Two or three cows equal barn cost

Two or three ET cows equal new barn cost

But high quality breeding stock involves luck and guess work.

by Charlie Calley
March 1984

Hugh Langmaid of North Danville, Vt. is leaning against the wall of his new $150,000 cow barn talking with Buck White, his builder. The 56′ x 130′ barn is so new you can still smell the fresh cement. Six or eight cows have just moved in today, and Hugh’s son Scott is making them comfortable in their stalls; hanging up their name, rank and serial number charts.

Inside the new tie-stall cow barn

The place is white and clean. F1uorescent lighting is recessed in the ceiling. The walls are even wainscoated with reddish brown ceramic tile imported from Italy.

And, although the one-story barn has a wood frame, the only exposed wood you’ll find on the interior is on the doors to the milk room and office. And the main entrance, a portico located midway on the south side, might be the entrance to a new office building or branch bank. The tie stalls are of tubular steel, by Norbco, as are the calf pens, railings in the cow wash room, and barriers throughout the barn.

“It’ll cost over $150,000 if you include the cement lined manure pit,” said Hugh. And then there’s the heifer barn, yet to be started; and the hay barn, now under construction. “After we finish the hay barn and the heifer barn, and get back to the space we had before the fire, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cost goes over $250,000.” That might seem like a substantial sum for a barn that ties only 50 cows, but the Langmaid bovines aren’t just ordinary cows; they’re supermilkers; high production Holstein breeding stock that Hugh uses in his growing embryo transplant business.

Two or three of Hugh’s black and whites could pay for the whole cow barn; and he could sell two or three more to pay for the hay and heifer barns.

Scott Langmaid is adjusting one of the metal cow shocker bars that hang over the cow backs to discourage them from hunching up and dropping their manure in the stall. The bar makes the cows step back to drop manure into the new gutter cleaner that carries it away to the southwest corner of the barn, where the Houle mixing pit and pump is located. From there it is pumped underground to the 5 2′ x 72′ concrete storage pit, which is eight feet deep. “It should hold a Winter’s supply of manure,” said Hugh. ”We’re just getting started with it so we don’t really know yet whether it’s going to be a liquid or semi-liquid system. We use more sawdust for bedding than a lot of people and that doesn’t go through the pipeline too good.

*Buck White who built the new facilities with Hugh Langmaid, who lost the old one in the fire.*

The fire, last July 18, took all three barns, which were located on the site of the new complex. “We assume the hay barn was the start of the fire,” Hugh said. “It started around ten o’clock at night, with quite a few cows in the barn. The neighbors were the first to notice the fire and they came right over and started moving cows out.

“We had a fire stop of masonry board that slowed up the fire enough so we could get all the cows out safely,” said Hugh. “The firemen pretty near drained our pond to put out the fire.”

Neighbors took in the barnless cows after the fire and the Langmaids had them scattered halfway around Danville. Now, they are bringing them back a few at a time and expect to have the whole herd home by mid March.

The new barn is the third at the Langmaid’s Pond View Farm since it was founded by Hugh’s ancestors in 1797. “When we took over the farm from Hugh’s parents 24 years ago, we milked in the old, original barn,” remembers Hugh’s wife, Ann. She has a picture of the old post and beam barn in her living room.

There’s also an aerial picture of the long, one-story barn Hugh built across the road from the house 1 7 years ago. This is the one that burned, along with its attached hay and heifer barns. The latter two barns were built in the mid and late 1970’s, also by Buck White, of Barnet, Vt. “We wanted to build them back to be better than what we had before,” Hugh said.

Pond View Farm, so named for the beautiful mountain views that can be had over the farm pond, consists of 250 acres, with 130 tillable. The Langmaids grow no corn and feed only baled hay, with grain rations. Last year they put up between 10,000 and 12,000 bales.

Despite the absence of corn or hay ensilage from their diets, the Langmaid cows produced milk last year with an averge butterfat content of 3.8 per cent. “We’re hoping for four percent this year,” said Hugh. The production records for last year show a 20,000 lb. herd average, but Hugh points out that figure is deceptive. Because of the embryo transplant business, many of Hugh’s top producers, cows capable of milking much more than 20,000 lbs., are kept dry for long periods of time, sometimes several years. They aren’t included in the herd average.

