TCHDailyNews farm stops continues with a visit at Voight Acres, the Outagamie County Breakfast on the Farm host.
The farm has been owned by Steve and Sue Voight since 1978 after they purchased the farm from Steve’s father and uncle. Steve says there’s a lot to enjoy about farming, but his favorite is watching the animals grow in such a short time.
“I like to see all the younger animals grow and mature, and take off into a milking cow,” Steve said of his favorite part on the farm. “It’s interesting to see the growth and how fast it goes by, those two years from birth to the milking strain, those two years go by real fast.”
In 2014, Steven and Sue expanded their farm into an LLC with their two sons, Tim and Mitch. The farm holds 260 cows, 230 of them milking to go with 228 heifers. Tim says it can be challenging to balance everything on the farm, but he has a special system.
“It’s all in my head,” Tim joked. “We’ve got computer systems too.”
While cows play an important role on Voight Acres, Mitch explains that there’s also plenty of fieldwork to go around.
“We have about 400 acres,” he said of the farm. “We own 180 and we rent an additional 220. It’s about 200 [acres of] alfalfa and 200 [acres of] corn.”
Voight Acres also places a focus on having registered Holsteins, explains Tim.
“It’s all about genetics around here,” Tim said. “We work on trying to get good cow families and right now we’re flushing on two cows, which is trying to get embryos out of them so we can put them in other heifers. Our two cows right now, one dam is 13 years old and the grand dam lived to be 16 years old. They all had high components and a high lifetime production and that’s what we want in a herd.”
The 31st annual Outagamie County Breakfast on the Farm will be held at Voight Acres Sunday, June 11.