Allen Hill Dairy to host Fayette County Farm City Day
Rick Allen says you have to be creative to be successful in dairy farming today. Which explains why Allen Hill Dairy on Route 51 at Smock has operated a restaurant, runs hayrides during Halloween and sells breeding stock and embryos from its Registered Holstein herd.
“We are a dairy and we sell milk. That’s our mainstay. These other things don’t do it all on their own. But they help,’ he said.
“You just have to be creative sometimes to be successful,’ he said.
Allen Hill Dairy is this year’s host for Fayette County Farm City Day.
Allen hopes hosting the event will help farmers and “city people’ by “building a bridge of understanding between them. Basically, it’s a day out for farmers and city people,’ he said.
But it will also be a day when the Allens can showcase their farm, which has been in their family for more than a century and a half.
Allen and his brother Ron are the sixth generation to run the family farm.
Isaac Allen purchased the farm in 1850. Three years later he built the brick farmhouse that has been continuously occupied by the Allen family.
Isaac’s son Addison continued the operation, inheriting the farm in 1862.
According to the Allens, Addison’s youngest son John assumed ownership of 120 acres in 1900, but his son Paul was not interested in farming, so John willed the farm to Paul’s son Ralph in 1951, who was Rick and Ron’s father. Ralph, Rick and Ron ran a three-way partnership beginning in 1971. Then in 1981, Rick and Ron assumed ownership of the remaining 110-acre tract when their father passed away.
Maintaining a milking herd of about 50 cows for more than two decades, Rick and Ron decided to expand in 1992, an event that showed more of the creative touch.
Through a close friend, Rick Allen acquired a large pole barn for free. “He told me I could have it but I had to come and get it,’ he said. Situated on a farm near Monroeville, the Allens disassembled the structure and from it have built three barns.
“It gave us the chance to jump from 50 to 100 cows in our milk herd and we didn’t have more than $10,000 invested in the expansion. That’s how you can be creative.’
Another way is avoiding major debt.
“We have always done that. We don’t borrow a lot of money.’
It’s still “tough making ends meet,’ since the low price of milk (between $16 and $18 per 100 pounds today) continues to force the Allens to be creative.
Like many family farms, working wives bolsters incomes. Rick’s wife Sandy, who recently graduated from college, is a career resource specialist with CareerLink-Private Industry Council. She had run the “Happy Heifer’ restaurant, “but that just got to be too much. We sold that business a year ago,’ Rick said.
Ron’s wife, Lisa, is a teacher in the Brownsville Area School District.
Yet, days on the farm still begin before dawn.
“I usually get up between 4:30 and 5 a.m. I like to be in the barn by 5 so we can start milking at 5:30 a.m.’
The Allens are proud of their herd and how they have managed it, and rightly so. They have had 20 cows registered by the American Holstein Association as excellent.
“We have always shown our livestock at the Fayette County Fair, too. We’ve done that for the past 31 years.’
Now, the next generation is taking part.
Rick’s son Taylor works on the farm and daughters Courtney and Shelby have shown livestock from the farm at the state level. Ron’s daughter, Danielle, has also been involved in the competitions and his son Clinton also works on the farm.
“We have a five-month old grandson, Cole,’ Rick said, smiling. “We haven’t gotten him started – yet.’
It’s still a tough life, although Rick said he can’t imagine doing anything else.
“This definitely is not a 9 to 5 job. You can’t go away. You just can’t leave it.’
The farm consists of 300 acres, owned and rented, of crops plus additional land in pastures and forests, 120 purebred Holstein dairy cows plus 120 heifers and calves. Allen’s raise 120 acres of corn, 80 acres of alfalfa hay, 85 acres of grass hay and 15 acres of pasture. All of the crops raised are used to feed the dairy cattle.
The adult milking cows normally have a calf every 12 to 14 months and then produce milk for 10 to 11 months. A cow’s gestation period is nine months. Currently the herd average for milk production is 23,000 pounds per cow including a 950 pound butterfat component. The butterfat is important for the manufacturing of ice cream, coffee cream, cheese and other dairy products. Allen’s cows produce enough milk annually to manufacture approximately 248,000 pounds of cheese. Total milk production per year approximates 3 million pounds.
Visitors to the farm will able to tour the new free stall dairy barn where the cows are fed a balanced total mixed ration (TMR). The feed consists of corn silage, haycrop silage and grains.
Cows are milked twice daily, every day. The Allen’s milk in a milking parlor, consisting of a “double eight” cow milking component, eight cows are milked on one side, while eight other cows enter and are prepared for milking on the other side.
Once the milk enters the milking unit, it is transported to the milk tank by a stainless steel pipe. Milk is untouched by human hands or other foreign material or even normal air while on the farm.
Recycling is also part of the herd management system, sawdust is used as bedding material for the animals. This bedding becomes part of the organic matter that is distributed back to the crop fields for natural degradation.
On an average day, nearly 1.2 tons (2,400 lbs.) of grain is fed to the milking cattle.