2004 Agri-View Article

TheArticle that appeared in the Agri-View newspaper front page December 2004

HEDRICH FAMILY ENTHUSED ABOUT DAIRY GOATS

BY KELLI GUNDERSON

LIVESTOCK EDITOR

Before Larry and Clara Hedrich even owned goats, they shared a deep admiration for the animals.

“We’ve always had an interest in goats,” Clara says of herself, who grew up helping her family milk dairy cows, and her husband, who grew up in town but worked on his grandparents’ beef, sheep, hog and mink farm. Although they had no experience raising goats when they met, Larry and Clara’s shared interest in the animals led them to explore several dairy goat farms across the country. They've spent family vacations touring farms in Arizona, Colorado, Alabama, Texas, Virginia, South Carolina, and New York, and even spent much of their honeymoon visiting goat operations in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It wasn’t long after their honeymoon that the couple acquired a few dairy goats of their own.

“When we bought this farm in 1978, the previous owners had left two goats and some peacocks,” Clara says of her and Larry’s 22 acre farm west of Chilton. “We just never got rid of them.”

Twenty-six years later, both goats and peacocks still have a place at the Hedrichs’ farm, called LaClare Farm, along with a few llamas, a Border Collie and a couple of miniature donkeys. But the animals that receive the most attention from the Hedrichs remain their dairy goats.

“We’ve been commercial since 1996,” Larry says of his and Clara’s dairy goat operation. Before that time, the couple raised goats purely as a hobby. They had purchased their first purebred goats in the early 1990’s as 4-H and FFA projects for their five children – Anna, now 24, Greg, 22, Katie, 19, Jessica, 16, and Heather, 15. By the mid-1990’s, the herd had grown large enough that the family was milking as many as 24 does twice a day by hand.

“We’d hurry to get milking done before we headed to work in the morning and after we got home at night, “says Larry, who, at the time, was working an area supervisor for a major construction company. Clara, too, was working off the farm – as the ag teacher at Chilton High School. Considering the couple’s cramped schedules, they soon realized that milking two-dozen goats by hand morning and night “just didn’t make sense, “ Larry says.

“We gave our kids the option of selling the goats or going commercial,” Larry recalls. And, considering each of the Hedrich children’s affection for goats, the resounding response was, “Go commercial.” Within a couple of years, the Hedrichs had doubled and tripled their herd numbers, had begun milking their does in a home-built couble-10 herringbone parlor complete with pipeline, and had started shipping their milk. Today, the family is milking 150 purebred, registered does, including some of each of the major dairy goat breeds – Alpines, Nubians, Oberhaslis, Toggenburgs, LaManchas and Saanens. The plethora of breeds on the farm, Larry says, is a result of each of the family members’ breed preferences. “Nobody can agree on which breed is best,” he says.

Although lots of opinions sometimes make for lots of disagreements on the Hedrich farm, Larry and Clara say they cherish all of their kids’ involvement on the farm.

“The goats have been great for the kids,” says Clara. She and Larry, who both hold leadership positions in state and national dairy goat associations, agree the family’s goat operation has served as a wonderful tool through which to educate their kids about agriculture, teach them responsibility, and offer them first-hand experience in the agriculture field. Each of the Hedrich children “got their dairy background” milking goats on the family farm, Clara says. Which helped each of them find a part-time job at a dairy cow farm in high school or college. In fact, the eldest of the Hedrich children, Anna, a UW-River Falls graduate, has found a career as full-time herdsman on a large Fond Du Lac County dairy farm. The second of the Hedrich kids, Greg, a UW –Stout graduate, is the technical education teacher at Rosendale-Laconia High School. The third, Katie, is working part-time on a dairy farm while pursing an accounting degree from Fox Valley Technical College. And the fourth and fifth, Jessica and Heather, a junior and freshman at Chilton High School, respectively, also work part-time for a local dairy farmer.

With only two of their children left living at home these days, Larry and Clara have less help on the farm than they once did. The loss of labor has been partially offset, however, by Larry’s increased presence on the farm. In June of 2000, he resigned from his construction career to farm full-time. Clara, who’s currently working full-time as the ag teacher at West De Pere high school, helps him with milkings and other farm chores, and Jessica and Heather pitch in too.

“Each of the kids milks six times a week,” Larry says of his family’s work schedule. The schedule tends to vary depending on the kids’ school activities, but Jessica generally helps one of her parents with the morning milkings and Heather usually helps the other at night. To be as efficient as possible, the family prefers to have two people per milking, plus the help of their Border Collie, Bess, to bring the goats into the parlor.

“With this many goats, it’s important to be efficient,” Larry says. That’s the reason he and his family switched from hand milking to machine milking, from water buckets to automatic waterers, and from feeding baleage twice a day to feeding baleage in greater amounts once every four to six days. “In this business, chores can be the most consuming part of your day,” Larry says. “If they are, you don’t get anything else done.”

Of course, getting things done is often the key to profitability. Efficiencies on the farm help the Hedrichs keep their cost of production manageable, although Larry says it’s still grown rapidly the past few years.

