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Nebraska farm is model for Rock County proposal

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Big Dairy on the Prairie

Nebraska dairy farmer Todd Tuls plans to break ground in March for what will be the biggest dairy operation in Rock and Walworth counties.

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Todd Tuls

READ TOWNSHIP, NEB. — Driving west on Highway 92 from Omaha, Neb., it's easy to imagine you're in the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin.

A line of cars crawls behind a combine. Beef cows and their big calves graze on corn stubble. Small farms with yards full of well-aged barns and pumpkins for sale complete a picturesque view.

About 80 miles west of Omaha is Rising City, population 386. Out here, one turn off the state highway puts you onto a gravel road. The hills flatten, but the view is no less picturesque.

Suddenly, among the fading fall colors is a matched set of enormous, long buildings gleaming white in the sun. The buildings dwarf four semitrailer tanker trucks in the parking lot. Beyond the lot, bales of hay are covered by white plastic stretched over huge hoop frames.

Between the buildings and the road, small, newly transplanted trees grow along a gravel drive to a small office building. The only signs are those prohibiting trespassing.

An astute visitor might put together the tankers and the hay bales and realize he or she is looking at a dairy farm. But the things often associated with dairy farms in southern Wisconsin—old farmhouses, calves in outdoor hutches, wooden barns converted to fit growing operations—don't exist on this farm.

The sterile, white buildings give no indication they contain 6,000 dairy cows.

This is Butler County Dairy, which owner Todd Tuls built from scratch in 2008. Four miles west and across the county line is Double Dutch Dairy, built from the ground up in 2000 and home to 4,600 cows. The two herds make Tuls the biggest dairy farmer in Nebraska.

This spring, Tuls plans to build a 5,200-cow dairy operation on Highway 14 east of Janesville in Bradford Township. The planned construction site was a cornfield this summer.

If the farm were built, the new herd would be the fourth-largest in Wisconsin and would bump Rock County's largest herd—Larson Acres in Magnolia Township—from eighth to ninth place on the state list, according to Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources data.

To help understand what a 5,200-cow dairy looks like, the Gazette in October went to Nebraska to tour Tuls' operations and the communities around them.

Cows beyond cows

It's the most over-photographed picture in the dairy industry: the long double row of cow lined up at the feed alley in the middle of a freestall barn.

From the end of an alley at 6,000-cow Butler County Dairy, the view is no different, except you have to squint a little to see the far end of the row.

Then you realize the barn is built on a long, upward slope. What looks like the end of the row really is the middle of the barn—the building stretches an equal distance down the other side of the slope. Hundreds more cows are lined up eating at the alley past where you can see.

And then you remember that this is just one of six barns.

Even though you're standing among thousands of cows, the barns are peaceful at mid-morning. In one barn, two workers move along a row of cows. One examines each cow to confirm she is pregnant. The other makes notes on a clipboard.

Others work in the office, in the milking parlor and outdoors moving feed or working on a building expansion. In all, fewer than 20 people work among the 6,000 cows on a weekday morning.

The cows at Butler County Dairy and Double Dutch Dairy are housed in groups of more than 240 based on their stages of lactation. They do everything as a group: eat, sleep, deliver calves and get medical care.

Each large pen has access to feed, water and sand-bedded stalls. The cows walk around as they please in the pens. At any given time, most are eating or lying on sand and chewing their cuds.

Computers constantly measure the temperature and humidity inside the buildings. As the conditions change, the computers roll heavy curtains up or down and turn fans on or off to draw in outside air. When the weather is mild, the barns can take advantage of the prairie breeze. In the humid summer, they can turn into wind tunnels that pull large amounts of fresh air over the cows, Tuls said.

Three times a day, each group of cows walks from its pen to the milking parlor. While the cows are gone, a worker driving a skid loader scrapes the manure from the feeding and bedding areas.

The cows are herded into a holding area where they jostle and shuffle into single-file lines and into the milking parlor. At Butler County Dairy, workers can milk 180 cows at a time. At Double Dutch, they can milk 140 at a time.

The process is carefully orchestrated so each cow spends as little time as possible away from feed and bedding, Tuls said. It takes 45 minutes from the time the first cow from each group leaves the bedding area until the last cow returns from the parlor, Tuls said. And it takes seven hours to get the entire herd through the parlor once. That leaves an hour for cleanup before the next milking shift starts.

