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Money and manure matters

June 8, 2017, Linn, Kan. – Handling manure can be costly. A farm in Kansas was spending up to $90,000 each year to pick up manure solids, but now the costs have dropped significantly.

Since November of 2000, Lee Holtmeier has been managing the Linn Willow Creek Dairy LLC outside Linn, Kan. Prior to that, he’d worked 20 years for Farmland Foods buying hogs and grew up auctioneering cattle and hogs at his family’s sale barn business in Nebraska. The only experience he’d had with dairy cows is when he started breeding cattle for Willow Creek Dairy when the dairy began operations in 1999.

While he didn’t know some of the intricacies of dairy farming, Holtmeier did know how to manage people and spot problems. “We’ve changed a lot of things and moved some things around,” Holtmeier says of his time at the farm the past 17 years.

One of those major changes was improving how manure was handled. Prior to 2007, the dairy was spending anywhere from $80,000 to $90,000 per year hiring dump trucks and excavators to take out the manure solids from three settling bays and three lagoons in the spring and fall. Not only was it costly, it also had a larger environmental footprint with several heavy machines being run to pick up manure. READ MORE