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Farm Beginnings® Profile: Nolan & Vanessa Lenzen
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The Lenzen Family |
By the time he was 20, Nolan Lenzen had already completed a dairy management course at a local college and launched a farming career in partnership with his father and grandfather. They were milking 90 cows in a tie-stall barn and cropping 300 acres near the south-central Minnesota community of Watertown. Some might say it was a family-farming dream come true.
“We had three generations on the farm and way more work than we knew what to do with,” recalls Nolan seven years later. In fact, barely two years out of high school, the young farmer was already feeling a bit burnt out. So he rented his own farm in hopes of busting out of the rut. He even took the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings® course in hopes of picking up some innovative business management tips as he struck out on his own. On his rented farm, he implemented all of the latest dairy management techniques he had learned in college: milking in a tie stall, keeping the cows off pasture and using a grain-rich total mix ration system to boost production. On paper it looked good. In reality, it became the same old trap Lenzen thought he had escaped.
“I chased production. I was up to almost 24,000 pounds rolling herd average and won awards for milk production,” Lenzen recalls. “But at the end of the day, an award hanging on the wall doesn’t put food on the table.”
There he was, still on the south side of 25, and he was on the verge of burn-out once again—not on farming, but the way he was going about it: pushing production, pushing the herd, pushing himself, all the while going further into debt and leaving little room for life outside of the parlor, the cows and the crop fields.
“We had no family time,” recalls Vanessa, Nolan’s wife. “It was all work and farm.”
But on a recent spring day, the Lenzens seemed to have struck a more sustainable balance. They had taken time out to host a Farm Beginnings field day on milking parlor alternatives and after the tour participants had left, Nolan, Vanessa and their four children—Evan 1, Brody 3, Ty 5, and Haile 8—planted a few trees around their farmstead before the evening milking.
During the tour, Nolan, now 27, recounted how he spent the previous cold months: “I spent most of last winter going back and forth to the library.”
“Now he’s around all the time,” says Vanessa, also 27. “If I need help he’s around, and if we want to spend family time or do something with the kids together we can go do that. We’ve been a lot happier as a family and a lot closer.”
What gives?
After his second flameout while attempting to dairy conventionally, Nolan realized it was time for something completely different. So in 2004 he finally did what he had wanted to do since high school: launch a grass-based milking operation. Instead of confining the cows and spending time (and money) hauling grain and other feed to them while hauling manure in the reverse direction, he converted to a system based on rotationally-grazed paddocks. The cows are moved at least once a day to a new paddock, allowing them to harvest their feed in the form of grass while spreading manure in a manner the soil and plants can make use of sustainably. The cows are fed no grain and get dry hay in the winter. It’s a low cost way of producing milk — one estimate is that on a per-cow basis it can be done for a third of the price of a confinement system. Managed rotational grazing systems don’t require expensive manure management systems, cropping equipment or housing facilities. Because of its low cost and efficient use of resources, grass-based dairying not only saves money, but it can also be quite profitable.
“I always wanted to graze, but then I went to school for dairy management and got brainwashed into thinking I wanted free stalls and big equipment and all of that,” says Nolan. “Since I converted to grazing, I’ve made more money this way than I ever did with conventional. Even with my 24,000-pound rolling herd average Holsteins, I was to the point where I couldn’t even afford to fix my truck. Once I switched to grazing, I paid off all my loans and took it from there.”
The Lenzens are in their second year on a 140-acre farm they’ve purchased in the northwest part of Minnesota. The 40-cow dairy herd is in transition to being certified organic and the family plans on selling milk for a premium to Horizon Organic starting a year from now. When they moved to the farm, milk cows had not been on the place in four years, and a lot of work was needed to make it a Grade A dairy. The thin soils had been cropped extensively, and the Lenzens spent most of 2008 establishing a rotational pasture system on former cornfields while Nolan milked cows on his dad’s farm. They were able to use cost-share money from the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program to get their rotational grazing fencing system set up, and the county paid to have a tunnel put in beneath the road that runs by the farm so the cows can safely access pastures on the other side.
One of the biggest projects was adding a low-cost eight-cow parlor to the back of an existing tie-stall barn. The parlor is an example of the Lenzens’ do-it-yourself approach to farming. Using a lot of sweat equity, Tans Iowa Parlor Design Internet plans and second-hand materials and equipment, they’ve built a “pit-style” parlor for around $10,000. The design of the parlor allows the farmer to stand in a pit at eye-level with the udders of the cows, saving knees and backs and speeding up the milking process.
Saving labor is a key part of the Lenzen operation. During the farm tour, Nolan shows off everything from a simple pulley system for opening the cow door in the parlor and a quick-coupler system for attaching paddock watering lines, to what he jokingly refers to as the “Lamborghini of fencing reels”— a device for stringing out and rolling up portable electric fence quickly and efficiently. He talks excitedly about a device he ordered out of Canada that will open the gates between grazing paddocks automatically, allowing the cows to move to fresh grass in a more timely manner.
Perhaps the ultimate labor-saving strategy implemented on the farm is that the cow herd is not milked 12 months a year—since the winter of 2004-2005 they’ve been milked on a seasonal basis. The Lenzens time the breeding of their diverse mix of cows (“I counted the other day and I have over 12 breeds in our herd,” quips Nolan; they are chosen for their ability to make good use of grass, not win Dairy Herd Improvement Association awards) so that the cows calve in spring. That means the animals stop producing milk from approximately February to April.
In preparation for drying the cows off, the Lenzens start milking them mornings-only along about October. This means lower production, but Nolan says in the end, it’s a money-maker. He’s spending less on electricity and other inputs to run the parlor twice a day. Also, valuable components like milk fat increase in the cows’ milk when they are milked once a day. This can produce quality premiums in the milk check.
“I hate to say it, but I make almost more money milking once a day,” says Nolan. “And you have a life. I’ll get done milking and I’ll get done with chores about 9 o’clock in the morning, and I’ll have the rest of the day that I can go do whatever with the family and I don’t have to worry about getting a hired hand out here or being back for milking. They’re done for the day and so am I.”
Getting the dairy operation off the ground hasn’t been without its challenges: dry weather and a soil that’s much lighter than what the Lenzens had near Watertown can make grazing a challenge. And dairying seasonally means the family has to pay particularly close attention to their farm and household budgets—they are basically going without a paycheck for a few months out of the year. But both Nolan and Vanessa say they’ve learned to set aside part of their milk checks while they are coming in to hold them over during the winter.
“I make sure all my expenses are either pre-paid or paid in advance,” says Nolan. “You learn right away you need to start setting money aside when you are getting your milk checks, and I think it makes you a better manager because you’re not buying stuff on credit all the time thinking the next milk check will cover it.”
Lenzen took the Farm Beginnings course in 2001-2002. He said its emphasis on business planning and creation of networks with existing farmers doing things out of the mainstream gave him the confidence to eventually pursue a system of farming he had been attracted to since high school.
“I don’t think I would have started on my own if I hadn’t gone to the class,” he says. “It kind of gave me the push to go off on my own and do things my way.”
Vanessa is finishing her photography degree, and has plans to establish a studio in the farm’s original barn. Nolan has plans of his own, as he continues his search for ways to reduce labor while maintaining a profitable dairy operation.
“I don’t want to be low input,” he says with a smile. “I want to be no input.”
— A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2009 Land Stewardship Letter. For more information on LSP’s Farm Beginnings program, see www.farmbeginnings.org. More information is also available by calling 507-523-3366 in southeast Minnesota or 320-269-2105 in western Minnesota.
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©Land Stewardship Project, 2009
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