Sustainability comes from embracing change
It’s a muggy Friday morning in mid-May as Karen and Darren Hughes and their two oldest children, Haley, 13, and Hayden, 11, gather in the gravel lot outside one of Sunset Farms’ barns. Dressed in blue jeans and muck boots or – in Hayden’s case – a dusty pair of black high-top sneakers, they’re about
It’s a muggy Friday morning in mid-May as Karen and Darren Hughes and their two oldest children, Haley, 13, and Hayden, 11, gather in the gravel lot outside one of Sunset Farms’ barns.
Dressed in blue jeans and muck boots or – in Hayden’s case – a dusty pair of black high-top sneakers, they’re about to give yet another tour of the family’s more than 3,500-acre dairy farm in northwestern Washington County.
Giant fans whir in the background as a row of unfettered Holsteins poke their heads out from the open curtains of their freestall pen. A few of the cows appear to be having a late morning snack, but they’re just chewing their cud – awaiting their turn in the milking parlor a few steps away.
“These are mostly three- and four-year-olds,” explains Karen, who manages the farm’s herd of 1,150 heifer cows and is a partial owner of this six-generation family business. “They grew up together, and sometimes there is competition, so you don’t want to put a younger cow in with a bigger, older cow.”
“In each pen, there is a pecking order,” adds Darren, the farm’s feed manager.
Family operations
Southeastern Wisconsin, a major metro area, isn’t what most people would consider to be an agricultural hub. It doesn’t have the bovine-dotted hillsides of the Driftless Area, the vermilion cranberry harvests of the Northwoods, or the heaping potato and snap bean crops of the Central Sands. But the region does have plenty of farms. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s most recent farm census, there were a total of 4,479 farms in the counties of Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, Walworth, Washington, Kenosha, Racine and Sheboygan combined in 2017.
That figure includes hundreds of small operations, including farms of fewer than 10 acres. But it also includes 433 farms of 500 acres or more, including dozens of farms of 1,000 acres or more.
Soybeans, feed corn and corn for silage are the top crops produced in southeastern Wisconsin, covering hundreds of thousands of acres, as they do in many other parts of the state, but the region also distinguishes itself by producing other noteworthy products.
Walworth County, for instance, ranks 13th among the state’s 72 counties for grain sales and sixth for hog and pig sales. Sheboygan County ranks 14th in milk sales. Racine County ranks sixth in vegetable, melons, potato and sweet potato sales, and Ozaukee County ranks 13th in the state for the sale of fruit, berries and tree nuts. Waukesha County ranks 10th for the number of ponies, mules, burros and donkeys living on farms there. Milwaukee County ranks 16th for nursery, greenhouse, floriculture and sod sales, while Washington County ranks first in the state for floriculture and nursery sales.
Linking the diverse farms in southeastern Wisconsin is the fact that more than 80% of them are family owned and operated.
For years, farms in Wisconsin have struggled to survive, and many have not. The state lost 11,500 farms between 2002 and 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
But despite the well-documented challenges of farming, including long hours, increased production costs and unpredictable weather, owners of three family-run dairy farms in southeastern Wisconsin – Sunset Farms, Mighty Grand Dairy in Kenosha County and Cozy Nook Farm in Waukesha County – say they’ve managed to sustain their family businesses by embracing change, welcoming new ideas and pursuing excellence along with growth.
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Growing a business
Established by German immigrants and homesteaders Joseph and Maria Langenecker in 1847, Sunset Farms originally began as a small dairy operation typical of the era.
In addition to the Langeneckers’ small herd, the farmers also raised pigs and chickens, according to Karen Hughes, but over the years, and with subsequent generations, the family began to focus more on its dairy operation.
Although wheat farming was originally the chief agricultural product in Wisconsin, problems with the crop – such as pests and soil nutrient depletion – prompted many farmers to move into dairying, according to state historians, and the number of dairy cows increased rapidly in the second half of the 1800s. By 1899, more than 90% of Wisconsin farms raised dairy cows.
Since then, the number of individual farms has declined, while many remaining farms have grown, often by purchasing farms that went out of business.
