From the Fields - Madeline Desrochers

By Madeline Desrochers, Yuba County dairy farmer

We’re seeing record prices for our bull calves and Angus bull calves. We’ve been breeding some of our lower-producing cows to Angus. We started that a little over nine months ago, so some of those crossbred cows are now being born. Any calf that has a black coat is going to go for more. It’s very new for us, and we’re doing it on a small scale, not nearly as aggressively as some dairies. We’re seeing the benefits because prices are so high. We live close to the Sierra, and there’s a lot of smaller beef ranches around here. It’s their calving season. If they have a mama cow that loses her calf, they’re calling us looking for drop calves, so we’ve been selling some to the beef producers as well.

The cows are producing a lot of milk because of this is beautiful weather. We’re milking the most cows we’ve ever milked because we purchased some last year from a neighbor that sold out, and we’re growing our herd. We’re grateful to have healthy cows because the national news is talking about bird flu and how that’s been knocking down milk production in cows in Texas, New Mexico, Idaho and several other states. We’re very blessed to not have that here. But we don’t live in fear. We’re not going to be scared that that’s going to happen to us. Hopefully, it will be helpful for milk prices for dairy farmers. It’s an unfortunate event, but it does knock supply down.

Birds are always a problem. We have plenty of pigeons and starlings around this dairy. What can you do about that? We are in the Pacific Flyway. We haven’t seen as many migratory birds this year as far as the geese and ducks. There’s only so much you can do when you house as much feed as we do. They want to come here and eat all of the feed and grain.