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[00:00:00] Mike Howell: The Dirt with me, Mike Howell, an ekonomics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by ekonomics.com farming’s go-to informational resource. I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research use, and issues helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
Hello again everyone. Welcome back to the Dirt. I’m glad you’re tuning in this week. We are still in Canada continuing our series on Canadian agriculture. Today we have Jason Crozier with us. Jason is a dairy farmer here in the Alberta area, and we’re gonna be talking to him a little bit about his dairy today.
Jason, welcome to the Dirt.
[00:00:56] Jason Crozier: Yeah, thanks for having me here today.
[00:00:57] Mike Howell: Jason, if you will, tell us a little bit about you and what you’re doing there on the dairy.
[00:01:01] Jason Crozier: Yeah, so we have a family dairy farm. We milk close to 200 cows on our farm. My family settled the area back in 1896, so we’ve been there for a long time now.
Just me, myself, my brother, and my dad, and we actually have my brother’s son that’s just recently come back to the farm, which is sixth generation. So we’ve been dairy farming in the area for. Quite a while now.
[00:01:22] Mike Howell: That sounds like it. You said you have about 200 cows that you’re milking. What kind of rotation is the milking on?
Is it twice a day? Three times a day?
[00:01:30] Jason Crozier: So about 13 years ago, we had a barn collapses from snow load. So we were forced into kind of building a new facility and at the time, robotic milking was kind of the new thing that was out. And we started looking around and decided the technology was good enough that it was something that we were interested in, and we put a robotic milking facility in.
We had put in three robots. We were milking about 160 cows at the time. For the last 13 years, we’ve been in a robotic milking facility, and just a few years ago we put in a fourth robot so that we can increase our numbers a little bit at the farm.
[00:02:03] Mike Howell: Things are definitely different today than they were. A hundred years ago when you were milking by hand, my grandfather started off with a dairy and my dad was milking cows and he still thinks I can’t milk a cow, but I do know how to milk a cow if I had to.
If it comes back down to it, there used to be a lot of dairies in the United States. I grew up probably five miles is a crow, flies from a dairy that was milking 1200 cows three times a day. And it’s quite an impressive thing. And they went out of business a few years ago. We’re losing a lot of dairies in the United States.
There’s several things that come into that. They’re low price on the milk, can’t seem to get that price up where they think it needs to be. We’ve got a lot of environmental concerns that are making it harder to have dairies. Labor is an issue with any kind of agriculture. So how are things here in Canada?
Are y’all facing the same issues? Maybe some different issues.
[00:02:49] Jason Crozier: I think we share a lot of the same issues. We do have a little bit of a different system here in Canada, obviously with our supply manage system. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. What it’s trying to do is stabilize the price for us a little bit and the consumer so that we don’t have those price fluctuations up and down where you do see the boom and bust cycle a little bit more in the state side of things.
So it’s a little bit easier to manage, but obviously we have a lot of the same problems with. The labor and costs. Some of our costs obviously include feed. So we’ve over the last few years with $25 bushel canola and we’re feeding canola meal on our rations. We’ve seen the fluctuation with barley price and we see those fluctuations.
So we’re always dealing with the same sort of things, but we do have a little bit of a stabilized price that seems to help us a little bit from those boom and bust cycles that you guys are dealing with.
[00:03:37] Mike Howell: I have heard a little bit about the price control, and it reminds me a lot about the peanut quota back in the southeast United States that they did away with us.
Probably been 20, 25 years ago now, but if you didn’t have the quota, it was no guarantee that you could sell your peanuts. When they did away with the peanut quota, it kind of opened it up and we have those vicious cycles like you’re talking about Now. Talk a little bit about that price control structure and how that works.
[00:04:00] Jason Crozier: Our price structure. We take some things into it, like the consumer price index, and there’s a bunch of things that they put into that pricing system. So what they’re doing is they’re trying to just keep it so that it’s a little bit reasonable and we do discuss it. If there was a time not too long ago here that.
They figured, you know what? We really can’t give the consumer a price increase, even though our pricing formula had shown that we should probably increase the price of milk just because we know that people are hurting the price of groceries. We, over the last few years with COVID and all these crazy things that have happened, there’s just a few things that go into it.
