Douglass Farm – My WordPress

RUTLAND TOWN, VT.

It all started as a 4-H project

A father and son team ignores conventional wisdom that says dairy farms must be big in order to be successful.

By Steve Taylor
January 1982

YOU need 50 to 60 cows, a raft of machinery, and a debt load of $2,000 or $3,000 per cow to survive in dairy farming today, right?

Hogwash, says Elliott Douglass of Rutland Town, Vermont.

*Lane Douglass, and his father, Elliott (above), pause for the author’s camera, as does one* *of their Jerseys (below). Further below is a view of the Douglass* barnyard.

He and his son milk exactly 18 Jersey cows; they get by nicely with old tractors and machinery; and their farm doesn’t owe a nickel to anybody.

“Can’t be enough income off that operation to live on,” you say.

Douglass will get out the books and show you that the 18 Jersey cows rolled up an income over feed cost of $23,281 over the last 12 months and that the farm netted an additional $10,000 from the sale of breeding stock. At that rate, why even think of busting your hump milking more cows?

“l don’t want to milk any more than what we are right now, but Lane, my son, thinks maybe he’d like to getup around 28 cows,” Douglass says.

There aren’t very many farms in New England like Elliott and Lane Douglass’ operation, set right in the middle of a sprawl of tract housing and trailer parks just off U.S. Rte. 7. Just about everything they do flies in the face of conventional dairy farming practice in the region today.

Here are some of the unusual things:
• They have cows in two small stanchion barns, one a former two-car garage and the other a converted hay shed.

They lug milk by hand from the barns to a detached milkhouse 100 feet away.
Cows are fed entirely on hay and grain, and it’s grass hay, not alfalfa.
No dealer ever lays a wrench on their equipment –they fix everything themselves.
Thanks to a local milk market and high test, they get close to $17 a hundredweight for their milk.
Any item they need is bought with cash before it’s delivered.

The Douglass operation is able to operate this way primarily because both father and son are good cow men who have the eye for good breeding and the determination to provide their animals the best possible management. Elliott Douglass has owned at least one Jersey cow ever since he was in the service during the Korean War.

Though the farm has been shipping milk for only a few years, Douglass has developed a strain of Jersey that excels in type and makes milk, milk, milk.

The herd has a rolling herd average of 13,009 with 616 pounds of fat on a 4. 7 percent test. Their top animal is a second-calf heifer which has just wound up a lactation with an actual record of 20,771 pounds of milk and 891 of fat.

That qualifies her for the American Jersey Cattle Club’s Hall of Fame. She’s carrying service of one of the breed’s top bulls and Douglass is pulling for her to drop a valuable bull calf.

The Douglass herd has a per-cow income over feed cost of $1,492, which contrasts with the $987 figure that’s the average for the breed nationally. The herd is mostly bred and raised on the farm, but some animals have been purchased in over the past few years.

It was Lane’s purchase of some heifers to build up his 4-H dairy project that pushed Douglass into full time dairying.

“I’d worked in all kinds of jobs over the years, but always had kept some cattle around. When Lane kind of got carried away with buying heifers we got into the milking business,” he recalls.

Actually, the story goes back quite a while before that. Douglass got out of the service and, in 1953, got married and started farming on a place in Randolph Center. He bought his first registered Jersey that year. Later he moved to a rented farm in North Clarendon, and then drifted into driving tractor-trailer rigs across the country, and working on construction jobs.

He ran a bulldozer for several years and was the operator who opened up many of the trails of the Killington and Pico ski areas, when they were being developed in the late 1950’s. He worked briefly in a machine shop, then for the city of Rutland.

His family eventually grew to four daughters and son Lane. He bought some land for $100 an acre in Rutland Town in 1960 and built some houses on it to sell.

In 1970, the kids were anxious to get involved in 4-H Club dairy projects, so he bought a building that was on skids and dragged it home to serve as a barn for the kids’ heifers.

Douglass became an active 4-H leader and worked with dairy projects at the local level and in statewide programs too.

Lane was in Rutland High School when he “got carried away” with cattle. The choice came down to either sell off some of the animals, or building a barn and milking them.

“I called the bank and asked for some money to build a barn. They said no problem, they’d give us all the money we wanted. Trouble was, I had a six-percent interest mortgage with them and they wanted to rewrite it before they’d let the loan go through,” Elliott recalls.

“The mortgage wasn’t very big, but darned if I want that interest rate to go way up, so I said the hell with that. What we did was take what had been a two-car garage and make it into a cow barn,” he says.

