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Taking care of the earth and having fun on the farm

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Meyer Dairy

 

Written by Jonathan Eisenthal

For Nick and Tara Meyer, taking care of the earth and enjoying the family farming life on their dairy near Sauk Centre is all the same thing.

Tyler, 5, and Madeline, 3, follow mom and dad around the dairy barn and help out and make for lots of fun moments throughout the day.

“They both are funny, and they have a great time out working with us,” said Tara, who keeps a farm blog. She writes about once a month to tell the rest of the world what they’re missing by not being farmers. “Last summer our son Tyler showed a calf at the local dairy show and this year he’ll do a little more of that. He’s learning the ropes of being a showman. Tyler named his baby calf ‘Polkadot.’”

The Meyers have 240 milking cows, and they keep the young stock on site — raising the next generation of milk cows for their operation, while selling off the bull calfs as babies. A crew of 10 trusted employees — one full-time and the rest part-timers — help keep the place running smoothly. Nick’s dad Gerald also helps daily. The family crops 470 acres in corn, soybeans and alfalfa.

Thinking about the future, Nick and Tara decided to take part in the Discovery Farms network, a farmer-funded research project at 11 farms throughout the state. The project captures real-world, on-farm data by measuring sediment and nutrients in run off and tile drainage discharge.

“Discovery Farms is giving us a great opportunity to show what real farmers are doing with the land, and it gives us real data we can use in the future,” said Tara. “First and foremost, farmers are conservationists. That’s certainly true here. We want to make sure that this farm is viable for our kids. When Nick’s father passed the farm on to him, conservation was one of the important values he passed along to us. We work with a crop consultant who helps us with all of our manure management plans. Since we are a dairy farm, we are fortunate to have that nutrient-rich manure to use on our fields. The crop consultant helps us make sure we are applying it at the proper rates for our soils. We also have done some stalk nitrate testing through NRCS.”

Stalk nitrate testing, done after harvest, measures the amount of the essential plant food ‘nitrate’ in the corn stalk. Too little points to nutrient deficiency, while too much means there’s more fertilizer than the plant can make use of, which can lead to leaching of nutrients away from the farm field.

“We are doing grid soil sampling, that’s the most important way we determine the right amount of manure and nutrients to place in the field,” said Nick. “Grid soil sampling has become a pretty common practice across farming. It’s just one more way farmers can target the placement of nutrients.”

These techniques help make sure the crops get the food they need, while assuring that nutrients don’t leak away into nearby streams and ditches and cause environmental problems.

Meyer Dairy 2

The Meyer family farm near Sauk Centre is part of Minnesota’s Discovery Farms network.

The experts with Minnesota Discovery Farms installed a flume and monitoring station to collect and sample rainwater running off a field at Meyers’ farm. The samples are picked up for analysis at a laboratory.

Nick and Tara have been surprised by the results in the first few years. Almost all the sediment and nutrient loss has taken place during a single heavy spring rainstorm in each of the past two years. Setting aside the effect of these two storms, which are major events and rare, the sediment and nutrient levels show that Nick and Tara are putting in the work to ensure water quality in their neighborhood.

“A milking cow will drink about a bathtub full of water a day, so clean water is extremely important to dairy farmers,” said Tara.

The crop rotation itself helps prevent erosion and sediment loss.

“For our dairy — like most dairy farms — alfalfa is an important part of our rotation,” said Nick. “Alfalfa is one of those crops where if you do get these big rain events it’s going to hold the soil in place. There’s been a lot more talk about cover crops in the last few years. We haven’t used them on our farm, but there is talk, and there’s starting to be research into whether cover crops are a good answer for our type of farm operation. It might not be a whole farm or a whole field, but rather it would be an area of a field. In the last few years, we have have been watching closely and seeing where certain areas are more susceptible and so would be a good choice for a cover crop.”

Connecting with other farmers helps the Meyers keep up with the latest information on best management practices for the farm.

“We like to go to typical farm conferences and trade shows,” said Tara. “We just attended the Midwest Dairy Expo here  in St. Cloud. We’ve also been part of the National Outstanding Young Farmers program. We love to travel and meet and network with farmers from other states.”


 

This post is part of an ongoing series to highlight Minnesota corn farmers participating in Discovery Farms Minnesota, which is a farmer-led effort to collect real-world, on-farm water quality information from different types of farming systems.

You can learn more about Discovery Farms here and here. Click here to read the first Discovery Farms Profile in this series and click here to read the second.

Look for other Minnesota corn farmers participating in Discovery Farms to be profiled in the near future.

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