I’m not an expert, obviously, and what. Goes into the pricing formula, but it’s just stuff that we’re trying to keep the price at a reasonable level so we don’t have those 40, 50% spikes that you can see in some of the other commodities right now. I, I guess beef’s a pretty good example of what’s happening in the beef market right now with the huge increase in the price of beef.
[00:04:54] Mike Howell: Yeah, if you don’t believe that, go price a state. I’ve eaten several steaks while I’ve been here in Canada, and the price is going up every day. I don’t care how much a state cost. I love eating too much to not eat a steak. Jason, you mentioned COVID, and I know there was a lot of things going on around the COVID time, but a lot of farmers struggled through that.
They weren’t able to get their crops to market. Consumers couldn’t go to purchase that. How did that affect the dairy industry?
[00:05:17] Jason Crozier: Yeah, we had a few tough years. It was funny, at the start of COVID, everybody was, you could see people hoarding milk and right off the start, all of a sudden people were buying a whole bunch of milk products and storing them, and then all of a sudden everybody had a whole bunch of stock of milk and everything, so everybody stopped buying them.
It just threw the market right into a state of flux, like everything else. We had some tough years with growth, with restaurants shutting down. Obviously people’s habits change. Kids weren’t going to school. It took a few years, like probably four years I would say. Until we had some growth back in our market, you don’t really have growth in your market.
Tends to be pretty tough. It seems like we’ve kind of come through that finally. But yeah, there were some tough years just with trying to deal with the change in the markets and people’s behavior and habits and stuff.
[00:06:01] Mike Howell: Jason, you mentioned that you’re the fifth generation there at the dairy, and I think you said the.
Sixth generation has just came back to the farm. We talk a lot about sustainability on the dirt, and if somebody can keep a dairy going for six generations, you’re doing something right. Something’s pretty sustainable there. Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing, how this dairy has stayed around for so many years and being productive.
[00:06:21] Jason Crozier: What we do is we try to keep our costs line. That’s one of the biggest things, is just trying to keep our costs in line every day. The biggest cost on a farm is obviously feed costs. Like you were talking in your other podcast with weather, that’s something that you can’t control. But we do our best job to deal with people like an agronomist to make sure that we’re putting the proper amount of nutrients in our crops and just anything that we can do that we’re looking at all our different costs all the time to just make sure that there’s stuff that we are doing that try to keep those costs down, whether it’s buying machinery, just anything that we can do to try to keep our costs down.
And then besides the dairy, we do have. A small, I guess in today’s standards crop side of things, we produce all of our own feeds, so we’re not dealing with the market cost of purchasing feed as much. So we probably crop about 1500 acres total. So there is a little bit of cash cropping to our farm. So like I said, we have a little bit of cost control that way and.
To be honest, they kind of work opposite of each other. When we have a good cropping year, sometimes it’ll be a little bit tougher on the dairy because the cost of some of the inputs and stuff like that that we are purchasing go up, and that kind of mitigates the ups and downs of that. And then same thing with every dairy farm you have that beef side of things as well.
So. Two years ago, we were selling a bull calf on our farm for $25, basically almost giving them away. Today they’ll pick them up for $600 within a few weeks old. So we’ve kind of diversified enough that we can get through the bad times and just tighten our belts, and that’s kind of what we’ve done over the years, just to make ourselves ride through the tough times.
The other thing is there’s a lot of people before me that put a lot of hard work in. The land was almost given to them for free. So I’m pretty lucky in that way that the people before me have been generous enough to allow us younger people to farm and give us what they could and off the hard work off their back.
So I’m always conscious of the people before me and. They’ve kind of allowed us to do what we do.
[00:08:16] Mike Howell: That makes a big difference. Jason, you mentioned that you’re raising most of your feed there on the farm. In my part of the world, a dairy cow, I know the nutrition is utmost important to get that milk production and quality where you need it to be.
And the dairies that I’m familiar with, they feed a lot of corn silage. They bring in a lot of alfalfa, shipped in from New Mexico and Arizona. Talk a little bit about what these cows are eating and what you’re growing there on the farm.
[00:08:39] Jason Crozier: Yeah, so we’ve kind of changed over the years with the new corn hybrids that have lower heat units in our area.
We’ve continuously made the switch. We used to be a mostly alfalfa silage barley silage operation, and we’ve basically taken the barley silage rate out of our ration. I mean, every dairy farm’s a little bit different, but our situation, we started testing at probably both. 20 years ago, just small scale, and we’ve gotten to the point where it’s all hybrid corn that we’re feeding, replacing all that barleys in our ration.
