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Kansas dairy constantly seeks efficiency, conservation improvements

This year’s World Dairy Expo Dairy Producer of the Year is always seeking ways to improve the farming operation.

Ken McCarty tells Brownfield they were milking around 800 cows in the early 1990s and now milk more than 20-thousand cows on four Kansas farms.  He says genetically, the cows have gotten better, the technology has improved, and they have become better managers since 2011.  “We were really looking at about 70 pounds of milk production per cow per day. Today? Just yesterday on 20-thousand cows, we averaged a hair bit over 100 pounds of milk per cow per day.”

McCarty says dairying is their obsession, and growth doesn’t necessarily mean more cows.  He says it’s about improvement. “We want to make more milk. We want to lower our carbon footprint. We want to increase employee retention. We want to decrease costs. We want to increase productivity. For us, it’s really just about progress, not necessarily growth.”

McCarty says one of the challenges is improving how the dairy uses and reclaims water in a region that relies on limited water resources.

Water availability and use is a very serious issue in northwest Kansas, and McCarty says they take water conservation very seriously in the fields and in the barns. He says the family’s four farms invest heavily in technologies that make them more water efficient. “The lion’s share of our water consumption comes from irrigating row crops so we deploy, you know, smart irrigation technologies whether it be soil moisture probes or lowering drop nozzle distance to the ground. All sorts of things like that to try and be more water efficient. Precision irrigation matters.”

McCarty says the dairy recovers plate chiller water, uses smart cow cooling systems, and temperature-sensitive drain plugs to conserve help water.  He says their on-farm milk processing plant is the key to saving a lot of water. “We basically take four to five loads of raw milk and condense that down into one load of processed good and the difference there is really we’re taking the cream off, but we’re really conserving and reclaiming that water making our milk processing plant nearly water-neutral.”

McCarty says excess water from the milk processing plant goes right back to be used as drinking water for the cows.  Their Rexford, Kansas plant makes condensed skim milk, ultrafiltered milk, and pasteurized heavy cream. “The added benefit to that is obviosly reducing our freight of finished goods, it expands our geographical reach to market, but it also keeps water over top of where it came from.”

McCarty says the Ogalala Reservoir is a declining water source they all depend on, so using it wisely is important to everyone in the region.  McCarty says the farms also use no till and minimum till practices to help hold water and soil in place.

AUDIO: Ken McCarty discusses the family’s award, farming operations, and how they conserve water and look for new efficiencies with Brownfield’s Larry Lee at World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin.