Healthy & Homegrown

Through dairy farming's ups and downs, one thing remains: The cows need to be milked twice a day, 365 days a year.

The Squibb family can attest to that, managing Topwinds Farm, a 150-acre dairy farm in Billings. There are no sick days, no vacation time and no excuses.

"If you're sick, you get up and go take care of the cattle, and then you come back in and try to heal up," says Shannon Squibb, who runs the farm with her husband, Richard. "It's kind of the standing joke that we both can't be sick at the same time."

The Squibbs, along with teenage sons Ryan and Clayton, took over the farm in 2000 after the death of Shannon Squibb's father, Larry Stine, who founded the farm in the early 1970s.

Rise and shine

The family is up at 5 a.m. every day to spend two to three hours milking 60 Holstein cows, feeding calves and cleaning the barns. These chores take even longer during the skin-biting cold of winter because of additional feed requirements for the herd.

Before the second milking at 4:30 p.m., the family puts in hours of fence mending, hay loading and unloading, and machinery and barn repairs. In summer, the family cuts, rakes and bales the grass hay for winter feed.

Running a farm requires a jack-of-all-trades, says Shannon Squibb. Breakdowns in the barn range from the milking unit that attaches to the cow to the compressor unit or hot water heater, which requires mechanical competence.

"One day, you may need to be an electrician or one day, you may need to be a plumber," she says. "You have to have a wide range of knowledge."

It's unusual, though, for a farming family to take on media celebrity. But that's where the Squibbs found themselves after two 30-second Hiland Dairy Foods television commercials featuring the family and their farm began broadcasting in January. The TV spots, which also feature five other Midwest farm families, will run through 2010 on Springfield's local network channels, as well as cable, says Sarah Lake, public relations director for Envoy Inc., the advertising agency that produced the ads.

The commercials also air in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Okla.; Fayetteville and Fort Smith, Ark.; and Wichita, Kan., Lake says.

The farm families also appear on food coupons in daily newspapers with nearly 1.5 million coupons distributed throughout the four-state area, says Greg Stephenson, director of marketing and advertising with Hiland Dairy Foods.

When the advertisements hit the market, Shannon Squibb says the family didn't know what to think of all the exposure. "But we would do whatever to help market the products," she says.

Down but not out

Squibb says wholesale milk prices have been as low as $10 per 100 pounds of milk with the current price hovering around $13, which is a 40 percent to 50 percent decline in the Squibbs' revenue compared to last year at this time. She declined to disclose the farm's annual revenues.

While they've seen their paychecks shrink, the Squibbs have seen their expenses expand.

Besides paying more for fuel, fertilizers and electricity, Shannon Squibb says their largest expense, feed, has risen by as much as 50 percent.

"A lot of people have gone out of the business because of the low milk price we receive on the farm even though that doesn't reflect on the consumer at the store," she says.

Such a drastic drop in farmers' paychecks makes it especially tough to survive when expenses run between $15 to $17 to produce each 100 pounds of milk, says Stacy Dohle, industry relations manager with the Midwest Dairy Association. She says consumers are not eating at McDonald's, Wendy's, Domino's Pizza and Pizza Hut as much as before the recession, which affects the demand for cheese and milk.

"Pizza is a very big driver in the dairy business," Dohle says. "Twenty-five percent of all the cheese that is used domestically is pizza cheese. When our pizza chains don't do well, ... that affects the demand for cheese and then that affects the milk price."

Until the price for wholesale milk rises enough to cover expenses, the Squibbs' main strategy for surviving is to cut costs as much as possible by delaying equipment purchases. Items that need replaced are getting repairs instead.

Giving up the farming lifestyle they want for their family or selling the land is not an option, says Shannon Squibb.

"Everything we have is invested," she says.

"This is not just a business. This is also our home, our investment, our savings. Everything is here."