Straight Talk with NDFB

Best of Straight Talk: The proof is in the cream

• Episode 5

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In this "Best Of" season of Straight Talk, we travel back to Season 3, episode 9, as our hosts, siblings Emmery and Ezra, drive to Carrington to visit with the van Bedaf siblings, Piet and Maartje, and learn more about the family's dairy farm and creamery.

Tune in as they talk about:

  • The history of the farm and why Carrington, N.D.
  • The importance of animal agriculture to North Dakota
  • Building relationships with the community as the key to successful diversification
  • Managing businesses, large or small
  • Finding true joy and fulfillment in your work

Links

Piet van Bedaf’s Youtube channel

Maartje’s Cows & Co. Creamery

Email Emmery at emmery@ndfb.org

Like what you’re hearing? Become a member of NDFB! 

[Straight Talk theme]
 
[00:12] Ezra: You're listening to Straight Talk, NDFB with Emmery and Ezra. A few weeks ago, we interviewed Maartje, owner of Cows and Co Creamery near Carrington, North Dakota. We enjoyed that interview so much that we wanted to go up and eat gelato in person. I mean, have a podcast in person with her, but also her brother Piet, who runs the family-owned dairy operation. So in this episode, we discuss how they moved from the Netherlands to North Dakota, how they work together as a family, and various aspects of the dairy business. We were just talking a little bit about the dairy. It sounds like you guys are on a pretty rigid schedule up here.

[00:59] Piet: Yeah, we're. We're pretty much milking 24 hours a day. Not quite milking 24 hours a day, but the milking equipment is always running. So we're milking about 21 hours a day and then about three hours is washing. So it's. Yeah, it's 24-7 here.

[01:17] Ezra: So how much of that is man hours?

[01:19] Piet: So we're, when we are milking, it's. We don't have automated milking. We're still putting the machines on by hand and prepping the cows by hand, cleaning their udders, putting on the machines. The machines come off automatically, but there's still a lot of manual labor. So we're typically milking with three people in the parlor and they're able to get all of our cows milked three times a day.

[01:43] Ezra: Okay, so do you have everybody working shifts then?

[01:46] Piet: So they milk work in 12 hour shifts. Everybody here. So 5 to 5. The milking crew, some of the other guys that feed calves will work 7 to 7.

[01:57] Ezra: Oh, that's crazy. How many employees do you guys have?

[01:59] Piet: Around 23 at the moment.

[02:01] Ezra: Okay, so how much of the dairy industry today is fully automated or majority automated?

[02:10] Piet: The majority of the dairy industry is milk and cow similar to how we are, where the either in a parallel parlor or like a rotary style parlor where the machines are still put on by hand. But there's starting to be more and more automation where cow can go to the milking robots and get milked whenever she wants. Yeah, it's coming fast at this point. It's pretty expensive equipment. Probably once all of our milking equipment needs to be upgraded. When we get to that point, we'll probably look at it more serious. But at the moment, the way we're doing it is working good for us.

[02:43] Ezra: That sounds great. So today we're all sitting at a desk here at the van Bedaf dairy and we only have two microphones, so we're all sharing microphones. So I feel like my questions have to be really direct and specific.

[02:56] Emmery: This is our first on site interview and Ezra and I and Ezra's wife Lexi and my son and their daughter Evie just all piled in the car and came up to Carrington. And it was just awesome to pull in. Cause you have your big Holstein cow statue out in the front and you have quite the operation here. You know, when we interviewed Maartje a few weeks ago, we talked a little bit about why your family came here from the Netherlands. But could you just, maybe we could even go back and how long has the van Bedaf family been involved in dairy? And then can you just give us a brief history of how you guys wound up here?

[03:32] Piet: Sure, I can do that. So my great grandpa van Bedaf, he originally started renting a farm back in the Netherlands. I think there would have been not just milk cows there, but pigs, chickens, other kinds of animals. Pretty small scale, like a lot of farms would have been back then. When my grandpa was around 18 years old, I believe that my great grandpa passed away, he took over the farm, and then a few years later he was able to purchase that farm. And that's the same farm that me and my sister would have lived on when we were in the Netherlands. 

