Jane Eason was looking out the loft window of the New Day Dairy GuestBarn, a north-central Iowa bed-and-breakfast, when she saw hooves sticking out of a pregnant dairy cow.
The heifer had gone into labor early, while New Day Dairy owners Dan and Lynn Bolin were at the Iowa State Fair.
Eason, 78, alerted Dave and Pam Bolin, Dan’s parents, who were managing the dairy farm at the time. Pam and Dave needed an extra set of hands, so they called on Robert Eason, 53, to help with the delivery.
“My dad helped birth a cow,” Aric Eason, 12, said about the experience.
The Bolins, who opened the GuestBarn in 2015, love to offer their visitors a peek into real farm life with “24/7 cow gazing,” farm tours and the “Be a Dairy Farmer Challenge” that involves a tractor ride, bottle-feeding a calf and shoveling manure.
Helping deliver a calf isn’t on the regular itinerary, but it’s a fun memory the Easons will take home with them to south Texas.
The Easons stayed in the GuestBarn for a week in August while they visited family and took care of business in Iowa. In between day trips, they played badminton and petted the kittens. Ian Eason, 14, ran the gravel roads to train for his high school cross-country season.
“My father worked at a dairy, so it’s a little nostalgic,” said Nelda Eason, 52. “It’s very calming.”
Farm gets award
The Bolin farm, a Century Farm started in 1890, has 120 dairy cows — mostly Holsteins — whose milk is turned into Prairie Farms cream cheese and other products.
In July, Iowa Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig traveled to the farm to give the Bolins the Wergin Good Farm Neighbor Award.
Among reasons Naig cited for choosing the Bolins was their “modern barn designed with cow comfort in mind.” Cows decide when and how often to be milked, wandering into the room with a milking robot named Rita as many as four times a day.
“Rita customizes the milking experience to each cow and can alert Dan of any possible mastitis infections or feed changes which may signal illness,” the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship said in a news release about the award. “Throughout the life of the animal, feed rations are appropriately adjusted to provide just the right nutrients needed by the calves, heifers and cows.”
The Bolins grow corn, hay, peas, barley and oats on 200 acres, using minimum tillage to reduce erosion. Outside the GuestBarn is a pollinator garden.
Learning on vacation
Dan Bolin grew up on the farm. When he married Lynn, from the Minneapolis suburbs, and they moved back to the farm in 2011, Lynn saw it with fresh eyes.
“When I came to the farm, I found it fascinating,” she said.
They started talking, along with Pam and Dave Bolin, about whether tourists would be interested in seeing a dairy operation up close. At first, it was a tough sell.
“To a pilot flying an airplane every day, the thrill of flight gets less,” Lynn Bolin said. “The thing that makes farming unique is so far I haven’t met someone who doesn’t eat. There’s that common tapestry that weaves us together. That curiosity about ‘where does my food start?’ ”
Multigenerational families are frequent visitors at the GuestBarn, which rents for $250 to $500 a night and includes room for up to nine people, with three bedrooms, each with their own bathroom, and a futon. Parents often want an educational vacation that doesn’t feel like school, Bolin said.
If a calf is born during a guest’s stay, the guests get to help name it. The calf Robert Eason helped deliver was a male, and it was sold to a neighboring farm to be raised for beef. But the family gave another new female calf the name Chess. Other cow names include Happy, Rivi, Watch, Dinga, Kit and LOL.
“In two years, I’ll do a pretty amazing thing. I’ll get milk from Bacon,” Dan Bolin said, gesturing at a brown Swiss calf a guest named Bacon.
B&B diversifies farm income
A decline in milk consumption in recent years has caused some dairy farms to go out of business, while others have diversified. Some are adding on-farm creameries, while others are focusing on farm-to-table events. The New Day Dairy GuestBarn creates another revenue stream for the Bolins and an on-farm role for Lynn Bolin.
“I created my own niche because I get to do more of the GuestBarn piece of it. The tours with people. The design, the cleaning, the hospitality piece, marketing,” she said.
The Bolins have three kids, ages 6 to 12, who also help with the cows. Having the GuestBarn “diversifies what our options are in another 10 to 20 years.”