The embryo transplant process, what Hugh calls ET, begins by administering hormone drugs to high pedigree Holsteins, cows ranked within the top three per cent of the breed, in terms of such traits as milk production, butterfat percentage and conformation. The drugs bring the cow into heat at the convenience of the farmer. But, they also cause a cow’s ovaries to release a multiple of eggs, usually about six.

At the proper time for conception, the cow is inseminated artificially. Hugh keeps a semen tank and does some of the AI work himself.

Then several days after insemination, the womb is flushed and the fertilized eggs collected in bottles. Next comes the job of using a microscope to find the embryos and preserve them until they can be placed into the wombs of recipient cows, who must be in heat for the implantation. The recipient cows do all the work of being pregnant while the queen mothers get all the glory. When Hugh started with embryo transplants, about two years ago, he used a Pennsylvania outfit that flew technicians up to North Danville to do the flushing and make the implants. Sometimes they carried embryos back to Pennsylvania to be implanted in recipients there, and some were frozen and shipped overseas. Now, veterinarian Cal Blessing, out of Monroe, N.H., handles the flushing and implanting.

“ET makes the top three percent of the breed worth a lot of money, if you can flush ’em,” says Hugh, “because you can get a lot of calves out of one cow. We’ve had as many as 30 eggs per flush. We had 52 pregnancies in one year out of one cow, but there’s a lot of risk and expense, too. We flushed a cow the other day that if she has bulls, we can’t sell them because of the pedigree.

“About 30 percent of the animals can’t do ET, and with those that can, there’s only about a 50 percent conception rate. And if the embryos are being shipped frozen, there’s more loss there. I’ve got one cow that hasn’t flushed in three years.

“A lot of people are selling embryos these days, but not me,” says Hugh. “You can sell them as calves for an average of from $5,000 to $6,000 per animal.

“We get the calves on the ground and if the pedigree is right, there’s buyers,” said Hugh. Often, buyers turn out to be groups of Wall Street financiers because “I guess they think cows are a good investment.”

The new barns have concrete foundations

The Langmaids plan to keep 30 milkers through this Winter, and about 70 heifers. Heifers are perhaps even more valuable to an ET operation because they have a higher conception rate, and fewer health problems. On the other hand, said Hugh, “We don’t know how good the heifers are.”

Even more difficult aspects of the business are judging bulls and predicting the cow buyers will be looking for one and two years in the future. “I don’t know just why,” he said, “but the whole world seems to be looking for higher butterfat. Europe has always been interested in a high test, and now this country, too.

”You’ve got to keep track of what people are after,” he said. “It’s easy to flush a cow and find out nine months later you had the wrong bull. You’ve got to use the new bulls of the time. That’s what brings the high prices. “The biggest part of the gamble is the bulls. If a bull is too new, you can get bad results in a couple of years. There’s no track record. But if you use old bulls, they’re not modern enough. The price won’t be there.”

Hugh says that what makes his business most interesting is when he sells cows in the price range of between $50,000 and $100,000 per animal. He tells the story of how last Summer he sold a 1 ½ year old heifer to a group of financiers for a price toward the top end of that range. “They immediately flushed her and got seven calves. l hated to lose out on them, but it was a good sale for us,” he said, remembering the fire. ”We had a sister to that cow, though, and one day we just found her dead in the pasture. Vet said she had ulcers.”

Hugh says he blames the government for the present “milk surplus” problem by encouraging farmers to farm through low~interest loans — and then they tell us we’ve got too much milk.”

The Langmaids are members of the Cabot Cooperative Creamery, whose tankers make the pick-ups from the farm’s new 600 gallon bulk tank. Although their new barn might be expected to have a fancy milk pipeline, the Langmaids use dumping stations instead.

“We have to sell cows,” says Hugh Langmaid. “We couldn’t survive on just our milk check. We’ve been selling breeding stock for 20 years, but it hasn’t been long that we’ve been selling more cattle than milk.” He makes the point, however, that there’s a lot of luck and guess work involved in making money through the sale of breeding stock. “Sometimes you guess right — but most of the time you don’t.”