So then when my dad got a little bit older, around 16 or so, they added a freestall barn milking parlor. And then when I was born, they expanded the herd and when we left, they were milking around 60 cows in a freestall barn with a milking parlor. Pretty similar to how we are now, just smaller scale. In the Netherlands, there's a lot of pressure on land, a lot of people in a small space, and really difficult to expand in agriculture, especially the part of the Netherlands that we were from, we were on the southern border near Belgium. 

So a lot of people were moving to the U.S. at that time. A lot of dairy farmers, and some to Canada, Australia, even to Germany, Ireland, some other countries in Europe. My mom and dad wanted to stay in dairy and wanted to give us kids the opportunity to grow up in dairy. So they started looking in the U.S., were looking some in Canada. They thought the step to the U.S. was too big for them at that time, because to come to the U.S. you have to invest a certain amount of dollars to get your visa or the visa that they were looking at. So they started looking in Canada. 

There's quite a few Dutch dairy farmers in Canada already in the area that we eventually moved to. So we moved there in 2001 together with my aunt and uncle's family, who also dairy farmed in the same town in the Netherlands. And they're still in Canada milking cows today. So we milked 110 cows in Canada until around 2007, I think. Sold the farm. The farm was never really officially for sale. Somebody came and made an offer, so they were bought out in another place by a city they were looking to relocate somewhere. They made an offer and it was a good offer. So then my mom and dad decided, well, maybe this is the time to make the jump to the United States. 

So they sold the farm, started looking in the United States. A lot of Dutch dairy farmers moved to Michigan, Ohio. South Dakota was kind of starting to become more popular at that time. So they were looking in South Dakota a lot. South Dakota had some land available, but land prices were quite a bit more than here in North Dakota. So they wanted to have at least a good amount of acres to be able to grow some of their own feed to kind of control some of those costs. Looked in a few spots in North Dakota. We'd always come through Carrington. Driving back and forth from we were near Edmonton, Alberta, down to the, like, South Dakota, Brookings area, you'd come through Carrington. So they always kind of thought Carrington was a nice town, has a good school, grocery store, a hospital. Seems like a good sustaining community. They were able to find some land in Carrington, just three and a half miles out of town, and started building the dairy in 2008, around the summer of 2008. And we started milking cows here in March 2009.

[07:10] Emmery: Wow. So when you came down here, may I ask how large your operation was at the time?

[07:17] Piet: When we started in Carrington would have been the milking parlor and the barn directly behind it, which houses around 200 to 300 cows. And then by summer 2009, we had built a south freestall barn was completed, and we filled that with a lot of heifers that were calving over that summer. So by the end of that year, we were milking around 600-700 cows, which was the original goal, was to milk around 600- 700 cows when we started construction here. And we've slowly expanded since then, added a maternity barn, another barn for milking cows, heifer barn, calving barn, calf barn.

[07:57] Ezra: When you guys move from Canada to North Dakota, you, I'd imagine just packing up a dairy operation isn't that's not exactly how it works, you know. So like, did you just load the, the cows you had on trailers and bring them down here and, and just plug and play or, or dive into that a little bit.

[08:16] Piet: So we, when we sold the farm in Canada, we sold  it with the cows, but we kept some of the heifer calves. Then we took those with us here. We took some of our equipment, but some of the smaller things like calf hutches, maybe some like, day-to-day tools, left a lot of that there were kind of sold with, with the farm there, I guess. But we did want to keep. Yeah, some because we had a pretty good herd in Canada. So I think my mom and dad were wanting to keep some of those heifers. So we, we brought, if I remember right, we brought everything under like a year of age here. So they had to be branded, inspected. They went to a raiser here. And then we started milking those as they started calving, I guess.

[09:05] Emmery: So you and Maartje were teenagers?

[09:10] Piet: I was 17 at the time, so that would have made Maartje, 13.

[09:14] Emmery: That's quite the change, you know, in your young years to go from the... How old were you when you left the Netherlands?

[09:20] Piet: I was nine. I think March maybe would have been six.

[09:23] Emmery: So you really spent your growing up year moving...

[09:25] Piet: Back in the Netherlands. I mean, remember some of that obviously, but don't. Don't remember a whole lot. I mean, under nine years old you have some memories, or I do anyways, but not, not a lot. But when we lived in Canada, I have quite a few memories of that and was my senior year when we moved here, so that was a little bit of a challenge. But everybody was very welcoming in Carrington. Made a lot of friends right away, and I think my brother and sister did also. So, yeah, the family went and you go with, I guess you don't really have much of a choice at that point.

