Thirty years later that number dropped to 23,000. At the end of 2016, the number of licensed dairy farms ebbed to 9,400,and last year that figure dipped below 7,000 farms. That’s a drop of 64,000 individual dairy operations in just over half a century. It’s also a period of time that many people can relate to and remember well, especially when they drive down the rural road and see the empty barns or lonesome, still standing concrete silos.

Good old days

Farmers or former farmers will remember the days when these empty barns were full of cows and the houses full of the families that milked that herd as opposed to those farms now housing a couple of horses, a few goats or maybe a stored boat or two in the barn and a transplanted city family living in the house.

What and why?

What happened one might ask? Where did all the dairy farms go and why? Well, lots of things happened. Old stanchion barns with small narrow dairy stalls, a silo you had to climb daily, a hay baler from which you had to lift each and every bale and years without a vacation away from milking cows twice a day using buckets faded from the scene. A movement to a modern dairy operation happened.

In order to keep the family farm going and financially viable, fathers and sons combined their small farms or bought neighboring farms from operators who wanted to retire or change direction to make one bigger farm that would support an added generation. The common 80- to 160-acre farms weren’t big enough