Each cow is milked three times every 24 hours.

Tuls' cows each produce an average of 85 pounds (about 10 gallons) of milk per day.

Imagine loading 10 gallons of milk into the trunk of your car every day, Tuls said. The highest-producing cows make 20 gallons of milk at their peaks, Tuls said.

Between the two farms, Tuls' cows produce 100,000 gallons of milk daily. That's enough to fill 15 tanker trucks.

"My goal when I opened Butler County was to get to 100,000 gallons per day," Tuls said. "Now we're there and occasionally beyond. It's kind of a fun number, 100,000."

Milk isn't the only thing the cows produce by the truckload. Every day, a truck picks up 15 calves from Double Dutch Dairy and 20 from Butler County Dairy.

The babies are raised at a custom calf-raising facility that has 1,500 calf hutches, which look like large, plastic doghouses. The raiser typically has 1,200 calves on site at any time, Tuls said.

The baby bull calves are neutered and raised as beef steers at a facility that is not part of Tuls' operation.

When the female calves are about 6 months old, they are trucked to a 12,000-head custom heifer-raising facility in Plainfield, Neb. Tuls owns the facility. Heifers (immature females) for his herd and two other herds are raised there.

The heifers are trucked back to the Butler County and Double Dutch dairies in time to deliver their first calves.

Manure management

Tuls' cows produce 161 million gallons of waste annually at Butler County Dairy and Double Dutch Dairy.

It's a common challenge in the industry: the more cows in the herd, the more space needed to dispose of manure. Often, the waste is used as fertilizer for crops.

Tuls doesn't grow crops himself. Instead, he contracts with nearby grain producers who let him apply waste onto their fields and crops. In turn, Tuls buys much of the feed for his cattle.

The contracts prohibit landowners from applying commercial fertilizer outside Tuls' plan.

"They can supplement to some degree, but they would not be allowed to put on fertilizer that would inhibit us from fertilizing," he said.

The landowners do not pay for the waste but do pay for the cost of application, Tuls said.

The waste is applied in three ways:

-- Spreading solids—Dry waste is spread on top of fields and incorporated into the soil.

-- Knifing—The waste is pumped out of a storage lagoon, through a series of hoses and into an applicator mounted on the back of a tractor. The applicator injects waste below the soil surface. Knifing is supposed to reduce the odor associated with manure application. However, it only can be done when crops are not growing.

-- Center pivots—Liquid waste is pumped from the top of the lagoon, piped underground and sprayed onto growing crops through center-pivot irrigators.

Much of the solids settle out in the lagoon, meaning the wastewater pumped through the center pivots typically contains 35 percent solids, Tuls said.

"That sounds like a slurry, but it's not," Tuls said. "Milk has 12 percent solids in it, and it's not a milkshake."

Most of the center-pivot application is done in July and August, although it can be done later in the fall if necessary, he said.

The use of "dewatering" lagoons through center-pivot sprayers is common in Western states but not in Wisconsin, said Steve Struss, an agricultural engineer with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. Tuls uses 40 such pivots in Nebraska. He's proposing to use 16 in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin DNR has not yet approved the proposal.

In Nebraska, Tuls has been battling with the town of Read, where his Nebraska farm is located, for the right to run manure water pipes under a county road to center pivots. When the town prohibited him from doing so, Tuls unsuccessfully appealed to Butler County and then filed a lawsuit in Nebraska court. The case is open at this time, Tuls said. He is suing the town for the cost of laying 2 miles of pipe around public right-of-way rather than the 33 feet it would have taken to go under the road, he said.

Tuls said the town discriminated against him, because other public utilities cross the road.

The Gazette was not able to reach a representative of the town of Read for comment.

Tuls and other supporters say moving waste through pipes to center-pivot sprayers saves wear and tear on public roads; allows crop farmers to use affordable, non-fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, and improves the efficiency of the operation.

Using center-pivot sprayers, Tuls can apply waste throughout the growing season. Farmers who don't use such a method are forced to spread large amounts of waste in the spring or fall when crops aren't growing, he said.

The general public doesn't realize the benefits of pumping waste through hoses and irrigators, Tuls said. They tend to be concerned only about the amount of waste and the potential for odor, contamination or runoff, he said. Professional application reduces the risk, Tuls said.

