Not everyone can grow multiple businesses on one farm. Dale and Clay Hemminger have done it on their Hemdale Farms in Seneca Castle, N.Y., but it has not been easy and has required many pivots over the years.

So what’s their secret to success? “It’s a situation where the final outcome of a system is greater than the sum of its parts,” Clay Hemminger told attendees of the Pennsylvania Dairy Summit in Lancaster, Pa. “It's really what our business is built on. One plus one equals way more than two for us.”

Clay is the third generation of his family to run the farm, which has grown from a 90-cow operation in the 1960s to more than 1,400 cows milked by robots and an extensive greenhouse operation.

“We grew incrementally,” Dale Hemminger, Clay’s father, said. “I’ve always liked to kind of be on first base, and we’ll see if I can’t just steal second without risking a lot of equity on a misstep.”

Making adjustments

Dale joined his father, Ralph, on the farm in the 1970s when freestalls were put in to replace the existing bedded pack setup. Vegetables, at the time, were an integral part of the business.

In the 1980s, the farm continued its expansion, growing to 2,000 acres to take advantage of growing regional demand for vegetables. Changes were made to the dairy operation, but numbers essentially stayed the same.

Big changes started happening in the 1990s. The vegetable market was in flux, the dairy market was starting to consolidate, and Ralph died in 1997. The vegetable processing market started to become dominated by Midwest farming operations, Dale said, but there were still profits to be made. The farm grew to include 50 employees, and the snap bean harvest operation was one of the largest on the East Coast.

Still, Dale said that he saw labor was going to be a long-term issue, so he shifted more of the business to dairy, which was expanded to 400 animals and a new parlor.  

"One of the most profitable and smartest things in my career was to focus on cow comfort, and we made the double-7 parlor into a double-10 with a holding area on it,” he said.

Here come the robots

Dale’s fears about labor concerns became a reality. The farm became a spotlight for immigration raids, and by the late 2000s, the harvesting business was shut down and vegetable equipment sold.

Dairy became the major focus, but labor issues were not going away there, either. Robots quickly became part of the farm’s future. The dairy operation grew to 800 cows, and a four-robot system was installed.

“I had met my career goal to get to around 800 cows, and I put in the robots at around age 50,” Dale said. “My dream was to have grandchildren, watching the robots milk cows. And that’s how we ended up with all these robots.”

In the 2010s, the dairy grew to 13 robots, and the parlor was eventually shut down. But vegetables were not completely forgotten. The farm purchased a 2-year-old tenant greenhouse operation that was losing money for a big discount and focused much of its attention on growing cabbage for kraut, as well as growing other vegetables. The greenhouse itself is “low-tech,” Clay said, with lots of reusable trays, shelving and racking.

Next generation comes home

In 2013, Clay came back to the farm, but it wasn’t before he and his father had a long chat.

Dale said that he always told Clay that a job would be available for him on the farm if he wanted it, but if he wanted a career on the farm, he had to go to college — he got a degree from Cornell University — and he had to work for another business for a few years, which he did.

Clay told his father that he wanted to maximize the farm’s infrastructure to become more efficient. Between 2013 and 2019, the farm continued expanding. The dairy now includes 1,400 cows and 22 robots. The greenhouse grows cabbages and other vegetables, and raises plugs for 20 other farms in the state.

Last year, the farm produced 39 million pounds of milk. Number of milkings averages 2.7 a day, and the somatic cell count is 150,000. The cows average 94 pounds of energy-corrected milk.

Heifers are raised by another farm and bought back, which has been a more efficient and cheaper way of getting replacements then raising the heifers on the farm.

But the key to everything, Clay said, is the management team and having a good culture. The farm has eight managers, most of whom have been given the chance to buy shares of the farm business, giving them an even bigger incentive to do well.

“My father realized at the early stages of his career that if he wanted to achieve his goals, he needed good people in the business,” Clay said. “He focused heavily on having an operations manager, a dairy manager, and that allowed him to focus on higher-level things at the same time as he did on the operations.”

Managing the ‘silos’

Of course, growing big is not for everyone. Many farmers do not have the land base to grow, and regulations can impede farmers who try to grow their operations to take advantage of their size.

But for the Hemmingers, the goal is not just to get bigger. “I'm not a believer of continually growing just to grow,” Dale said. “I like finding your sweet spot, and we'll work on that margin.”

Having business silos — the dairy, the greenhouses, and the operations and shop — and operating each of them as efficiently as possible gives them options to use equipment between the operations, move employees to where they are needed and have some diversity so when one business is not doing well, they can make changes so the entire farm operation doesn’t suffer.

"Having all three of them allows us to have significantly more resources, labor, and just coming together to create synergies that allow us to be better in each one of them," Clay said.

They have also taken advantage of alliances with neighbors, joining with other farms to buy equipment and trading land resources depending on the year and each farm’s needs.

Even with a limited land base and regulations that can make it hard to farm, Dale said he is excited about the future of farming in the Northeast, especially dairy.

“I think we can compete,” he said. “We're seeing, right now, California has its issues with both water and resources. New York state is a challenge. I'm more concerned about New York state than I've ever been. But we still have some positive things.”

The key is to manage farms like businesses and know your numbers.

"We've got to know our numbers, folks," Dale said. “Way too many farms say they've always done it that way and keep doing it. We've got to know our numbers, and we’ve got to exploit what we're good at.”

“I'm very excited," he adds. “If global trade stays together, whatnot, dairy is going to drive the bus, and I think it can be phenomenal. We're a day's truck drive to 40% of the nation’s people. You guys are closer than we are. It's an exciting place to be.”