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“We’re planning for 1,500 people,” said Bangor’s Deb Schwarz, who chairs the La Crosse County Dairy Breakfast Committee.
The affair will be held on Brice Prairie on the Morning Star Dairy farm of John and Barb Schaller on Saturday, June 21, from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. The breakfast menu will include pancakes and sausage made by the Mindoro Lions Club, cheese curds, Culver’s custard and cake doughnuts.
However, there will be far more than just good food. There will be educational displays, a dairy barn open house, a live broadcast by radio station WCOW, a “spin-to-win” wheel and a visit by the MEDLINK helicoptor, as well as live music by Double Crossed.
Schwarz has personal reasons for wanting to see the breakfast — which attracted 1,200 or more people in previous years — successfully revived. “My husband is a dairy farmer and we would like to educate people and show them that we are caretakers of the land,” she said.
“I asked John to be on the committee and he offered to host a breakfast instead,” Schwarz said.
John and Barb are the third generation of Schallers to work their farm. “My grandfather moved here in 1937,” John said. The house the Schallers live in, built circa 1860, is one of the oldest on Brice Prairie.
Asked why he and his wife agreed to host the gathering, John, a graduate of Holmen High School, admitted that a big part of it had to do with improving the image of farmers.
“La Crosse County hasn’t had one of these in a while and it seems like people today are less tolerant of things like manure and smell,” he said. “We would like to show people what we do and that we are doing our best.”
Barb, who grew up in Fort Atkinson, met John when they were students at UW-La Crosse. “I never expected to marry a farmer — not that I had anything against them.” she said. “Now I can’t imagine any other kind of life. We are blessed to be here.”
The Schaller farm milks 400 cows three times daily and it’s immediately obvious that this is a clean, well-run operation. “I’ve grown to appreciate how efficient farmers have to be,” Barb said.
Morning Star Dairy also houses and raises 300 heifers. Last year, a new heifer facility was added. “In the past we’d send the heifers away at four months and then get them back later, but you always think you can do it better,” John said.
He’s proud to say they’ve only lost one animal since last September. The new heifer barn, 40 feet by 360 feet, has automatic windows that can be raised or lowered at the touch of a switch to keep the animals comfortable in any kind of weather.
The Schallers own and rent a total of 700 acres where they grow the corn and alfalfa to feed their 700 head of dairy cows. Although there are eight fulltime employees, there’s only one tractor. “I’ve never been big on owning, fixing and repairing tractors — we hire out all our field work,” John said.
Schaller does pay for the fuel, though, and the recent rise in fuel prices has not been kind to his pocketbook. “In the last couple of weeks we’ve spent about $6,000 on fuel,” he said.
John said he’d like to grow his herd of milk cows to 450 since that is the number the farm is currently set up to handle. Each animal produces about 28,000 pounds of milk annually.
The Schaller’s have four children — Trenton, Bergen, Lauren and Cameron. John is the youngest of 12 kids, and his father was also the youngest child. “I think my youngest son probably figures it’s in the cards (that he’ll become a dairy farmer, too),” he said.
Schwarz would like to see the dairy breakfast become an annual occurrence again. “We’d like to get back into the swing and to keep educating the public about the dairy industry, how diverse it is and the different ways people make a living at it,” she said.
The Schallers are hoping the breakfast will give people a little more tolerance about how a successful dairy farm operates — and a better understanding of how the milk that winds up on our breakfast tables gets there.
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