We keep a pretty simple ration. We purchase a little bit of alfalfa hay, just with over the years, the conditions that we face over the summer. Tough to grow really good quality hay. So we’ve decided we’re just gonna purchase that. And then cash crop some other things like canola or something like that. A little bit easier with the rain cycles in the summer to get good quality hay.
We’ve just decided to purchase that aspect of things. And then we add a little bit of canola meal for protein into our ration. And then we’re, we’re using our own barley that we grow a Copeland barley. If it makes malt, we’ll sell some of that, but we also feed it to the cattle as well. So a bonus, we switched over to Copeland Barley a few years ago.
[00:09:46] Mike Howell: Jason in the south where I’m from, the dairies, most of the cows are raised outside. They keep ’em out in the pastures. They have free range access to Bermuda grass or bahe grass. And then during the winter we have winter forages, rye grass, and they are supplemented a good bit with feed and hay, but I know there’s some dairies that they live inside the barn year round and everything is monitored.
They give ’em exactly what they need through the feed. How is your dairy set up?
[00:10:10] Jason Crozier: We do have quite a bit of pasture land on our farm. Obviously when it’s minus 30 in Alberta here it gets pretty cold. So we have some pens that they’re in during the winter. Dairy cows inside the facility that are milking don’t go out a lot, but we do have quite a bit of pasture land, so it’s just a native pasture grass that we’ve had forever.
I’ve never changed, and we’ve just decided we enjoy having the cows out in the summer. So we do have quite a few of them out in the summer, and we produce enough feed obviously in the summer that we. Silage the feed that we’ve purchased so that we can get them through the winters. Obviously we have almost six months of winter where we’re, we are here in Alberta, so
[00:10:47] Mike Howell: I can’t imagine dealing with the winters y’all have to deal with all the snowfall and getting feed trucks from one place to the other. I don’t know how you manage all of that.
[00:10:54] Jason Crozier: Yeah, it can be tough. Uh, minus 20 day when it’s sunny, it’s not so bad, but there’s those 10 or so days of minus 35 that. We just kind of hunker down and do what we can do.
It’s kind of survival mode is what we call it on the farm during those days.
[00:11:09] Mike Howell: Jason, you know, another thing that I know you have to deal with is manure management. Anytime we have livestock in confinement, we’re gonna have to deal with that. And I know in the US we have a lot of regulations around that.
You have to have a nutrient management plan in place, and I know where that manure is going to go before you’re able to get a permit to start doing that. Tell us a little bit about how you manage your manure and what that’s being used for.
[00:11:30] Jason Crozier: Everything in our dairy facility, all the wash water, the manure, everything is trapped in the back of our barn.
We have a system that pumps it into a positive tank that it’s actually. A manure tank. United Livestock used to make them. You’re probably aware of the silo tanks, the blue silo tanks. Yep. So we have one of those, and it holds probably about 1.3 million gallons of manure. So we pump everything from the facility into there, and twice a year in the spring and the fall, we’ll take it out, spread it on the fields.
Usually we have a tractor. In the field with custom operator that comes and spreads it, and we’ll try to incorporate that manure into the field almost immediately so we’re not losing any of the nutrient value from there. My wife is an agronomist, so she takes care of managing the nutrients in the soil and taking advantage of whatever we can cut back on the petroleum side of fertilizer.
Anything we can take advantage of? We do. And we’re all still, the last few years we’ve been kind of running a composting program with our solo manure, just experimenting with it right now. Trying to see if we can cut back on the amount of trucking that we’re doing to take it out to the fields and just testing that.
That’s kind of, its infancy, but uh, we’ve just started doing that the last few years as well. Yeah.
[00:12:41] Mike Howell: Do you have enough land that you’re able to apply all of your manure there, or do you have to move some of it off farm? At times?
[00:12:47] Jason Crozier: We’re lucky enough that we have enough land base that’s fairly close to our farm just with being in the area for so long.
We’ve purchased enough land over the years that we’re pretty lucky that way that we’ve got enough land that we can distribute it, we could actually use a little bit more. Just it’s nice to put all that nutrients back into the soil at the end of the day. Yeah, nice. It’s nice to be able to use it.
