The case for more homegrown fuel
Even though fuel prices remain high, the increased use of corn ethanol is helping temper those price increases. And it’s also benefiting the farmers who grow the corn.
Read More“Fun,” “high tech” and “unbelievable” are words most often associated with a theme park, not a large-scale dairy.
While it isn’t Walt Disney World, the 4,500-cow MVP Dairy in Celina is a tour destination with interactive displays, virtual reality milking and jitney bus drive-throughs of its vast barns. It supplies milk for Danone North America, maker of Dannon yogurt. The goal is to tell the seemingly simple story of how a cup of yogurt starts with carefully nurtured soil.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Jann Klopfenstein, a Wapakoneta City Schools second grade teacher. Her class and two others were among the 5,000 people who toured MVP’s Dairy Learning Center and dairy in the summer and fall of 2019. The tours were made possible with a grant from Auglaize County Farm Bureau.
The center also hosted professional visitors and events for groups, such as the Auglaize, Logan, Mercer and Shelby county Farm Bureaus. Another 3,000 visitors were set for spring of 2020 but pandemic restrictions prompted closing until conditions improve.
“The kids were simply amazed and excited,” Klopfenstein said. She was especially impressed by the farm’s cleanliness, attention to detail and care the staff showed while working with the students.
The International Dairy Foods Association was impressed, too. MVP’s cutting-edge technology and concern for its cattle, environment and community enabled it to win the group’s Innovative Dairy Award for 2020.
“Everything they do has a ‘scientifically proven benefit’,” said Allison Ryan, MVP’s marketing and communications director.
Environmentally friendly practices include recycling water and regenerative farming, which rebuilds soil’s organic matter and biodiversity.
The cow manure, so prized by home gardeners as a natural fertilizer and soil enhancer, is also recycled. It’s processed and treated with technology that allows some to be applied on fields through the irrigation system. Dried manure is used on the dairy’s fields, which produce much of the feed for MVP’s herd, and by area farmers.
A testament to the efficacy of the processing system — one of the dairy’s partners lives next door.
The dairy’s story, a two-family affair, began about 15 years ago, after the VanTilburgs of Celina started regenerative farming to revive declining soil. They were so far ahead of this curve, they made their own seeders to plant cover crops, which boost the soil’s organic matter and valuable biodiversity.
About five years ago, three VanTilburg brothers, Kyle, Luke and Matt, part of a century-old farming family that’s diversified into ag-related businesses, decided to get off the “roller coaster” of commodity crop prices. They learned of Danone’s regenerative approach and the stability of its cost-plus arrangement with suppliers. However, they lacked dairy experience.
Enter the four McCarty brothers, Clay, David, Ken and Mike. They are part of a fourth generation farm family operating four dairies with thousands of cows in western Kansas and Nebraska supplying Danone NA. They hoped to buy a dairy to support Danone’s new lines at the Minster plant about 20 miles from MVP. The brothers met by chance when vetting properties.
Given their shared vision for sustainable farming with positive environmental, social and economic effects, they decided it would be easier to start from scratch than retrofit an existing operation.
During the permitting process, they invited people in to allay concerns, Kyle VanTilburg said. Transparency was applied to all aspects of the operation.
“Most people in the general public don’t know where their food comes from,” said VanTilburg, a Mercer County Farm Bureau member. “Plus there’s negative thinking about animal agriculture, and we wanted to fix that.”
Thus the learning center was added to the project, and eventually so was Allison Ryan, who came to MVP after 11 years with the American Dairy Association. Ryan, who grew up on a dairy farm, helped develop the displays and website and now oversees the learning center, an unusual feature for dairies.
The partners’ attention to detail and careful planning allowed the dairy to go from zero cows to 4,500 in about three weeks.
“We had the staff to do it,” said Brock Peters, general manager. He started working on a Kansas dairy farm in high school and has been with the McCartys for about 13 years. There are 40 full-time employees.
VanTilburg urges other farmers to “look outside the box” when considering new ventures. “Agriculture is always evolving and changing,” he said. “It’s (MVP) a farm-to-table product on a large scale.”
Because of its size, “there were some grave concerns” at first, said Claudia Coe of Celina. She serves with Luke VanTilburg on the board of the faith-based drug recovery program Mercer County House of Hope. She and her husband, John, own Celina’s radio station WCSM.
“They have been very good stewards,” she said of the dairy. She’s an enthusiastic fan, who has taken visitors to tour it several times. “It’s an asset to our area. It’s just wonderful.”
Michael Leach is a freelance writer from Grove City.
Even though fuel prices remain high, the increased use of corn ethanol is helping temper those price increases. And it’s also benefiting the farmers who grow the corn.
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