For Sunset Farms, the biggest growth occurred in the late 1960s when Hughes’ grandparents, Albert and Mildred (Langenecker) Wolf – the fourth generation to own and operate the farm – bought two neighboring farms, bringing the farm’s total number of milking cows to 200.
After several years of milking cows in three separate barns, Albert and Mildred’s four sons – Ray, Dan, Bernie and the late Paul Wolf – invested in the construction of the farm’s first freestall barn and stand-alone milking parlor in 1972. The move allowed the brothers to merge the three separate herds and have a centralized location for milking, rather than running from farm to farm. It also made the family business one of the first in the state to switch to a freestall barn operation.
Designed to increase both the comfort of cows and efficiency of the milking process, freestall barns have alleyways for cows to move around freely, accessing food and water at their leisure, and stalls for rest and sleep. Freestall barns are also easier to clean, helping farms adhere to the rules governing manure management more efficiently. This style of barn differs from the more traditional tiestall barn, where cows are typically tied to their own stall, taken out to graze in the pasture, and then often milked in their stall.
Since the 1970s, Sunset Farms has only continued to grow and embrace innovation. Today, the roughly 40 acres of farmland devoted to the housing, breeding and milking of cows includes three freestall barns as well as separate areas for so-called dry cows approaching calving and a maternity ward where cows on the brink of birthing spend their days. There are also areas for the farm’s young stock, where the four-to-six calves born per day on the farm reside until they are old enough to join a pen with older animals. There’s also a space for the farm’s 400 beef cattle – a mix of Holstein and Angus breeds.
To help feed all those hungry cows, Sunset Farms grows soybeans, feed corn, corn silage, wheat, alfalfa and oats – on 3,500 acres surrounding the original Langenecker farmstead.
And as the farm has grown so has the number of people who share in its ownership. Today, ten people co-own the farm: fifth-generation farmers Dan, Ray and Bernie Wolf; sixth-generation farmers Karen and her husband Darren Hughes, Karen’s first cousins Carl, Ed and David Wolf; and long-time employees and family friends Greg Ritger and Marcus Asmus.
Nearly every owner works full time on the farm. To help keep business humming along – and the cows happy enough to produce 12,250 gallons of milk per day – the farm also employs about 20 other people, including second- and third-shift employees.
“The farm is working 24 hours a day,” Karen said. “The animals are living things. They don’t just get sick during the day, so we need to be on call for that. And the cows don’t just have babies during the day.”
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Mergers and acquisitions in family farming
The large size and scope of Sunset Farms’ operation might make it seem like an outlier, but it’s emblematic of a state-wide trend in Wisconsin’s dairy industry.
While the number of dairy farms in the state has steadily fallen since 1940 – with about 420 dairy operations shuttering between April 2022 and April 2023 alone – the actual number of dairy cows has remained roughly the same, hovering at around 1.27 million.
What’s more, the amount of milk those cows produce continues to grow by leaps and bounds. According to Dairy Farmers of America, average milk production in the state has grown from about 16 million pounds of milk per year in the mid-1950s to roughly 32 million pounds in 2022.
While the closure of individual farms has impacted individual families and communities, it has also created opportunities for other family farms to increase the size of their cropland and herds.
In fact, 95% of dairy farms in Wisconsin remain family-owned and operated, and many of these, including Sunset Farms, are now also incorporated.
“We see 1,500-to-1,600-cow dairy (farms) that are all family run. They look like what you might call a corporate farm, but they’re not. It's just the way those farms are structured,” said farmer Dave Daniels, who serves as a director for the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, representing District 1, which includes Kenosha, Racine, Walworth, Jefferson, Waukesha, Milwaukee, Ozaukee and Washington counties.
For Daniels, who owns the 1,000-acre Mighty Grand Dairy in Kenosha County, expanding his parent’s farming operation was the only way to maintain the business while raising a family.
In 1997, Daniels, who had taken over his parents’ smaller farm in Kenosha County, merged with two neighboring farmers around his own age to form Mighty Grand.
“We were all on our family dairy farms with our dads, milking cows, but our dads all wanted to retire. We wanted to continue the business, but we looked at dairy farming, and we knew it was a challenge because you had to milk the cows every day, so we pooled our assets and developed an LLC,” Daniels said. “We're still a family farm; we’re just three families that co-mingled our assets. And we’ve been successful in keeping a viable dairy business.”
With younger generations having fewer children and the average age of farmers continuing to climb – in Wisconsin, the median age of farmers is now 56 – many farmers are often forced to hire nonfamily laborers or consider merging with other farms if they don’t have enough children or other relatives who are interested in carrying on the family business, said Daniels.
At the same time, he adds, there are large family farming operations that have several family members interested in taking over the business one day but not enough land or livestock to provide jobs or ownership stakes for them all. And in cases like this, farmers will look to expand their farms – as Karen Hughes’ grandparents did – to make sure there is enough land to support a larger family operation.
In Waukesha County, Tom and Joan Oberhaus made the decision to form a limited liability corporation with a young couple to help ensure the survival of their roughly 75-cow dairy farm in the Town of Delafield. After taking over the 189-year-old operation in 1985, Tom and Joan, now both in their 60s, eventually realized that they needed to find younger partners to help ensure the farm’s long-term survival.
Originally located at Goerke’s Corners in the town of Brookfield, the farm moved in 1957 to its current location after Joan’s grandparents sold their property to the State of Wisconsin to make way for the I-94 interchange. Today, the current Cozy Nook Farm includes a 20-acre pumpkin patch and sells Christmas trees in the winter to help generate extra income.
While Tom and Joan’s son Charlie Oberhaus enjoys planting and harvesting, he has never been interested in managing cows, according to Tom, so the couple partnered with Dan Gerrits and his wife, Brittany Renn Gerrits, to help with the dairy aspect of their business. Dan looks after the cows, and Brittany, who grew up on a dairy farm about 10 miles away, helps with breeding and raising calves.
“Our son likes farming. He's out planting today. But he runs a trucking business most days,” Tom said. “He knows it's easier to make a buck driving truck than it is milking cows. Danny and Brittany pretty much took over milking last fall. That's the first that I'd been out of the barn in years. Now, I’m kind of the CEO.”
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Embracing change
But such growth requires older generations of farmers to stay open to change and new ideas.
At least that’s how Karen’s father, Dan Wolf, and her uncle, Bernie Wolf, see it.
In a small, wood-paneled office near Sunset Farms’ milking parlor, the farmers are busy taking care of some last-minute administrative tasks before heading out for lunch. The walls of the tiny office are lined with photographs of the youth softball league the farm sponsors and aerial photos of the farm shot in different decades. There are also several computers, including one showing images from the farm’s surveillance cameras.
Dan has just gotten back from Jackson, where he went to pick up a part for a tractor. Bernie, who handles the bookkeeping and taxes for the operation, is reviewing the farm insurance.
“We renewed our policy a couple of months ago, and now I have some time to make sure all our trucks and tractors are insured and make sure we are not insuring any vehicles that we sold,” Bernie said.
Asked to summarize his advice for running a successful family business, Dan said, “You gotta be open minded and share your ideas and thoughts, and let other people get involved.”
“We have some very important people who are part owners and decision makers that aren’t technically part of the family, but we consider them to be extended family,” he added.
Bernie agrees.
“It’s amazing to see (the growth), and just sit back and watch all the employees doing their work. They know what to do, and they just do it,” he said.
It’s also important to be community-minded, they said.
Several of Sunset Farms’ owners work for the Allenton Volunteer Fire Department, including Karen’s cousin Carl Wolf. Dan serves on the Addison Town Board. Dan’s wife, Ellen Wolf, worked as the town clerk for more than 20 years and now mows the lawn at Allenton Resurrection Parish in town, where the family worships and serves in various roles. When he’s not fetching parts, Dan goes to church three times a week to pray for his family, the farm and the people who work there. Darren served for many years in the Army National Guard. Karen serves on advisory boards for the Slinger School District.
“I heard someone on the farm once say that there are three Fs in farming,” she said. “First, it’s your faith. Then, it’s your family. And then, it’s farming. You have to put it in the right order, and if you don’t, you’re going to burn out. It’s important to keep your priorities in line.”
