As a towering green tractor rolled into his Croswell barn on a sunny April morning, Bob Shinn stepped aside and watched it pass.
Pulling a large red mixer wagon, the tractor rumbled slowly along an aisle lined with hundreds of black and white heads. The trailer dropped a mixture of alfalfa, corn and cottonseed at the feet of some of the 700 Holstein cows at Bob Shinn Farms in Croswell.
The cows are the bread and butter of the farm, Shinn said, but the person inside the tractor is just as important.
Josh Varty knows how to operate machinery, ensure the proper mixture of nutrients in the feed and, just that morning, he repaired a hydraulic leak in the pricey mixer. He does all that in between thrice-daily feedings in varying weather.
The 35-year-old Croswell man doesn’t mind the work because — for Varty — where there are cows, there’s job security.
“No matter what happens they’ve got to be fed,” Varty said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s your birthday or Christmas Eve, the cows don’t take the days off.
“Somebody’s always got to be feeding them. Somebody’s always got to be milking them. And there’s calves being born every single day.”
Despite the consistent work, finding help on a dairy farm isn’t easy.
The hours are long, schedules are unconventional and the weather is variable on farms throughout the Thumb and Michigan. And, while the scale of work on dairy farms may have advanced with the passing years, the general perception of the industry has not.
“If you would go into a typical junior high and ask those students how milking occurs, you would probably still hear that it’s collected in a bucket through hand-milking,” said Craig Anderson, manager for the Michigan Farm Bureau agricultural labor and safety service program.
The lack of information on agriculture in school systems combined with the lack of dedicated workers to take up the task leaves farms hungry for employees.
And while other agricultural industries can hire seasonal migrant workers, dairy farms have no such option. Visa programs that allow for guest workers at seasonal operations don’t apply to dairy farming where the work is year-round.
The result is dairy farms throughout Michigan are relying on a slim work force, or foreign workers with what is, at times, questionable paperwork.
Source: Times Herald
