The Moos Room™

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[cow moos]
Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. The OG3 are here. I promise we will have a guest soon. We're actually going to have one next week. Today we're going to cover a subject that blends all of our worlds together. We've got beef, dairy, and Emily's world of farm safety and mental health all coming together. I know I say it's Emily's world.
It's everyone's world that we all live in, but mostly it's Emily's world and this is The Emily's Show. The topic today is talking about management decisions that we can make that affect our mental health and help us be a better person inside our operation moving forward, both beef and dairy. That's where we're headed today. It can be a tricky thing. Emily, what's the first thing that comes to mind when this topic comes up?
Emily: The first thing that comes to mind for me is just how important it is that we're talking about this. When we're thinking about mental health and how much we know now about that, how it impacts our ability to function day to day. We want to make sure we're functional so that we can be good managers of our cows. Just thinking about mental health management, managing your mental health is management for your farm too.
Joe: I think the hardest thing for me when we talk about all this is it's so hard to place a production value on your mental health. I don't know what it's worth. I don't know how to measure it. There's not a good way to say, okay, if you're this much happier, this much more satisfied with your job, how does that translate to production in your herd?
I know it's worth something and it's probably worth quite a bit because all those little things that you do when you're feeling good and you're in a good spot with your mental health, those add up. A lot of times when your mental health is suffering, you're not doing those little things and you don't have the time to get those other things done. It's a balancing act and it's something that you have to think about constantly.
It's a team effort, usually on a farm to make all these things happen. There are certain decisions that we've thought of and we've gone through the list of things that we think about when we think about mental health and management decisions. We're going to bounce back and forth between the beef and the dairy world. I think it's all still relevant.
One of the things that we've already talked about and we've covered recently is housing our calves. I know, Brad, this is kind of rehash the differences between individual housing, paired housing, group housing, and how that looks for labor.
Bradley: Well definitely you're going to have a lot less labor when you group your animals compared to individual. The more calves you can feed at once, the less labor it's going to take. Obviously, there's still some labor to it, still some thought to it, but there's savings definitely.
Joe: Emily make sure that I'm right on this, but a lot of times when we're talking about management decisions that could benefit our mental health, we're just talking about saving time or saving labor because most of what we think about for stress when we talk about dairy and beef operations is money and time. If we can figure out a way to save time without sacrificing too much money, I think that's where we're looking on a lot of these management decisions.
Emily: Yes, absolutely. I think that that's a really great way to explain it, Joe. I was going to say that it also includes, physical health too.
Joe: To me, physical health comes down to time as well. If you don't have the time because you feel like you're so strapped in your cattle operation and you don't have time to work out, now, I mean that's a little bit of a misnomer and shout out to Jason Medows at Ag State of Mind where he's always talking about you have the choice.
There's always a choice in how you want to do things and how you balance everything and the hierarchy of importance of things. I think he would say that you have the choice to take that time for yourself to get your physical health right, get your mental health right. There's choices that things might go differently on your farm because of that choice, but it's still an incredibly important choice.
A lot of this is freeing up time for you to work on yourself both physically and mentally and that includes family time. I know a lot of people have kids out there and there are sporting events left and right. Brad's got kids in basketball, he's constantly running around. Probably feels like a shuttle service, right Brad?
Bradley: Yes, pretty much. I drive a mean vehicle all over Morris.
Emily: The dad taxi.
Bradley: Exactly.
Joe: Farmers are in that same boat. I think that's the key. There's all these different choices and we're just trying to figure out are there management decisions out there that can help your mental health or difficult decisions that you're maybe feeling guilty about making which definitely happens because it might sacrifice a little bit of production. My argument is going to be that if you can improve your mental health, get some of the things done that are really important to you, it's going to balance out if not be better overall in the long term.
Emily: I always tell people I'm not going to sugarcoat it. That's going to be hard. You're going to have to really work on rewiring your brain and thinking about, yes, my work is very demanding and it's very important and it means a lot to me, but taking time for myself doesn't mean that I'm disrespecting that. That's something that, like I said, takes time, takes some work but it's something I have done. I've done and undone it a few times, but it's really worth it to be able to give yourself that discipline to reteach yourself that self-care is important, self-care is not selfish.
Joe: One of the examples we've already talked about is that you can group house calves and that might give you more time back. Initially, that's going to come with the drawbacks of the initial investment for equipment to be able to change your operation to do that. There's definitely a learning curve like we've talked about before.
That one I think is a pretty straightforward decision when you lay out everything that you have in front of you. You know what the factors are, the pros, the cons, everything is pretty straightforward. The issue comes when we get into some of these other decisions like, "Should I milk three times a day or should I milk twice?" That's a big decision. It comes down to labor a lot of the time.
Do you have the help to do it? If you're on your own it comes down to how much time do you have to actually do these kind of things because we know that if we milk three times a day, we're probably going to see more production. Is that worth it in the overall scheme of things when we're balancing time and labor and your own mental health?