Declining farm totals, skyrocketing production: Over the past century, Wisconsin has seen a sharp decline in the number of dairy farms, from around 171,000 in 1920 to just 6,350 in 2022. At the same time, production has increased dramatically, from around 7.4 billion pounds of milk from nearly 1.8 million cows in 1920 to 31.9 billion gallons from slightly less than 1.3 million cows in 2022. This chart shows the number of farms, cows and pounds of milk produced in Wisconsin. Each line represents the total for a given year as relative percentage compared to 1965 when yearly data become available. By that point, the number of farms in the state had already fallen to 86,000 and production was up to 18.8 billion pounds of milk from more than 2 million cows.
Taking advantage of new agricultural technologies
Part of being open to change is embracing new technology, including devices that can monitor the movements of a cow’s stomach and software that can help the farm fine-tune its breeding program so it doesn’t end up with too many or too few heifers.
At Sunset Farms, Karen Hughes uses a dairy-herd management program called DairyComp to track each cow.
“I enter everything about that animal into the program so we know how old she is, when she is having her baby and how much milk she is producing,” Karen Hughes said.
In the fields, staff working to plant and harvest crops use GPS and auto-steer features on their tractors to create more precision. Darren Hughes has a portable grain tester that he can use to monitor the moisture content of the feed, both on the field before it’s harvested and while it’s in the barn.
Karen remembers her dad and uncles going on farm tours and taking continuing education courses through the Professional Dairy Producers of Wisconsin while she was growing up.
And with technology continuing to advance, she said, her father and uncles continually encourage her to “‘take that class, go on that tour, go learn how other farms are doing things’ to help her learn how to work smarter, not harder, try to adapt,” Hughes said, adding, “The old farmers, their knees were bad and their hips were bad because of the way they farmed. That’s just how it was back in the 1950s. Now, we can make things easier on our bodies.”
Southeastern Wisconsin milk production: While none of the nine Wisconsin counties (Manitowoc, Fond du Lac, Clark, Dane, Kewaunee, Marathon, Brown, Shawano and Dodge) that produced more than a billion pounds of milk in 2021 are part of southeastern Wisconsin, the region does see more production per cow than the state as a whole. Data on Milwaukee County is not available.
|
County |
Cows |
Annual Production (pounds) |
Milk per cow (pounds) |
|
Sheboygan |
28,000 |
750,400,000 |
26,800 |
|
Washington |
15,500 |
430,900,000 |
27,800 |
|
Walworth |
13,900 |
393,370,000 |
28,300 |
|
Ozaukee |
9,300 |
237,150,000 |
25,500 |
|
Racine |
3,100 |
84,320,000 |
27,200 |
|
Kenosha |
3,500 |
83,300,000 |
23,800 |
|
Waukesha |
1,700 |
45,390,000 |
26,700 |
|
Total |
75,000 |
2,024,830,000 |
26,998 |
|
State |
1,274,000 |
31,702,000,000 |
24,884 |
|
Percentage |
5.9% |
6.4% |
Communication and quality control
As an only daughter with three brothers – none of whom joined the family business – Hughes discovered her love for raising cows at an early age. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls with a degree in dairy science, she worked briefly on another farm before returning to Sunset Farms when she was about 22.
Sixteen years later, Hughes’ primary job on the farm is to tend to the animals and employees she supervises. For her, the key to keeping the entire farm operation running efficiently is communication.
“Over the years, I’ve learned that managing people is probably the biggest part of my job, because if your team isn’t working together well, it just makes your day harder,” she said.
Staying in tune with the animals is also key and requires her to observe their behavior, their movements and their health.
Like a shop manager inspecting widgets coming off an assembly line, Hughes regularly walks the pens, observing each of the 1,500-pound animals that produce the farm’s milk and their offspring that may someday produce that milk as well.
The process might seem monotonous, but it’s crucial.
Whatever a business does, they need to do it well, she said, because there is always going to be other businesses out there trying to do it better.
“We want to produce a high-quality milk product,” Hughes said. “We’re feeding people. The 12,250 gallons of milk that we produce each day have to be perfect.”