"We're actually as strict as you can get as far as our management of fertilizer, and our types of applications are regulated by our nutrient management plan," Tuls said.

Keeping score

Two charts are taped to the stark, white door of the barn office at Butler County Dairy near Surprise, Neb. The charts are full of the sort of data that's important to a dairy producer: cull rates, pregnancy rates and pounds of milk produced, to name a few.

The data comes from the 10,600 cows kept between Butler County Dairy and the nearby Double Dutch Dairy.

Tuls expects workers on both farms to watch the scores, and he expects them to compete against each other.

"Everybody wants to see the score," Tuls said. "If we never saw the score in the end, why would we play?"

Next year, Tuls wants to add a third chart to the contest. By 2012, Tuls expects to be milking 4,600 cows at Rock Prairie Dairy in Wisconsin. The 5,200-cow farm would be located in what this summer was a cornfield on the Rock Prairie eight miles east of the Janesville city limits and four miles southeast of unincorporated Johnstown Center.

Tuls isn't nervous about breaking ground on such a project. He has been in the dairy business his whole life, and this is the next step in his dream of farming in America's Dairyland, Tuls said.

Tuls, 41, grew up in Chino, Calif.

"Back in the day, it was probably the dairy Mecca of the world," Tuls said. "One farm after another. Everybody in the community I grew up in lived on a dairy."

He later farmed with his brother in Kansas until 2000, when he moved with his own family to eastern Nebraska.

Tuls didn't hesitate when the Gazette asked to tour his facilities for the purpose of writing a news story.

"Absolutely you can come out," Tuls said. "I wish your DNR would do the same."

Driving a Gazette reporter and photographer in his larger-than-life pickup through his larger-than-life barns, Tuls spoke confidently and informally about his operation.

He knows his dairy background will be closely evaluated by those who disapprove of commercial dairy farms. At least two Rock and Walworth county residents already have sent letters to the DNR or the Gazette opposing the project.

One thing opponents bring up is a 2004 manure spill from Double Dutch Dairy. According to Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality records obtained by the Gazette, waste from that spill reached the nearby Big Blue River as well as a neighbor's fishpond.

Tuls said he documented the spill and was not sanctioned by the Department of Environmental Quality. He has not had other spills or any DEQ citations, he said.

Tuls said he has learned from previous mistakes.

"If I didn't make those mistakes, I wouldn't be as knowledgeable as I am today," Tuls said. "Failing is failing forward."

Other observations

Not everyone has the desire or the nerve to say anything negative about Butler County Dairy or Double Dutch Dairy, said Augie Goelz, who lives a mile from the Butler County farm. Agriculture is king in Nebraska, Goelz said. If people have concerns about commercial farming, they tend to keep quiet, he said.

"Everyone has an opinion, but not everybody is willing to come out with their opinion," said Goelz, who owns an automobile repair shop in nearby Osceola, Neb. "You get boycotted."

However, Peg Johnson of rural Shelby, Neb., is one of those who is willing to say the farm has hurt her quality of life. She dislikes the truck traffic associated with the dairy and the roadside littering that comes with it.

Workers "tear up the road ditches" to bury pipes to the center pivots and drag hoses to pump into knifing applicators.

Vehicles are "up and down the road like crazy. They never used to be," Johnson said.

She admitted, however, that Tuls has listened to her concerns.

"If you would call Todd and tell him, he tries to shape it up," Johnson said. "If you have complaints, he'll take them."

Kevin Siffring, who lives a mile north of Butler County Dairy and has five of Tuls' center pivots on his land, said Tuls has been a good neighbor and a good business associate.

Tuls records the amounts of waste applied to fields and administers field tests every year, Siffring said. He always follows through with what he says he will do, Siffring said.

"They're just a super neighbor to us," Siffring said. "Last year sometimes it snowed so you couldn't hardly get out to the shop. They've cleared out our driveway I don't know how many times."

Diane Schroeder of Ulysses, Neb., lives five miles from Butler County Dairy, which is too far to be bothered by the odor, she said. But she doesn't like the thought of breathing particles blown on the wind from the center-pivot sprayers, she said.

She'd be happy if Tuls would move to Wisconsin altogether, she said.

"Actually, we'd just as soon you got him, but I'm afraid we're stuck."