Past,Present, Future. Read our Past, Present Future feature on page 11 of the 2nd section!
DAIRY ST R “All dairy, all the time”™
Volume 23, No. 9
Iowa dairy farmer tells his story on TikTok Venteicher uses social media app to share farm videos By Sherry Newell Contributiing Writer
June 26, 2021
Feed costs cause strain on producers Kohlman, Yurczyk make changes on their dairy to help them through By Krista Kuzma
krista.k@dairystar.com
CHILTON, Wis. – Growing crops has never been a big interest for Jeff Kohlman. “Tractors weren’t my thing,” he said. “I liked working with cows.” This is why the dairyman
purchases the large majority of his feed and focuses on managing his 500-cow dairy herd near Chilton. Although this started as a profitable way to dairy when he bought the farm in 2002, it has now turned into a reason he contemplated exiting the business last year. “It worked well at first,”
Kohlman said. “Even the bank said it was a good idea. After 2009, everything changed and it’s been pretty much downhill since. There have been times when it hasn’t been as bad but for the most part it’s been pretty much negative numbers.” Commodity prices have been steadily increasing since
Iowa – The person known as @IowaDairyFarmer on the social media app TikTok has amassed more than 4.2 million likes for his posts during the past four months. In real life, @IowaDairyFarmer is Dan Venteicher, who farms in northeast Iowa near Strawberry Point. His posts explain his family’s 180-cow robotic dairy and often debunk misinformation that frustrates dairy farmers everywhere. TikTok features videos 15 to 60 seconds long posted by users who have made it the fastest-growing social media platform in the world as of 2021, according to the blog “iconosquare.” The analyt-ics fi rm App Annie estimates MARK KLAPHAKE/DAIRY STAR TikTok will reach 1.2 billion Aaron Yurczyk feeds hay to his heifers June 18 on the farm he rents near Holdingford, Minnemonthly active users this year. sota. Yurczyk purchases all the feed for his 50-cow herd. And while many dairy farmers have been using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram to highlight their practices for some time, fewer have caught the TikTok wave. enteicher V firstsignedonin March 2020. “It was really just something to do during the pandemic. I set up an account but never posted,” Venteicher said. Read about dairy But a couple of things trigfarmers who have gered him to post his first video Feb. 27. dairied through the “I gave a tour to some coldecades beginning with lege students and one of them the 1950s through the had an account, so I saw our 2010s. barn on a TikTok page. I startSee pages 11 -21 in ed looking at the comments and was a little discouraged,” second section. he said. The comments led him to explain why he and his family MARK KLAPHAKE/DAIRY STAR installed the feeding system the Dennis Noetzelman from student featured in the video. Parkers Prairie, Minnesota is one of the farmers featured in Turn to VENTEICHER | Page 5 dairying through the decades.
Dairying through the decades
the beginning of the year with corn seeing a high this year of $7.32 while soybeans have topped the market in 2021 so far at $16.43 according to macrotrends.net. It has caused additional strain on dairy farmers purchasing feed. “I think this caught everyone off guard,” said Spence Driver, dairy nutritionist for Ag Partners in Goodhue, Minnesota. “It’s not just protein or corn sources. Other ingredients in the diet are running high, too. Those you can’t contract or you’re a lot more limited with contracting … certain ingredients they are just having to pay more for. So, most people’s feed prices are going up.” Driver attributed the increased prices to a variety of market dynamics: yields in South America, a dry spring in the United States, an increasing export market and a shortened inventory supply on top of plant shutdowns due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, and now a driver shortage for trucking. “It’s like everything else. Look at all the markets and supply chains, imports, exports. Everything is just messed up right now and it’s been that way for not quite a year,” Driver said. “It’s throwing a monkey wrench into everything.” Aaron Yurczyk has felt the pinch in his checkbook lately. The young dairyman has been purchasing all his feed since he began dairying in 2016 on a rented farm near Holdingford, Minnesota. “I always talk to my nutritionist to find the cheapest substitute on anything we can, but everything seems to run with the price of beans or corn, protein level wise or energy wise, so changing is kind of difficult,” said Yurczyk, who milks 50 cows. Last year, Yurczyk paid an average of $3.50 per bushel of corn. The last few loads he has purchased this year, Yurczyk paid close to $8 per bushel. To cut down the amount of ground Turn to FEED COST | Page 5