[00:13:06] Mike Howell: That’s a really critical thing.
You know, everybody’s talking about regenerative agriculture and that’s one of the things is if you have livestock there and have enough land to get that manure back on it and don’t have to ship it back and forth, that really helps out. It makes regenerative agriculture a lot more economical. Jason, I appreciate you taking time to visit with us today.
Is there any take home message you wanna leave our listeners with? Anything that we’ve left out that you want ’em to know about the dairy industry in Canada?
[00:13:30] Jason Crozier: I guess at the end of the day, what my thought is is that I think for any country, whether it be the United States or Canada, I think it’s really important that the grassroots farm level, that farms are healthy.
I know we do things differently here in Canada than they do in the States, but at the end of the day, I think it’s really important for us to have those food security in both of our countries and. For us to both have a good, strong agriculture industry at the end of the day, is good for both countries.
[00:13:55] Mike Howell: We do a lot of things the same. There are some differences, you know, the weather plays a lot into those differences as well, but we do a lot of things the same way. So Jason, we appreciate you being with us today. Listeners, thank you for tuning in. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode as much as I have really got a lot of information here today.
And if you will hang around for just a couple of moments, we’ll be right back with segment two. Farming Isn’t Farming without questions. And now there’s a place to go for answers. At economics. An entire team of agronomists is waiting and ready to help for free. No question is too big or too small. Visit Nutrien-ekonomics.com and submit your question with the ask an agronomist feature.
Listeners, welcome back for segment two. As you know, segment two is where we ask an agronomist a question of the week to help us do that. We’ve got Lyle Cowell, our Canadian agronomist back in the studio with us. Lyle welcome back.
[00:14:50] Lyle Cowell: Thanks for having me again, Mike, and again, great to have the studio up in Canada this week.
[00:14:54] Mike Howell: Really enjoying our time here. Lyle, this is a question that came in a few weeks ago from our ask the agronomist on the economics website, and the question was, are there any in-season applications that would benefit lentil yields?
[00:15:06] Lyle Cowell: That’s a very good question, and farmers are faced with this question quite often, not just with lentils, but with every crop.
But let’s focus on lentil. Lentil is a quite short season pulse crop, a legume that we eat the seeds of. So a pulse crop that is primarily grown in relatively dry areas across Western Canada and some of the northern states. So it’s a legum. So we will put a risely inoculate on it in the spring so that it fixes its own nitrogen.
Then we shouldn’t be needing to add any extra nitrogen in the spring or as a top dressing. That should be off the table. Should we be looking at other nutrients as a top dressing application. Generally not. It is a fairly short season crop and it forms flowers and pods quite early in the season. The lentils are right now across western Canada to the northern states are already podding, so there’s not much time between seeding and podding to really get this done.
We have to be cognizant of that part of the growth cycle as well. It doesn’t make much sense to then apply. Phosphorus or potassium is sulfur is a top dressing because really it was only a few weeks ago that we were seeding. So what is the right answer to me? We talk about so fertility all the time, but if you want to top dress your lentils, probably the main thing you should think about is fungicides.
To be quite honest, you’re going through lentil crop. In the summertime, lentils, especially in wet weather, become very susceptible to scle. Tenia or white mold, as well as petritis can turn a nice looking lentil crop into a dead lentil crop within weeks. So yeah, our business is so fertility, but if you really want to look at that extra dollar being spent midsummer on a lentil crop, and the farmer calls me in at, at the office, I’m gonna say.
Think about putting on a second application of a fungicide just to keep things that good looking crock, that I assume that you’ve already created a good nutrient management plan for it in the spring. And the next step then is to control diseases. So let’s think about it from that angle. Is mid-season top dressing should be above fungicides.
[00:17:19] Mike Howell: Great information there. Lyle, we don’t wanna apply any nutrients we’re not gonna need in that crop, and definitely need to make sure we’ve got a healthy crop growing in the field to get the best yields out of that. Listeners, we wanna thank you once again for tuning in today, and as always, if you have any questions about anything we’re talking about, you can visit our website.
That’s Nutrien-ekonomics.com. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with the Dirt. Hey guys, if you like what you heard today, do us a favor and share this podcast with someone else. It could be your neighbor, your friend, your crop advisor, or whoever you think would enjoy it. Your support helps ensure future episodes, so please like, subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you’re listening from.
