Fair Oaks Dairy - A MUST SEE!!!!

Last month I had the opportunity for the third time to travel to Fair Oaks, Indiana to visit the Fairy Oaks Dairy Adventure Center.  For anyone looking for something to do for entertainment as well as to have all your questions about dairy farming today answered, I highly recommend a trip there.  You can find out more at www.fofarms.com.  The following is a brief description of what we all did and saw.

The Dairy Tour

Upon entering the Dairy Adventure Center, visitors quickly come to a school bus like this to take a tour of one of the dairies 3000 cow farms.  The tour bus drives you through one of the cow barns, past the feed center and new babies (below).

 

This is the front of the milking center which houses the 72 cow carousal parlor.  Along side this building is the specially built garage which the bus pulls in and visitors can then proceed up one floor to the observation deck and watch the milking in the parlor.

    

 Once inside, you not only get to watch the cows being milked, but you also learn a lot from the video which tells you about the milking process.  Click on the picture below to watch the video.  Turn your speakers up - the narrative on the video is hard to hear, but the subtitles have lots of information.

The Education Center 

For me the highlight of the education center was the 4D video that we watched.  Very informative and entertaining.  Just watch out when the cow sneezes!!  Below are other parts of the center.

The above is an exhibit that contrasts farming back in the "old days" to farming today which uses technology to improve cow comfort as well as improve milk quality and production.

This is a merry-go-round of Holsteins

At this station visitors can time themselves prepping a cow and attaching the milk machine.

This is a fun and interactive climbing wall for kids.

Hall of Holsteins, each of which has some great facts to learn more about cows and dairy.

The Birthing Barn

Located just outside this barn is a stop and go light.  A red light means there's not much happening inside, but a yellow light means a cow is in labor and a green light means the calf is on it's way. 

On the day of our visit, we just missed the first calf on the right being born, but we able to watch the delivery of the calf on the left.

The Visitor Center

As if all the above wasn't enough, they also have a visitor center with souvenirs, a cheese store, a deli and ice cream shop.  We had soup and a sandwich along with milk shakes that were the best!  I brought home some of the Fair Oaks brand 5 year Cheddar which was amazing too!  This is a must see and a dream of mine is to build something like this in Manitowoc County.  I'm happy to report a group is working right now to determine the feasibility of something similar in our state!  That will take time, so again, if you are looking for a nice getaway, I highly recommend a trip to Indiana!

Crowd Gate Replacement

When a group of cows goes up to the parlor for milking, at the start of the group there are about 125 cows in the area we call the holding area.  Each time a side of cows leaves the parlor another 16 cows proceed from the holding area into the parlor and so the amount of space these cows need to be held in is constantly getting smaller and smaller.  To manage this area, we use a crowd gate which slides on rails along this area, gradually decreasing in size the holding area and moving the cows up toward the parlor.

Well after 15 years, the crowd gate had begun to cause us a lot of troubles and we decided that it was time to replace it.  No big deal, right?  We just write a check, take the old one out and put the new one in.  Sounds simple - oh but it was far from simple.  The 3 days it took us to get this done each started by 7 am and we quit about 6:30 pm each night.  You see what makes this less than simple is the fact we need to keep milking cows and since each shift takes 7 hours and 45 minutes from start to clean up, there isn't a lot of time to work without having to manage around the cows.  Here are some pictures of our project:

This is our old crowd gate which at one point we had to work on about 8 different times in a period of 6 weeks - it was really time to make this upgrade!!

The new crowd gate was loaded from a trailer that we had to back it into the barns about 700 feet to the holding area.  We used this skid steer with forks to lift the frame off the trailer and then assemble it up on the tracks.  We did most of the work on the new gate in the back end of the holding area to allow us to continue to used the old gate in the area up by the parlor.

 The skid steer holding the frame in place while being attached to the brackets that ride along the track.

Work being done to replace the rails while cows are still being milked.  It sure would have been nice if the rails that the gate rides on would have worked for the new gate.  Replacing these took lots of time and lots of grinding and welding, neither of which the cows are really comfortable with.

Removal of the old gate.  This was tricky because the gate itself was wider than the holding area.  We had to lift it, shift it slightly so it was crooked.  And then maneuver it to the back of the holding area and take it out on the trailer like we brought ht new gate in.

Temporarily how we moved cows, yes I WAS the crowd gate for a few days!!

The new crowd gate in operation!!  Like most thing in life, it was a challenging three days but oh so worth it in the end.