In fall 2011, my husband and I purchased a retiree’s small herd, which was mostly A.I.-sired. We added them to his family’s original herd, which was mostly herd-bull sired. None of the cows were registered, but all were Holstein.

Every Sunday after church, we go to the grocery store as a family. When I’m on top of things, I have a meal plan and a comprehensive list organized by aisle. Most weeks, we wing it and try to buy all of the ingredients for our standby meals. We’ve been in this routine for quite a while, but prior to January, one aisle had never made our list.

Since the cows first arrived in the 1940s, our farm had exclusively milked Holsteins. For most of the farm’s history, the cows were not registered and mostly herd-bull sired, but they were always black and white.

The second weekend in June, I spent about four hours talking to consumers at a local Dairy Days event with Midwest Dairy. The goal was to share information about dairy farming and dairy products with consumers in our community. Our booth was frequented by mostly parents with young children.

Last year, I found myself in a frustrating situation at my off-farm job as a structural engineer. I had multiple projects with overlapping schedules and similar scopes, and I could barely keep them straight. OK, sometimes I couldn’t keep them straight.

Last spring we purchased a 9-month-old heifer, an unusual move for our farm. She was 200 GTPI points higher than anything tested in our herd, positive for all the traits we watch in genetic selection and comes from a cow family we really admire. She came from a farm nearby at a dispersal sale, and she sold at a price we felt was very reasonable given all of this.

A year ago, our somatic cell count (SCC) was running in the upper 300,000s, and we were looking to make improvements. We had previously discussed SCC and measures that could help reduce it with our part-time employees (who do much of the milking), but it seemed like they weren’t overly interested, and we weren’t making much progress.

About two years ago, we started using sexed semen on virgin heifers to accelerate our genetic improvements, and our heifer numbers were looking to exceed our replacement needs. We had purchased a bred Holstein heifer that freshened with a black beef cross bull calf, and we sold him at about 3 days old for 20 to 25 percent more than his Holstein counterparts.