Get a taste of farm life at Kane County dairy breakfast
Just a few decades ago, whenever Fox Valley children went for a car ride in any direction from the Fox Valley, they'd pass field after field filled with grazing cows. Their grandparents - maybe even their parents - likely grew up on a farm.
But today, there are fewer than 10 dairy farms in all of Kane County. And life on any kind of farm is a mystery to many of today's suburbanites.
To remedy that, Dale and Linda Drendel will throw open their dairy and grain farm near Hampshire to the public the morning of Saturday, June 18. The Dairy Breakfast and Farm Tour will include a breakfast of pancakes, sausage, applesauce, cheese, milk, coffee and ice cream from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Those attending also can watch cows being milked from 6 to 9 a.m. They also can sit on the seat of a modern tractor, participate in a scavenger hunt and even try milking one of those cows with their bare hands.
From 8 to 11 a.m., WGN Radio agri-journalist Orion Samuelson will autograph copies of his autobiography “You Can't Dream Big Enough” and former WGN hosts Steve King and Johnnie Putman will autograph their book about guitar pioneer Les Paul, “A Little More Les.”
Changing times
As the driver of a tank truck hooked up a hose to the 1,100-gallon refrigerated stainless-steel tank inside Dale Drendel's milking parlor, Drendel said he has hosted the dairy breakfast/tours five previous times - the last in 2013 - because he feels a passion to show people what folks in his ever-shrinking profession do.
“The past dairy breakfasts have drawn 1,200 to 1,500 people of all ages,” Drendel said. “We want to tell our story and correct some of the misconceptions people have about farms and food.”
Drendel, 63, said he grew up on a farm down the road from what is now the 650-acre Lindale Holsteins Farm. He and Linda took over the spread 42 years ago. It holds more than 150 cows - 125 of whom are giving milk at any time - plus several bulls, one guard dog and so many friendly mouse-fighting cats he's not sure what they number. Corn, soybeans, hay and oats grow in the fields.
A lot has changed on the American farm since the days of “Lassie” and “The Real McCoys,” Drendel noted. He leaned down to a 2-foot-tall steel Thermos bottle next to his desk and pulled a thin, 3-inch-long plastic tube out of the liquid nitrogen inside it.
“This is a straw full of bull semen,” he says. “This is how every calf gets started.”
The newborn calf is quickly separated from its mother and placed in a private pen in a greenhouse-like barn nursery, so it can't be accidentally injured by Mom and can't interfere with Mom's milk delivery.
“This calf was born just yesterday,” Drendel said, as we pause next to a pen where a black- and white-spotted animal, as big as the largest dog, stands on wobbly legs, hoping for a meal.
When a female calf - known as a “heifer” until she has the first baby of her own - is about two years old, she will be artificially inseminated and give birth to her own first calf. Only then will she start giving milk twice a day.
The Drendels keep a few bulls with great family trees for breeding and selling to other farmers across the country. But they sell most male calves to some other farmer who will raise them for their meat.
The calf is fed factory-made calf feed plus natural milk from her mother and the other cows - but without direct contact with Mom - until she becomes weaned onto the adult diet of shelled corn, silage (corn plants that have been ground up, stalk and all, fermented and stored in one of Lindale's six silos), dried alfalfa hay and protein supplement.
All of that is grown right here on the Lindale Farm except the protein supplement and the calf feed. And those items are manufactured by a company from soybeans that have been grown on farms like Lindale.
Getting milk
Drendel said he's not sure why so many local farmers have given up the milk business. But one reason must be the demanding hours.
“A cow has to be milked twice a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year,” he notes. “It's a lot more labor intensive than just growing corn and soybeans,” like most Chicago-area farmers now do.
Drendel gets out of bed at 3:30 in the morning. He milks the cows starting at 4 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. As the 2:30 p.m. milking comes near, cows whose udders are swollen with up to 10 gallons of milk start mooing and restlessly waiting to get in line for the milking parlor.
“Cows have leaders, and they have followers,” Drendel said. “They know what order they will go in.” The cows enter the parlor 11 at a time along two narrow concrete platforms, their hooves about 3 feet off the floor. Between the platforms, a farm hand wipes off each cow's four teats with a cleaner and a germ-killing compound, then hooks up each teat to a mechanical milker.
As the four metal grippers squeeze, frothy white liquid runs down a transparent hose into a 10-gallon bottle, then on to that refrigerated tank in the next room. A quick-chiller that looks like a car radiator uses well water to cool the milk closer to the tank's temperature of 38 degrees.
Drendel learned to milk cows by hand when he was 7. But his family already was using mechanical milking machines.
“If I had to milk 125 cattle in one day by hand, these knuckles would be swollen,” he said with a smile.
That also would take more hours per day than there are in a day. Even with the machines milking 11 cows at once, it takes three hours each time to go through the herd.
Fewer farmers
Midwest dairy farmers are being squeezed now by tight finances. The price of milk jumps around in “peaks and valleys,” Drendel said, and right now, it's in a valley.
In 2014, when China was buying much American milk and cheese, milk brought $24 or $25 per 100 pounds. Now Drendel is getting more like $15. That's about the point where dairy farmers are spending as much on fuel and feed as they're getting in.
One promising note is that, in California, which produces more milk than any other state, many farmers are getting rid of their cows and going into the tree-nut business. But giant megafarms may make milk more efficiently. One six-farm complex in Indiana houses an incredible 30,000 cows.
The Drendels belong to a cooperative of farmers, which buys the raw milk from Lindale and takes it to a dairy in Rockford to be processed into bottles of milk under several different brand names. Pointing to the tank truck, Dale said, “In 24 to 48 hours of leaving the cow, it will be on the grocery store shelf.”
Despite the twice-a-day, every-single-day responsibility to his 1,500-pound wards, Drendel said he and Linda are able to go on occasional business trips thanks to the involvement in the farm of his son Jeff, his son-in-law, and three hired hands. After he eventually retires, he said, he's not sure whether Jeff will continue dairy farming. “But he will be involved in agriculture in some way.”
For details on the Drendels and their farm, visit lindale holsteins.com/
If you go
What: Dairy Breakfast and Farm Tour
When: 6 to 11 a.m. Saturday, June 18
Where: Lindale Holsteins Farm, 15N057 Walker Road, Hampshire. From Hampshire, drive two miles west along Route 72, then turn left for a quarter mile along Walker Road.
Donation: $8 adults, $5 children age 5-10, free for children younger than 5
Details: