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A WORKING DAIRY FARM
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FUN THE WHOLE FAMILY
German
Farmers Visit Cohocton's
Wolcott Dairy Farm
By Jeff Miller
(Reprinted from the Genesee Country Express, March
6, 2008)
COHOCTON - It’s easy to understand
the attraction that the Finger Lakes region has to out-of-state
visitors – swimming, boating, fishing, beautiful
scenery, wine tours, nearby cities and villages to visit,
gorges to walk and so on. But not many people would suspect
that bus loads of international visitors come to Cohocton
just to visit a dairy farm, but indeed that’s exactly
what happens.
For the past five months, Lent Hill Dairy
Farm, owned and operated by Paul Wolcott and his mother
Maureen, has hosted international tours of their state-of-the-art
milking facility that opened last summer. The most recent
international tour, on Feb.27, brought a group of about
12 visitors from various locations throughout Germany.
The tours are sponsored by DeLaval, a farming
equipment manufacturer headquartered out of Sweden, with
American headquarters located in Kansas City, Mo.
Charmaine Jagodinsky, out of the DeLaval
office in Kansas City, conducts the tours. Generally,
international tourists are flown into New York City, where
the visitors sight-see the city before moving on to the
farm upstate. Here, visitors see several state-of-the-art
dairy farms with a few days, making their way to Buffalo
where they take a flight back home after having first
gotten the chance to see Niagara Falls.
The reason for the international visits
is to get a firsthand glimpse of how large dairy farms
operate with cutting-edge technological equipment. European
farms are as large as American farms, Jagodinsky said,
but even with the DeLaval company headquartered out of
Sweden, the technology used on most European and Russian
farms is behind America’s.
The Lent Hill Dairy Farm installed a state-of-the-art
rotary milking parlor last summer. The farm has approximately
1,450 cows, of which about 850 can be milked. The parlor
can milk 50 cows at a time, 275 cows per hour, producing
55,000 lbs of milk per day. About 300 truck-loads of milk
are produced per year and taken to Polly-O Dairy in Campbell
to be used to make mozzarella cheese.
The process of milking is fairly simple.
Each cow enters a stall on a rotary parlor and takes a
ride around as she is milked by an automatic milking machine.
The milk goes through a cleansing process while the equipments
monitors the milk and the cow. By the time a cow has made
one rotation, she is through milking and is replaced by
another cow.
Daily reports are conducted via computer
technology. The technology monitors cow activities such
as how much milk each cow is ready to produce/has produced,
which cow is in heat or is pregnant, and any diseases
that a cow might have.
Paul Wolcott said that his parlor is the
second DeLaval rotary parlor east of the Mississippi.
His parlor was manufactured in New Zealand
and had to go through customs to get here.
Chuck Olin, owner of Charles Olin and Sons
out of Horseheads is the local DeLaval dealer. He headed
up the construction of the rotary facility. The parlor
took approximately two and a half months to build with
up to 25 laborers on the construction job at one time.
As for the German visitors, 11 of the 12
are DeLaval customers who already have smaller rotary
parlors.
One of the German visitors said that the
Lent Hill parlor was “very interesting” and
commented that “American farmers produce milk of
high standards.”
It was evident that Maureen Wolcott enjoys
hosting the tours on her farm. “This is fun for
me; I really love it,” she said.
Other foreign tours have included visitors
from Latvia, Canada, Ireland and Russia.
A second Russian tour that would have included
Russian Ministers of agriculture and a Russian governor
was cancelled by Valdimir Putin. On the first Russian
tour to the Cohocton farm, Putin called one of the tourists
home immediately. According to Maureen, he was to have
been given a medal of honor by Putin for his efforts in
agriculture.
Lent Hill Dairy Farm hosts about one tour
per week – most visitors come from other large American
dairy farms and wish to upgrade to modern equipment.
Other recent tours have included about 60
Canadians who toured the facility two weeks ago. A local
4-H group and loan officers from a local bank visited
this past week. The Wolcott’s will be hosting a
Lithuanian group at the end of April.