“When we started milking commercially, our cost of production was in the mid-teens,” Larry says. “It’s not there anymore.” Increasing electric, gas, feed and other bills have caused dairy goat producers’ cost of production to increase to an average of about $24 per hundredweight of milk, he says. Considering the price paid for goat’s milk has recently been running at an average of $27 to $29 per hundredweight, that doesn’t generally leave dairy goat producers a lot left over for family expenses. Larry says that explains why “the turnover in dairy goat farmers is crazy.” “There’ve been a lot of people we’ve gotten into the dairy goat business without having done their homework or figuring out the dollars and cents,” he says.

Larry and Clara are the first to admit that a new commercial dairy goat producer’s first year of milk production is generally a “very challenging” one. The genetics of a hobby herd may not allow the goats to produce enough milk to survive in a commercial herd, plus the goats may need to adapt to being milked in a new setting, such as a parlor. After the first year, however, Larry says, “the odds begin to change in your favor.”

Larry and Clara have seen and continue to see promise in the diary goat industry. According to them, the demand for goat’s milk is rising at a rate of 5 to 10 percent every year. In fact, the Hedrichs are planning to expand their herd to 200 does within the coming year in order to supply more milk to a demanding market. Most of the increased demand comes from consumers of goat’s milk cheese, which is the end product of a good majority of the goat’s milk produced in the United States. The Hedrichs” own milk is collected fresh from their tank every four days by Bongrain Cheese USA, and trucked to Lena, Ill., where it’s made into pure Chevre cheese or goat cheese crumbles. The finished product is then trucked to Pennsylvania, where it’s distributed throughout the United States.

Larry recalls a time when goat’s milk cheeses were tough to find in the United States. But times have changed.

“People’s tastes have come to demand goat’s milk cheeses,” Larry says. “Plus, the quality of the product has really improved.” Even a couple of small grocery stores in the Chilton area now carry goat’s milk cheeses, Larry reports.

Considering the demand for goat’s milk cheeses comes year-round, the Hedrichs have tried to balance their herd production for year-round milk. Dairy goats are generally seasonal breeders, breeding in the fall and kidding in the spring. But the Hedrichs breed their does year-round so they’re kidding and milking year-round. Each January, the family’s bucks and their youngest breeding does are exposed to 20 hours of artificial light every day for a period of about two months, after which the lights are shut off. This fools the does into thinking fall has arrived, and triggers heat cycles anywhere from two to eight weeks later. Those does are then bred for summer kidding, while the rest of the milking herd is bred during its natural heat cycle from July through January, for kidding througout the rest of the year.

One of the goals on the Hedrich farm is to have no more than 30 does kidding per month, Lary says. That’s because kidding brings with it the need for quite a bit of labor on the Hedrichs’ part. The does generally have twins, and all of the newborn males are left on their mothers until weaning time, after which they’ll often be sold as meat to Middle Eastern, Asian and Mexican folks living on the East Coast. The newborn does, on the other hand, are separated from their mothers as soon as possible to prevent disease transmission. The family raises the young does on heat-treated colostrum for the first day or so, and then on pasteurized goat’s milk and milk replacer until they’re weaned at eight weeks of age. The does are bred as soon as 7 months of age or 70 pounds, either by natural service or by artificial insemination, the latter of which both Larry and Clara have learned. The Hedrichs like their young does to have kidded ad entered the milking herd by the time they’re between a year and 18 months of age.

Once in the milking herd, the Hedrichs’ does will lactate for about 305 days, during which they’ll produce about 8 pounds of milk a day. That makes for a rolling herd average of about 2,000 pounds. While most of that milk goes to cheese, the Hedrichs have retained a bit of milk for their own use since one of their family members, Katie, began making her own goat’s milk soaps a couple of years ago as an FFA project.

“Katie started marketing soaps her junior year in high school,” Clara says. Katie’s Nitty-Gritty Soaps business, which is based out of the Hedrichs’ kitchen, has since earned her second- and third-place finishes in state FFA sales and marketing competitions. Katie makes about 120 bars of soap from every 8 cups of goat’s milk, often scenting the soap with things like lavender, lilac, lemon, homey and coffee. She also makes natural and cornmeal bars, and markets the soap at craft shows, local businesses, and from her website, www.laclarefarm.com/ngsoaps. The web site has allowed Katie to reach customers as far away as Africa, the Hedrichs note.

With the goat’s milk soap business looking promising, Katie’s just one of several Hedrich children considering coming back to operate the family farm at some point in time. Larry and Clara, who admit they’re big believers in the power of education, have encouraged each of their children to get a college education and work full-time off the farm for at least two years before considering coming back to the farm.

“I don’t have any wish to expand the farm to take on one of the kids only to find out that’s not what they want to do,” Larry says. Instead, he wants his kids to have experience in the working world, and to be committed to the job should they decide to come back to the family farm.

“The goats have been a nice family activity,” Clara says. She and Larry hope they’ll continue to be for many years to come.