Day 12, Friday May 21, 2016

Abby Cohagan

What was the cows main event at the Olympics? The 100 liter curdle.  Ha Ha, cheesy I know, but when part of your tours involve visiting two dairy farms, I consider it dairy necessary.  This took place after Trevor, Lindsey, and myself, came together to cook a breakfast of bacon and scrambled eggs for the group. Our day of touring first began by visiting a local landowner and dairy farmer.  We visited this gentleman so we could hear about dealing with the wet soil in this area.  This local landowner has been dealing with the issue of the soil for nearly 30 plus years.  Think about farm machinery in the United States, and you think big tractors, big wagons, big everything.  Well over here in the Netherlands you cannot use big machinery, you have to use small machinery with wide tires.  By using small machinery, you eliminate most of the weight component.  By using the wide tires, it allows you to distribute the weight you do have over a wider surface.  The reason behind this will come back into play later on.  

Albert Corporaal, an expert in soil in this area, greeted us at the dairy farm and was ready to teach us about why the soil is such a delicate thing to work with and the answer was simple.  The majority of the Netherlands consists of peat soil.  We learned how some of the farmland was created.  It was very interesting to discover that some cities and villages were formed as a water board.  A water board is a community that comes together and focuses on a water issue.  This involves them developing a system of dikes and canals to flood forests in order to kill the trees to make arable farmland.  While flooding forests with local rivers, they were able to deposit clay soil in the ground which made farming possible.  After learning about the history of soil, we took a tour of land seeing important features about farmland creation.  We visited a location called Kamperzeedijk-Oost which was on the outskirts of a polder area.  A polder is an area in land reclaimed from the ocean or another body of water.  The location of Kamperzeedijk-Oost was an old pump house.  In fact, I was the first mechanized pump house built in 1855 and was used to flood dikes to create arable land.  Before this pump house, 3 windmills were used to flood 10,000 hectors of land or 22,000 acres.  

After we finished touring the country side, we ended up at our tour guide Han’s daughter Conny’s house.  Conny’s husband, Hank, owns a dairy farm.  On Hank’s dairy there are 200 cows and 120 hectors of ground.  Of the 120 hectors, 90 were devoted to farm and 30 were devoted to nature land, or grazing land for his cows.  He milks his cows twice a day and averages 27 liters per day or 9000 liters per year.  His main choice of cows are Holsteins, mainly black, with a few red and blue ones mixed in.  One thing I found interesting was that out of the 160 milking cows and 40 dry cows over 6,000 cubic meters of manure is produced.  I also found it interesting that dried horse manure is used for bedding.  Now to get down to the numbers.  The average lactations that the cows are kept on the farm are 4-5.  The percent fat of the milk received is anywhere from 4-5%.  The conception rate for first time heifers happens to be 1.5, which means for every pregnancy it takes on average 5 doses of semen to result in pregnancy.  Which compared to the U.S. this is fairly high.  For older cows the conception rate is 1.3.  So for every pregnancy it takes 3 doses of semen to result in pregnancy. 

After dinner we proceeded on with our day and visited a thatch farmer.  We learned that the farmer, Vout, has been farming thatch since his family started in 1720.  While at the farm, we continued our research on the reed and thatching industry.  We also were able to stand in the middle of a reed field which was cool because when you jumped the whole ground shook.  Tomorrow we are looking forward to a relaxed day at a castle and a tourist town! 

Key Takeaways

• Dairy cows here do not produce the volume in milk that cows back in the U.S. do
• Farm sizes here are very small compared to the U. S. 
• The majority of the soil in the Netherlands is peat