[09:58] Ezra: Yeah, that's so true. So you talked about, you know, expanding in the Netherlands and how that was a challenge coming to North Dakota here. I mean, you don't drive down the interstate and see a dairy operation like this. Why, why isn't there a lot of dairy in North Dakota?

[10:16] Piet: It's a good question, because I think North Dakota is a good state for dairy. It's a lot of it has to do with processing capacities. What South Dakota did was aggressively go after big cheese processors, which they were able to get, and it kind of has to go hand in hand. You need the cows to produce the milk and you also need the production capacity. But who's who's coming first, I guess is that it's kind of the things you have, they have to come together almost. 

I think there's still a lot of opportunity in North Dakota. There's a lot of feed, a lot of space available, a lot of byproducts from different industries around the state that are available to feed to cows. So hopefully in the future, maybe something like that, they're working on it. They'd like to get more dairies in the state. They'd like to get some processing in the state. But yeah, like I said, a processor is not going to come without the cows and the cows don't come without the processor. So it has to go hand in hand.

[11:13] Ezra: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. So, you know, one thing I do, I think a lot of our listeners are interested in is why it is so challenging to get an operation like this going, why the permitting is so challenging. And maybe, maybe from your guys personal experience or what can we do as people in ag to maybe, I think probably educate would be a good place to start, educate people on why, why North Dakota and local communities need more things like dairies.

[11:43] Piet: I think you kind of see it with the hog industry in North Dakota at the moment. There seems to be a lot of interest in hog operations wanting to start up in the state. But there's some, some pushback. And I think part of it is when a farm like ours and we had, we had pushback when we came down or we had people that were against us putting a farm here. I think if you're an established farm and you want to expand, there's hardly ever any pushback. 

But when it's somebody coming in new to a community that doesn't know anybody, they don't know how they're going to run their farm, what kind of people are going to come work on the farm? I think a lot of people are maybe a little bit worried about what's going to happen. 

I think the best thing that we in AG can do is to try to show people that it is possible to do it in the right way and that it can be a benefit to a community. Ourselves, we try to be as involved in the community as we can. Always open to showing school classes, giving them tours. We work with 4-H and FFA just try to show as many people that we can, what we're doing, how we're doing it. I think it's a, yeah, it's a big thing when people can see that it's going to be a good thing. I Think that changes your mind pretty quick. But when you have no idea what's coming and there's somebody telling you it's going to be bad, which there's a few of those people can get a lot of people rallied behind them just by misinformation, I guess.

[13:17] Ezra: You know, I think that's one thing that is definitely underutilized, just being involved in the community. I think it's easy to just stay out on the farm and, you know, we're all kind of maybe people that like to be left alone to start with. And so, you know, extending ourselves to the community is not easy. But I'm glad to hear you guys do that. I mean, and when you pull up, you guys, I mean, aren't even if you were right next to the highway. I mean, this is a clean, crisp operation. This is cleaner than most farms in North Dakota. Like when you pull up, it's buildings and I mean you have to look inside the buildings to see the cows. Like, it's, it's seriously impressive.

[13:53] Emmery: I, I've never seen more impressive stacks of straw bales underneath hutches than in here. I was like, man!

[13:59] Ezra: I thought it Was in Arizona for a second.

[14:03] Emmery: So we talked a little bit about how you, how the dairy got started and a little bit about the importance of animal agriculture in North Dakota for diversifying and for just strength of state infrastructure. But you have these three outbuildings and what did you say? 1500 cows?

[14:20] Piet: Now we're milking 1600 cows. And then we replace or we raise all of our heifers on site here. So in total, around 3,000 head of cows, calves, heifers.

[14:32] Emmery: And then you have a couple dozen employees here.

[14:34] Piet: Yeah.

[14:34] Emmery: So you really, you guys really are business managers. How do you manage the day to day operations of personnel? And.

[14:44] Piet: That'S probably the biggest thing that changes from 50 or 100 cow dairy to 1,000-plus cows is you have to kind of take a step back from some of the jobs and let other people do them and play more of a manager role on your farm. On our farm, it's me, my dad and my mom kind of do that role together. 

