Episode Description:
The milk check has been a roller coaster ride. Record prices this spring have been offset by persistent high production costs. “The margins shrunk,” said Mark Sauter, who farms at Cannon Falls, Minnesota. “With today’s price, we’re floating probably 50 cents either side of breakeven; the feed costs are a big chunk of that.” In the TransFARMation podcast, Sauter describes the heavy snows that collapsed the free-stall barn.That was followed by a tornado eight years later. “The 2018 one was a lot tougher to recover from. In September of 2018, a tornado came over the farm and in February of ’19,. we had another 100 feet or so of free-stall roof collapse.” The tornado unknowingly shifted all of the rafters about six inches from top-to-bottom. “We fought with the insurance company to prove that it was from the tornado. We got that resolved and prices skyrocketed afterwards so we were about 30 percent short of what we needed for settlement costs.” Sauter said the herd is now just beginning to come back into full production. Listen to the full podcast.
