Georgia dairy producers Carol Williams of WDairy and Jay Moon of Moon Dairy heard in mid-June of fall show cancellations after already losing the spring shows to Covid-19; they knew they had to do something.

Riding the ups and downs of weather and markets can be a trying proposition, but for Sanders Ranch in the Buffalo Gap Grasslands of South Dakota’s Black Hills region, the key to it is balance – in managing the land and the commercial cow-calf operation of terminal Charolais-Angus crossbreds and the purebred Charolais bulls they have been breeding for generations.

Against the backdrop of the Tuscarora mountains, a half-mile from the busy road into town, she’s out to the barn by 3:30 a.m., milking by 3:45 while herdsman Anthony Yeager feeds and scrapes.

What started as an idea for three brothers to combine their dairy herds and build a new facility has led to one of the most automated precision dairies in the country, with robotic milking, cow monitoring, sand-bedded flush system, flexible stalls and a robot that delivers sand bedding to the freestalls.

If there is one thing to come down the road of recovery from a tragedy in agriculture, it is the sense of community that agriculturalists make business-as-usual.

“The overwhelming reality of it all is sinking in,” said Greg Gardiner of Ashland, Kansas, in a phone interview 10 days after the Starbuck fire – which had consumed over 300,000 acres in Oklahoma and nearly 500,000 acres in southwest Kansas – claimed 43,000 of the 48,000 acres at Gardiner Angus Ranch.

South Dakota cattleman reflects, looks ahead He may have grown up on a typical 1940s diversified farm in Iowa, but Dean Wink and the South Dakota prairie adopted each other decades ago.

Closing Will Feed was not an easy decision. Anne Burkholder grieved a few weeks before she could write about it in her Feed Yard Foodie blog. Some of the initial posts were raw.

“There’s a lot to be said for simplicity,” Steve Harrison observes about the cow management and cow flow basics that prevail at the expanding and diversified Harrison Dairy Inc. based on the family’s Century Farm near Loudon, Tennessee.