Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Staff Writer
When Alfred State College senior and fourth generation dairy farmer Katelynn Bumbacher decided to apply to the U.S. Dairy Education & Training Consortium held in Clovis, she said her friends and family asked her “Why are you going to the desert to learn about dairy?”
Bumbacher and almost 50 students from 23 universities arrived in town nearly six weeks ago to find out this region of the southwest is the third largest milkshed in the nation, and some of the local dairies have herds over 3,000, according to USDETC coordinator Robert Hagevoort.
“I had no idea that the dairy industry was so huge down here,” Bumbacher said. “I got here and the scale is huge. Our average is maybe 1,000 cows, so it's a lot smaller herds at home and a lot of family owned operations.”
The six-week capstone course, which ends Friday, consists of classroom based learning from visiting faculty at Clovis Community College and practical application at almost 30 local dairies engaged in CSI, or cow-based investigations.
Hagevoort and Michael Tomaszewski founded the non-profit in 2008 to address the lack of hands-on dairy education at today's universities. The students meals, housing, and education costs are funded through sponsors in the dairy and allied industry along with USDA grants.
“We try to basically engulf them in everything dairy,” Hagevoort said. “We can only do this because producers in our area let us — they will invite us onto dairies, open their books, open their barns, and show us how they do things and why they do what they do, and that's how the students learn.”
Hagevoort said exposure to the variety of dairies and the hands on learning aims to prepare the next generation of dairy managers and employees for a growing industry and provides them with tools to take back to their farms.
“Anything that we can show that is different or a different way of doing things we will go and see it and talk to the dairymen about why it is that he's running his business that way,” Hagevoort said. “So they are getting first hand information from guys that are successful in the industry. This is not just out of a book this is real stuff.”
The exposure to different management practices also extends to the other students, many who come from dairy backgrounds around the country and across the globe.
Lincoln University senior and third generation dairy farmer Tom Turner from New Zealand said he noticed big differences in logistics and nutrition between his family's pasture-based setup and the management systems at the large dairies in Clovis.
“The farm tours have been really good,” Turner said. “Visually seeing the difference, it's probably a wee bit different for me compared to everyone else here, because the first two weeks my eyes were just going everywhere trying to look and take it all in.”
“Nutrition is different here, 80 percent of the diet for New Zealand is just grass, the cows are out in the paddocks grazing,” Turner said. “That's a really big difference, and so looking at the intensive feeding systems and nutritionists coming out here, looking at every component of the feed and what it's going to be used for rather than our cheap, cost effective kind of way.”
Bumbacher said the OSHA training was a highlight from the course.
“One of the neatest things I've learned is the management, the scale,” Bumbacher said. “I'm not used to that — it's me, my dad and my brother and my siblings, so we don't really deal with other people. So it's really neat to get to learn those kinds of things. Those skills are necessary, I mean, eventually we want to grow so we will have to come in contact with that.”
Although students learned about traditional herd management practices, Hagevoort said another aim of the course is to prepare students for changes and future challenges in the industry.
“One thing that we want these students to understand is this world of today will not be like the day I grew up learning dairy,” Hagevoort said. “They are going to have to do more with less, they are going to have to deal with a consumer that's very aware of where their food is coming from, and they've got to be able to answer the tough questions.”
“We've got a great story to tell,” Hagevoort said. “We make communicators out of these students about an industry that they have an interest in.”