Effort, help, luck
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
Good employees, outside advice help farm expand, move forward
In the past 15 years, White Eagle Farm in Hamilton, NY has roughly tripled its herd size.
“We are hanging right around 900 milking cows,” said owner Ed Carhart, who attributes the farm growth to good employees, the advice of others, and keeping focused on moving forward and making progress.
“And, luck,” Carhart laughed.
White Eagle Farm was founded in 1967 by Carhart’s father.
“I kind of fell into farming,” Carhart said. “I just decided to make something of it.”
The farm includes 1,900 acres. Additionally, Carhart rents crop acreage, primarily to feed the herd, but sells some crops. Wendell Dickenson, the crop manager has been with White Eagle for 10 years. He oversees a crew of equipment operators / truck drivers and Carhart says that they would not be able to accomplish what they do without Dickinson’s knowledge and work ethic.
White Eagle Farm began working with Cargill in 1988. At first, the farm looked to Cargill for some feed, but recently the relationship has expanded to draw on a host of consultants and advisors that are helping White Eagle’s milking crew reduce somatic cell count, and helped the field crops crew improve forage quality and harvest efficiency.
Training and evaluation of employees led to an employee learning hoof trimming. The farm is seeing improvements in locomotion and lameness scoring.
“We got a lot of advice,” Carhart said. “It is very helpful. It is different than what we have been used to doing. Hopefully, it will pay off.”
White Eagle’s expansion has occurred mostly as a result of internal herd growth.
According to Carhart, “In 1997 we were milking 350 milking cows. We hired Harry Beach to be our herdsman and things took off. We built a new parlor in 2000 and were able to grow the milking herd to 900 without buying a single animal. When Harry retired last year, Arnie Eisenhut became our herdsman. He is responsible for all aspects of livestock management and has increased efficiency in the parlor. Production is better than ever.”
He explained the growth: “I have good help. Things started clicking. We built a new parlor in 2000. We built barns as we could. We just keep moving along.”
Carhart’s goal for the future is to use existing resources to make advancements on the farm.
“We want to get more milk out of the cows, and we want to work with what we have,” he said.
