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Larson Acres plans open house to showcase expansion

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Photo by Bill Olmsted

A truck makes its way down an aisle dropping food for the cows in the new barn on the Larson Dairy Farm south of Evansville. With thousands of head of cattle on the farm, even meal times need to be efficient.

Photo

Photo by Bill Olmsted

Milking cows in the new barn at the Larson Dairy farm south of Evansville have plenty of room to move about. The barn, which is nearly 80 yards wide and almost 1/4 mile long, can house about 1800 animals.

Photo

Photo by Bill Olmsted

A pair of workers tend to weeks-old calves in one of the new barns on the Larson Dairy Farm south of Evansville. New calves start out in single pens before gradually being moved into larger social units as they age.

Photo

Photo by Bill Olmsted

A weeks-old calf checks out a visitor from the confines of it's pen in one of the new, calf barns on the Larson Dairy Farm south of Evansville on Friday. At the farms, flexible pens allow calves to be individually monitored and gradually socialized as they mature.

Photo

Photo by Bill Olmsted

Mike Larson

MAGNOLIA TOWNSHIP — Mike Larson sits in his office, a floor below the bedroom of his youth.

Paperwork stretches across his large desk. He’s come a long way from the days when he plopped a piece of plywood over 5-gallon buckets.

“It’s a lot different than what we did when I was growing up,” Larson said, reflecting on a map of the expansion at Larson Acres that has doubled its herd.

Years ago, the family would level out an area, pour concrete and add on to the barn.

“The level of engineering is quite in-depth,” he said, referring to the extensive planning that went into the year of construction.

The old family farmhouse on Highway 59 has been transformed into a large conference room and offices for the county’s largest dairy. Outside, a new barn stretches nearly a quarter-mile. Calves have five new barns, and another milking parlor operates around the clock.

Construction is complete, and the farm plans to be at full capacity by the end of January. The expansion brings the total number of cows and heifers to 5,275 animals at two sites.

The family plans to welcome the public for an open house from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 31.

As family members planned the expansion, they visited many farms, so this is their opportunity to share the expansion with other farmers, Larson said.

“More importantly than that, we want to tell our neighbors and consumers what we do and why we do it so they have a better understanding of agriculture and the steps we take to protect the environment and the care we give each individual animal,” he said.

Eleven Larson family members are among the farm’s 52 full-time equivalent positions. The farm added 15 employees for the expansion—not only to care for animals, but also because more ground is being worked, requiring more agronomy employees, Larson said.

Larson showed a Gazette reporter and photographer around the expansion, which includes:

-- Four nursery barns. Each barn fits 60 calves. From birth to seven weeks, the calves are in individual, modular pens. Then a divider is removed between two pens.

“We try to get them socially able to adapt to neighbors so we go from one to two. Then they go to small pens of eight, then up to 16,” he said.

He compared it to kids: the size of day care rooms and classrooms increases as a child ages from 3 to first grade.

The barns have an “all-in, all-out” design to try to break diseases or viruses that might be lurking—something they couldn’t do before. A barn is emptied all in one day so that all of the modular pens can be taken apart, high-pressure washed, sterilized and put back together.

Depending on the weather, the sides of the barns can open or close.

-- Calf barn for 2- to 5-month-old calves. The calves move from their double pens in the nursery barn to here, where they start in pens of eight, then move to pens of 16.

-- Cross-ventilated, free-stall barn. The 1,184-foot-long barn has eight rows of stalls, and features ventilation that allows it to be cooler in summer and warmer in winter. When the temperature is in the low 90s outside, it’s in the low 80s in the barn.

The barn includes nine maternity pens; previously, the farm only had a community calving pen. On average, eight to nine calves are born a day, but busy days can bring as many as 25, he said.

The end of the barn housing pregnant cows can be darker, while the milking cows receive 18 hours of light because research shows that those cows like more light.

A covered breezeway for the cows runs from the barn to the milking parlor.

-- Milking parlor. Two parlors now run 24 hours a day as each cow is milked three times a day. It takes seven hours for one round of milking, with one hour of cleanup.

Five tankers of milk leave the farm daily. The 30,000 gallons produced at Larson Acres daily are taken to Grande Cheese Co. in Juda for cheese-making.

Each cow has electronic identification so the milking system can alert workers of changes in milk production. The system sometimes finds sick cows before they look sick, Larson said.

Cows have a temperature near humans—100.5 degrees—so the milk is quickly cooled down to 35 degrees. In less than five minutes, milk goes from the cow, through the calculating system and chiller and into the tanker.

Laundry is constantly running as each cow is cleaned with its own cloth each milking.

-- Additional sand separator. The system separates the sand from manure, so the sand can be reused in bedding.

-- Additional feed storage.

“We needed to add on to our feed storage because we have more mouths to feed,” Larson said.