My mom takes care of a lot of the herd records, the financials and some of the scheduling. I'll do some of the scheduling myself also. And just day to day scheduling work wise. It's typically between me and my dad doing that. The nice thing on a dairy is there's a lot of work to do, but a lot of jobs are the same every day. 

So like the milking crew, they Know what they have to do. We don't have to talk to them. Our herd guys, they're, they're really good. They've, a lot of them have been here for a long time. They know what their daily routine is. They know the work that they have to do every day. And the same goes for our feeder. He has a full 12 hour job, 11 hours minus the lunch. He knows what, what to do. 

The guys that feed our calves, they have a lot of different jobs on the farm. So they'll feed the calves in the morning and the afternoon and we look for jobs in between. That's probably where a lot of our daily managing is focused on just finding jobs for them to do. Overall managing decisions are typically made between me, my mom and my dad together.

[16:20] Ezra: Yeah. So just talking about roles and things in the business, I think maybe this is when we'll have Maartje scoot over a little bit too and kind of just talk to both of you. And just our first podcast that Emmery and I did together, we talked about working with family and how that, all the fun stuff that goes with that. And I think we talked a little bit about that with Maartje as well. But I, think it'd be fun because you guys are brother and sister and, and as are Emmery and I. You know, just to talk a little bit about what it's like working with family and sometimes just living close to family all the time and all and things like that.

[16:57] Emmery: What is it, you know, you grew up together, you moved here together, you've gone through a lot of stuff together. What, what would you say, like the biggest keys are to successfully working with family?

[17:07] Maartje: So I guess I'm going to start with that, our family is very unique. I was just talking to my sister in law a little bit ago and talking about this podcast and just like we're going to talk about like family business a little bit. And I was just telling her, I was like, it's really hard for me to talk or like give advice about like family business because I feel like we're very different from most or others. 

I guess I don't know much about many other places, but my parents live to see their kids be happy and I think most people are like that. But my parents are like business-wise, above and beyond, want to set up like great opportunities for their kids and try to help us to make that happen. I mean, they move to multiple countries to find a location where we can put roots down and you know, give the opportunity to Piete, and we also have another brother, Dreese, and then myself to grow and be happy. But also we're all very similar personality wise. So I think that helps being together all the time. My family likes to work. My mom, my dad, both my brothers really, and then myself as well. So I think that helps us get along and live so close together.

[18:21] Piet: I could probably add a little bit to what Maartje was saying and I think, I think it works good for us because we all have similar goals. Like my sister said, we, we all like to work hard and it, it really makes a difference if, if we're all on the same page. You know, we all work weekends, we work long days if we need to. It probably becomes a challenge when you have certain family members that don't want to do something like that, where they want to work just 9 to 5 that doesn't work on a dairy farm. I think that's a big part of it. 

And I myself, I enjoy working with my mom and dad. We don't always get along, but we don't have to always get along. And I think it's probably even a good thing that we don't always get along because it brings value to have different opinions. We can all be a little bit hard headed and think that our opinion is the right opinion, which oftentimes is not the case. You need other people in your family or other people in your business that are willing to say that your opinion is not the right opinion, I guess, if that makes sense.

[19:24] Emmery: So what I'm hearing is some consistent themes here. And Ezra and I talk a lot about core values because in businesses, each business has a core value, something that the business is centered around that it values most above all else. And it sounds like from what you guys are talking about, one of your core values is really dedication to the success of the other and the happiness of the other. Would you say that's true or what would you say what some of those core values are?

[19:55] Maartje: Yeah, I think that's 100% accurate. I don't know. Piet probably thinks, well, Maartje, what have you done for me? Because I don't do much around the dairy farm, to be honest. I'm at the creamery all the time. But Piet was like the general contractor for the creamery, basically dealing with the plumbers and the electrician and the carpenters. So he's, he's done a lot more for me than I have for him. So I'm sure he probably thinks, yeah, but I definitely see in both my brothers and my parents that they want the creamery to be successful and for the family to be happy. And honestly, it's like the creamery is not just mine, it's the whole family's. And at least I think it's really fun to do what we do and to use the milk from the farm. As you can hear my brother talk, he's very passionate about what he does. So the milk quality is great here. So it's really easy for me to make good dairy products.

