Dairy tour creates friendly waves
for Wisconsin dairyman

By Editor Walt Cooley

Neighbors judged Dan Brick and his dairy for its smell and mud on the roads – until he held his first dairy tour. Now the fifth-generation dairy farmer from Greenleaf, Wisconsin, says he and his employees have seen the attention they receive flip-flop from negative to positive. And they are getting more friendly waves from the same locals as they drive down the road.

“Our goal was to get to know the neighbors,” says Brick, manager of the 500-cow dairy. “There are always complaints about the smell and mud on the road. So we wanted to change that. We wanted to explain why there is mud on the road, why we are working late at night and why the chopper is running past midnight.”

After thinking about hosting a dairy open house for several years, Brick decided to ease into opening up his dairy by hosting an invite-only party. Residents living near the dairy or the land it owns or rents were mailed invitations. The list included 35 recipients. About 95 people showed up at Brickstead Dairy on the event day late last year.

“It was a pretty good turnout,” Brick says.

Four of the dairy’s employees and 10 volunteers helped Brick prepare for the event. Employees planted flowers, hauled in new gravel, moved and organized equipment and safeguarded the farm for visitors.

“We felt we had a pretty clean dairy,” Brick says. “But we made sure everything had a place and nothing was lying around.”

Prior to the event, Brick reviewed some suggestions about giving farm tours from the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board. Then he completed a dry run, including writing down a list of potential visitor questions and responses to them with his herdswoman, who would also be giving tours.

So during the tour when someone asked Brick about antibiotic use, he was prepared.

“’Yeah, we use antibiotics,’” he says he responded. “’But there are only six cows on this dairy on antibiotics. There are probably fewer cows on antibiotics than people using them in the neighboring town.’”

Making sure to relate all questions to something visitors could understand was very important, Brick says. For example, when his guests asked how much a cow eats in a day, Brick showed them a 55-gallon drum and told them to imagine it full. That, he said, would be equal to about the amount of feed a cow eats in a day. Guests could also touch and smell the dairy’s feed samples. Two tours were offered – a hay ride around the dairy and a parlor tour.

Afterward visitors drank beverages and ate homemade apple pie.

Brick says he recommends dairy tour first-timers do an invite-only event first. The invitation, he says, made the entire event more personal.

“People felt honored to be here rather than just seeing an ad in the paper saying we were having an open house,” Brick says.

Reflecting on the event, Brick says he was surprised how many of his neighbors knew little or nothing about the day-to-day operations of the dairy.

“A lot of these people grew up a generation removed from a dairy,” Brick says. “But they are not knowledgeable about what goes on at a dairy these days.”

Seeing first-hand made a big difference in his neighbors’ attitudes, too.

“If we can show how much work we put into cows each day, we’ll be better understood,” Brick says.

While the outcome of this event was positive, Brick recognizes that other dairy producers may have the same fear about tours that he did.

“There’s always that risk that while having people over a cow happens to die or someone will watch a calving and we’ll have a dead-on-arrival calf,” Brick says. “You wonder what people are going to think.”

Brick didn’t have to use his speech about life-and-death on a dairy during his recent tour, but he had one ready.

“The best thing to do is tell the truth,” Brick says. “People understand things can happen.”

He was also transparent about who funded the event – Brickstead Dairy, and only the dairy.

“I wanted visitors to see that I invested the money into this,” Brick says. “I really didn’t want to get anyone else involved because then people would say, ‘Well, they did this because it was free.’

The event and upgrades cost Brickstead Dairy $1,500, not including employee time. But Brick says the party also improved employee morale.

“The upgrades have also shown our employees that we’re excited to be working here, too,” Brick says.

Best of all, Brick says he worries less about having to answer late at night to a police officer responding to a disgruntled neighbor’s complaint about noise or mud on the road. Brick believes both the time and money required for a dairy tour are a sleep-aid worth the investment, and now that he has the stomach for it he’d like to do a neighborhood party every year. PD