Those are decisions that are really difficult to make because it's a clear decision to say, I'm going to give up production, which is money, but overall, what else does it do to the farm? What are the other factors involved? That's the kind of decision that we're talking about that becomes a much more difficult thing to work through. I'm going to, first of all, argue that you should involve the team.
Don't try to make these decisions on your own. Don't try to do it on your own. There's plenty of people that can help you through this decision. Not just your family and your employees on the farm, but your nutritionist, of course, your veterinarian. There's so many people that can help you.
Emily: You're extension educator.
Joe: I'm sorry, that should have been first on the list. Your extension educator, especially your local ones that know you really well, those are the people you reach out to and can connect you to the people that can help you make these kind of decisions. Eventually, you could probably even get all the way up the chain to Dr. Bradley J Heinz and he might be able to give you some insight as well.
Emily: Only if you're lucky.
Bradley: I do and I give great advice.
Joe: You heard it there. He's available and gives great advice. This is one that I encountered in practice all the time. Should I milk three times a day? Should I milk twice? What does that mean for labor? Dropping from three times a day to twice a day really comes down to the size of your farm, your employees, and how can they make that work. A lot of times it's do you have employees that are willing to work split shifts like that because that's a huge, huge factor. Brad, you guys milk twice a day, I assume.
Bradley: We milk twice a day. Only twice a day. Labor is always an issue, trying to balance everything and it's not easy and we're a little bit different kind of a dairy. We're more grass-based and a little bit lower production, but it has the same aspect. If you go from three times a day to two times a day, there are some places where we've gone to once-a-day milking towards the end of lactation to save on labor and save headache especially when I push the herd to 300 milking cows and everybody doesn't like that.
It's like, okay, we'll milk 40 cows once a day that are going to dry off to help ease everybody's mental anguish and just make everybody feel a little bit better that we're not having to milk so many cows like that when everybody has other things to do as well. I think it has the same aspects from whether you go from 3x to 2x or herds like us that are 2x and might go to 1x. There's a lot of thought behind that as well, especially from the grazing world.
Joe: There's no shortage of things to do on any farm. It's not like that time it's going to be all of a sudden empty. We all know that farmers are going to fill that time immediately, but that's valuable. You've got going from three to two or two to one, that's time that you've freed up to do something else that you want to get done, and it doesn't have to be on the farm. That's the thing that I see a lot of people, especially smaller farms and tie stalls, they make big changes to management to accommodate things they want to do. I think I might even have mentioned it recently on the podcast where I've known several farmers that will milk noon and midnight so that they can get to sporting events.
This isn't just a, "Okay, one year, we're going to do that." They've got four kids, and they're going to do it for every senior year for every kid. They're going to do four years of this, milking noon and midnight overall, so they can get to sporting events. That's a huge management decision, but it has big benefits for their mental health and their family by being able to get to these sporting events that are super important to everybody in the family.
Management decisions, I think it's something that most farmers probably think about this in the back of their mind, and they might not be realizing that they're weighing that in, and I think we're all just encouraging you to consciously weigh that in and make sure it's a big piece of every management decision.
Emily: Joe, I really liked that you shared that story again. I think it's important too, to mention that we live in a culture that the more you're doing the better, and you need to remember that more doesn't have to just be work. If you do decide to decrease milking per day, or anything where you're going backwards, in a sense, that doesn't mean that you're failing or that you weren't successful doing it three times a day, or whatever it was. It's again, a mindset shift that you need to work on, but knowing that taking time off so that you can be with your family and make sure those relationships are strong, for me, no brainer.
Joe: Agreed. I know that probably the beef guys at this point, the podcasts are feeling super left out, so we should probably get to some of those things as well and talk about some examples on the beef side. One of the big things that we talk about is calving season on the beef side, and this can apply to your seasonally calving dairies too, potentially unless you're like Brad and you just have both spring and fall because he wants to and he's a sucker for punishment. The big thing with calving season on the beef side is it's a little bit different conversation because a lot of our beef producers, especially in Minnesota, are not beef producers full-time. They have a day job, they're doing something else.
The beef side becomes a side hustle or a hobby, something they're doing to supplement their income rather than it being their primary source. Now, that's not true for everybody. Obviously, there's plenty of beef producers that produce beef feedlot or cow-calf, and that's their primary income. For me, calving season is a huge factor in this. If you've got a day job, and you're not wanting to deal with mud, and cold temperatures, random snowstorms, then fall calving might be an excellent management decision.
You've got cattle on pasture, combine that with a calving ease bull, and now you've got really nice conditions, long days to work so that after work, you're not working in the dark with just a headlamp or your kid holding the flashlight and trying to work that way. That can make a big difference in how much stress you have during that calving season. I think it's a great management decision to help your mental health and to reduce that stress on the farm. Calving season is a huge piece of that. Additionally, we talk about calving distribution.