[20:52] Ezra: We don't need to go into specifics, but just generalities. I think it's very common for when you got multiple family members working within a business to have family members that maybe have different interests, that they have interests within the business, but maybe their energies also send them in a different direction too, sometimes or, or when you're just young, you're just. Especially in today's culture, you're told you can just sit around till you're 30 and then figure out what you're doing. I mean, how do you guys work with those family members that, that maybe are on the fence or are maybe more committed somewhere else or have responsibility somewhere else, but want to stay involved?

[21:32] Piet: It's a good question. I mean, you really have to be understanding with the situation. Both me and me and my sister, we married early. I knew that I wanted to be on the farm right away. After college, that was, yeah, I didn't. Didn't have any other real interests that I wanted to pursue or really any other job opportunities that I wanted to pursue. So I knew what I wanted. But that's not the same for everybody. And I think it's important to give, whether it's siblings or, my wife doesn't work on the farm at all. And I'm not planning to pressure her to work on the farm either. She's a nurse at the hospital in town and she really enjoys that. So I think it's more important to let your family members do something that they enjoy rather than try to force something that's not going to work. 

And if they do want to work on the farm, I guess I would advise to try to make it work. And if you work at it hard enough, I think you probably can make it work. If all parties involved want to make it work, I think you can make it work.

[22:39] Ezra: Well, and definitely not pressuring anybody to come back and be involved, because there's a fair amount of people that I've talked to that is like, the pressure's on. Come back and make sure that this operation stays going. And that's really not their gifting. So I think, like, especially what you're saying is if it, if it's not something that you're passionate about doing, don't do it, you know, because that's, that's the worst thing for everybody involved.

[23:08] Emmery: I think there's something really unique here, though. Like, there is something that inspired your parents to move across the world. Not just across the country or across the continent, but across the world to give their children an opportunity that they felt like they couldn't give them back where they were. And I think that is something that is unique to agriculture. I mean, I think there's lots of different businesses that are for the sake of the family, but I think agriculture, you know, if you look at people like our great grandpa came over from Norway like five generations ago, so we're fifth generation farmers now. And I can't sit down with great Grandpa Barrett and have a conversation with him about like, why did you come here? But I imagine it would probably be for the same reasons, for the opportunity and the opportunity to raise a family who could pursue happiness and could pursue farming. And so I think that is something that is really unique about you guys and really cool.

[24:13] Piet: I think it sometimes is hard to explain to somebody that's not involved in farming at all because it's from the outside world. It does look a little bit crazy sometimes why you're doing the things that you're doing. But if you're in it and you're doing it, you know why or you feel why it's, yeah. A lot of happy memories growing up on the farm. And even as we're getting older now, still a lot of good memories. And now they're starting with our kids. Yeah. It's just hard to say exactly what it is. But if you're, if you're in it or if you're in that situation, I think you kind of know what that feeling is to grow up on the farm.

[24:52] Maartje: I could share a little story that my mom told me. So in Canada, we lived on a pretty busy highway, and it was between the city and the lakes. And they would be Friday night, my mom and dad would be in the parlor milking, but there'd be like trucks with boats going by going to the lake. And my parents would say to each other, oh, there they go again. These people are so crazy. Every weekend to the lake. And then they kind of looked at each other like they're probably looking at the dairy, thinking, those crazy people. Why are they dairy farmers? Like they're milking Friday night. So, yeah, it's just, I think it's in the blood. And you, like Piet said, you just really can't understand what it's like, I guess, on both sides, because part of me is like, well, the lake actually sounds pretty fun, but when you have a business to run, it's like we have other things to do. Like, we don't have time to go to the lake, but we still, as a family, find time to have a good time. I love the quote that is, find a career or a job or something that you don't need a vacation from. I used to be wanting to travel the world and I still do, but I love being at home. But, yeah, find a place where you don't need a vacation from.

[26:02] Piet: Something I've heard somebody say before is some people, they work to live where others live to work. I think all of us are in the live to work category. I think there's nothing else that I'd rather be doing. And yeah, like Mar just said, if I ever have to go out of town to something, it doesn't really matter what it is, it's always like, ah, I don't really want to go. I'd rather. I'd rather stay home at the farm.

[26:25] Ezra: Yeah, no, we really appreciate your guys's time and honestly, it's inspiring to come up and see something so clean. Thank you guys so much for your time here.

[26:33] Piet: Thank you.

[Straight Talk theme]