly how many heifers I want,” Schrupp says.

The Ho-Jos [Holstein-Jersey crosses] are terminal cross cows, “so we will milk them, but they will all be bred to beef. We won’t sell the Ho-Jos, but rather their calves, which are beef crosses out of the Ho-Jos,” she says.

In addition to sexed semen, NexGen employs technology from Nedap, where each cow wears a collar that tracks eating time, inactive time and rumination, with the ability to add a position tracking component down the road. “Tech coming would allow you to see where the cows are in the barn,” Schrupp says, saving the 13 NexGen employees time when it comes to locating a cow if she didn’t show for milking.

Even with the technology tracking each cow’s activity, Schrupp and Becker still lean on the human factor. “Our goal is to let cows be cows, and we really try to not go into the pens,” she says, “But, we will go in the pens for a walk-through because the computer doesn’t always find every cow that needs to be caught. There are a lot of things that can be learned by just going in and looking at them.”

All in-house

Just as all replacement heifers are born and raised on-site, Schrupp and Becker try to have a self-contained operation. Vern Becker is a trained nutritionist, Schrupp was in private veterinary practice until 2013 and Tim Schrupp worked construction until he joined the family operation. Megan’s sister, Ellen Stenger, is involved in the operation performing bookkeeping duties.

ALL IN ONE: NexGen Dairy has an impressive footprint, as structures have been added at the family dairy farm to ensure that all animals can be housed on one site. (Courtesy of Megan Schrupp)

“We try to do everything in-house as much as possible,” Megan says.

In addition to the dairy herd, NexGen operates 1,100 acres of corn for silage and alfalfa seeded with triticale that is harvested as haylage. “We buy ground corn, distillers grains and sweet corn silage,” Vern says.

NexGen Dairy is using the technology of today, blended with the experience of yesterday to ensure cow longevity gets the operation into the future.