From there the farm has grown a little each year, always using native lumber and family labor to build on the additions. The Douglass men do every bit of the construction work themselves–concrete work, carpentry, plumbing, and electrical.

The financial arrangements for ownership of the livestock and handling expenses are very clearly drawn between father and son. Lane pays his father $100 a month from his cows’ share of the gross milk income for rental of facilities and utilities.

Lane owns 12 cows, Elliott owns the balance. Elliott weighs his milk every milking, so the two know exactly how to divide up the income. Costs for feed are apportioned according to use, and the father finances any of the son’s capital outlays for purchase of breeding stock.

The cows are fed all the hay they want, and they get it fresh, four or five times a day. Douglass believes the best way to feed hay is to feed the poorer quality hay in the morning and improve the quality in each successive feeding during the day.

Hay is harvested on about 25 acres of leased land nearby. Most years, they’ll get enough off this land to carry the herd, but if yields are short or a crop gets rain damaged, they’ll buy supplemental hay.

“I like nice grass hay to feed cows for milk. I don’t like alfalfa because it’s so hard to make hay out of the first crop and what you buy there’s never two loads alike.

“Cows always clean up grass hay better and do better on it, I think,” Douglass says.

The forage is balanced with Blue Seal Energizer pellets with 16 percent protein analysis, fed during warm weather, and 20 per cent in the Winter. The cows get some feed from a small pasture near the barns.

Hay is harvested with an old 40-hp Ferguson tractor and a Farmall C. The baler cost Douglass $200–it’s a John Deere 14T that runs like a top so long as it is kept fine tuned. The Ferguson has a loader, used to bucket manure for spreading on the pasture and hay land.

Beyond that, there isn’t any fancy iron to be found on the Douglass farm. Elliott says he’s considering buying a used haybine to speed up haying next Summer, though.

Milk from the Douglass Jerseys goes to the Seward Family Dairy Bar processing plant a short distance away in Rutland City. Previously, their milk went to the Valley View creamery in Wallingford, but when that closed down last year, the milk was shifted to the Seward Rutland plant.

“We lost our market when Valley View closed and could have been hurt pretty bad. But our co-op, Northern Farms, came in and got us shifted over without any trouble. They did a real good job. .

“We really appreciate our local market because we save so much on hauling, plus we get the Vermont local differential. Some of the other producers who ended up with down country handlers are really having to pay for hauling,” Elliott Douglass says.

It’s the purebred cattle business that they like to talk about most. From years showing in 4-H, Lane has developed an eye for type and dairy character in Jersey cattle, while Elliott has long been involved in breed activities.

Elliott serves as a genetic recovery agent for the breed headquarters, responsible for working with breeders in upgrading commercial herds. He also does some cattle buying for the cattle club.

They figure that the colored breeds are going to begin coming back strong after years of decline, because of rising energy costs and the need for higher solids content in cows milk.

“l think the future for Jerseys is real good when you consider the way energy costs are going and how processors are going to want more solids for their products. It looks good for the colored breeds, I think,” he says.

Lane Douglass likes to show cattle now as much as he did when he was in 4-H and he plans to continue exhibiting his best animals at the major Vermont fairs, Eastern States Exposition and, perhaps, someday at the All-America in Louisville.

“l like showing. You learn a lot, both from the judges and from the other people exhibiting. I’ve always gotten a lot out of it,” Lane says.

Elliott still takes in the shows, just as he did when he was a 4-H leader, and he continues to sponsor the Elliott Douglass Award at the Rutland fair, a trophy given to the novice 4-H dairy exhibitor who shows the greatest sportsmanship and interest in dairy showing.

If Lane wants to bring the herd up to 28 cows, what will happen?

“Well, I guess we may try to go on another farm with a little more room than we have right here,” he says.

“I won’t get any more than the cows I’m milking now, eight head. He figures he can handle a few more: He’s younger, probably he can.”

Should they decide to expand a bit, they won’t change their basic philosophy. They’ll continue to breed cows for top production and type, run their business on a strict cash basis and avoid the creation of debt.

Elliott’s wife, Barbara, works for a Rutland department store and the four Douglass daughters are all away at college or out on their own working.

Since graduating from Rutland High in 1980, Lane has worked full time on the farm with his father.

With both men enjoying their work to the fullest, it appears they’ll be on the scene a while, proving a lot of conventional wisdom about dairy farming to be so much hokum.