I'm a vet, so I'm guilty of pushing everyone to just tighten everything up, as tight as it can, have all those calves pretty much on top of each other, but sometimes it's not realistic, and I forget about that. I'm guilty of that for sure. If you're working alone, or you don't have all that much help, having 85%, 90% of your calves in a two to three-week window might be just horribly painful and almost impossible to get done. Again, another management decision, if you got to stretch that out, you got to stretch it out, and that's a good management decision you can make.
Now, again, it's sacrificing some production but is that made up for in how well you can take care of your calves because you're feeling better and you're more motivated at work? No doubt. Our colleagues over in Ag business management, and specifically Jim Salfer with the dairy team would be incredibly disappointed with us if we didn't talk about some of the other things that can help us with our mental health as we move forward. One of those things is transition planning. I'm going to turn it over to Emily because she knows way more about this than I ever will.
Emily: Oh, boy, that's a lot of pressure. Transition Planning is a long, complicated topic, and we're not going to get deep in the weeds on it today. As we think about planning for the future of the farm, and how that may tie in to giving you some peace of mind, and knowing you have this piece in place, just starting the process. You've heard me say before, on this podcast, that it's a process that takes many years. It's going to take time, it's going to be stressful, it's going to be hard, but it is something that I always tell farmers, the sooner the better, that you do this.
Because once you have it done, you will feel like a weight has been lifted off your chest. I've had farmers tell me that, but they're like, "It felt so good to just know we have our transition plan done. These are people that are in their 40s, 50s, and they have their transition plans done. Over time, if they want to, they can go in and change them, but in the event of someone's untimely passing, there's a safety net there. There's something there. It's not going to be complete chaos and confusion because there will be some sort of a guide.
Joe: That peace of mind is worth a lot. I think, again, it's one of those things that probably a lot of people think about, and then push to the back of their mind because there are so many other things going on in the farm that they feel take precedence. For me, again, it's peace of mind-type thing. That's another way that's off your shoulders, and you don't even have to think about it anymore. When you are on the farm, you're really present, you're not thinking about these other possibilities. One of the last things I want to talk about is the lack of time that farmers take to socialize with other farmers, and it's a huge piece.
Personally, I'm a little bit of an extrovert, so I like to see other people and interacting with people is something that recharges me. I'm better at my job when I take the time to socialize and see other people, meet new people, learn new things. That's what keeps me going. I think, again, one of the things you can do is take those extra 5 minutes, those 10 minutes, when you run into town, talk to people, see people, don't race back to the farm. That's valuable time, and it's good for you to do. When you head to the auction market or the sale barn, take some extra time and hang out.
Grab a cup of coffee with someone you haven't seen for a while. Those are really valuable connections that really pay off for you on your farm and your mental health as well.
Emily: Our emotional health and wellness is really tied to a lot of our social relationships, too. If you remember my three-legged milking stool of wellness, physical, mental, we know how to do those and then emotional. Social relationships are a really big part of that. We need to be able to share our feelings. Doesn't matter if you're an extrovert or an introvert, you will feel that way. I think, yes, that it's super important that you take the time to talk to people, just so you know what's going on, and so you have time to catch people up on what you're doing too. That's really important, I think.
Joe: All of the things we talked about today, they all apply to you. They also apply to your family members and your employees. When you're making these decisions, and you're talking about all of these things that were concerned about your mental health and how much time you have to do the things you want to do, all of that trickles down, and it applies to everybody else that's involved on the farm. Having them involved in these decisions, again, you don't have to make the decisions alone, and there are going to be factors that play into that with these other people that are involved. Keep that in mind.
It's a part of this whole thing that Emily talks about with creating a good culture on your farm, and making sure that we involve everyone in those decisions and making sure that we're taking care of everybody, watching out for everybody else that's involved in the farm as well.
Emily: I couldn't have said it better myself, Joe.
Joe: I'm telling you, I listen to you when you talk. I really do.
Emily: That's very sweet. I appreciate that, Joe. Thank you. Well, I think that's the perfect place to wrap it.
Joe: If anybody has questions for us, feel free to get a hold of us. We're happy to help you work through these decisions. Admittedly, Brad says he gives amazing advice. We might kick all the questions to Brad but I think he'll be okay with that.
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Bradley: Gladly, I'll take anything I can get.
Joe: Perfect. All right, wrap us up Em.
Emily: All right, if you have questions, concerns, or scathing rebuttals, as always, you can email those to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Joe: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Emily: You can follow us on Twitter @UMNmoosroom and @UMNFarmSafety. You can also follow The Morris Dairy on Instagram @U-M-N-W-C-R-O-C Dairy.
Joe: Perfect. Thank you for listening, everybody. We'll catch you next week.
Emily: Oh my God, and visit our website, extension.umn.edu.
Joe: Always go to the website.
Emily: Bye. Bradley, say bye.
Bradley: Bye.
Emily: That's not a grand point like I thought it was but I think I had more but it's gone.
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