At a latitude 56 degrees north of the equator, Hamilton’s dairy and crop ground is considered just beyond the Northern Hemisphere’s boundary for arable corn regions.

Yet his claim to fame is doing the nearly impossible – growing Europe’s most northerly corn crop year after year.

This year Hamilton and his brother, Archie, planted 158 acres of corn for their 520 dairy cows. They are hoping for a crop at or above their rolling average of 24 tons per acre. Yet harvesting that corn crop isn’t without risk or cost.

To have a chance at harvesting, Hamilton must plant his corn under biodegradable plastic. And it isn’t cheap. The plastic covering this year cost him about $157 an acre, or about $25,000 for the entire crop.

And it isn’t easy to use.
“One problem with plastic is that the seed bed must be perfect and dry,” Hamilton says. “If you hit an unsettled weather spell, you might as well be drilling conventionally.”

This year his corn crop was planted by May 12, about 10 days later than he would have preferred. The plastic allows the corn to germinate quickly and mature in what few growing degree days Scotland does have.

After cut and ensiled in a new silage bunker, or clamp as Hamilton calls it, the silage will be fed as 40 percent of the expanding Holstein herd’s forage matter through the next year.

Hamilton says his herd will probably number close to 800 by next year. The reality of his relatively new freestall confinement facility is almost as fortuitous as his luck with corn is.

Until 2003, the Hamiltons owned what Bill, a licensed veterinarian, describes as a “fantastic” herd of 200 Hawkland Holsteins with an adjusted rolling herd average of 24,304 pounds on 2X milking.

“If we’re expanding, we’re never going to get our money back out of this herd or have anything to sell,” Hamilton recalls thinking before selling the herd. “I really wish we hadn’t sold them. But we did.”

So in June 2003 the herd was sold, and the dairy was demolished. And while the Hamiltons prepared to buy a new herd of cows and build a new dairy over the top of the old dairy site, they leased their dairy’s quota on the European market, which at the time paid back a significant return on investment.

“Originally, we were going to put up a new building, walk away and dittle, dittle, dittle around. Then all the value came out of milk quota, and we thought, ‘Maybe we don’t have to stay at 200 cows. Maybe we can go to 300, then later we thought 300, then 500.’”

One year after selling their previous herd’s prize cow for more than $24,000, Bill began buying and piecing together cow groups for the new, expanded dairy. Within eight months, his new dairy’s herd of 520 cows was milking, and Hamilton still had money left over.

But the expansion hasn’t been without its own challenges and costs. Hamilton says his herd has struggled with phenomena and has every strain of mastitis.

It took a few weeks for the cows to acclimate to the dairy’s new 50-cow rotary parlor, and although Hamilton bought show-worthy animals, many of them weren’t used to a large-herd, commercial milking environment.

“We also discovered a lot of ‘excellent’ classified cows had never, ever, ever been in a cubicle (freestall) in their life. They’d practically slept in the house. I don’t mean that literally, but we stressed them. Within six weeks, our hospital yard was full of 91- and 92-point cows.”

Now the Hamiltons are breeding their cows for feet and legs, udder depth and increased chest width.

Hamilton, whose hairstyle and mustache resemble the hypothetical cross of physical features from Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin, says his dairying philosophy is to be “high input, high output.”

He aims to have heifers calve in, rebred and to second-calving by 36 months. A goal he’s reaching nearly 55 percent of the time.

A large group of heifers calved in over the summer, and the dairy may consider 3X-milking soon. Of the possibility for more milk, Hamilton says, “You always want a wee bit more milk.”

Hamilton’s annual wee bit of luck in silage and his ongoing expansion is unabashedly visible in his confident responses to questions about his one-of-a-kind corn field and dairy operation.

When asked if he thinks his expansion was fortuitous, Hamilton responds with a short, “Yes” and a smirk. He knows that in both corn crops and cows, he’s been more than just a wee bit lucky.  PD

Walt Cooley
Editor
Progressive Dairyman