MONTICELLO — In recent months, Aleron Wasserstrass came to the same conclusion a number of Wisconsin dairy farmers have also reached this year: it was time to shut down the family farm.

“There’s not enough money to pay the bank let alone yourself,” Wasserstrass said. 

He wasn’t alone in the decision. His father, Calvin Wasserstrass, made the choice with him. Calvin retired from milking after 35 years. He noted that even though he was almost ready to end his time in the barn, he knew his son wasn’t. 

“It’s like you’re giving up at the worst time,” Aleron said. “Everybody’s struggling. Everything you worked for—you feel like you’re giving everything away.”

The Wasserstrass Dairy Farm began along Church Road in the Town of Washington northwest of Monroe. It was established by Calvin’s father, George, in 1956. Aleron said there was corn and alfalfa grown on about 240 acres of land and 70 cows to milk each day. Calvin married his wife Sandy in 1976 and the couple took over the family farm from his parents. 

“The first 35 years was pretty good,” Calvin said, describing his life as a dairy farmer with his young children and his wife. “You’d get two good years in a row or two bad years in a row, but you would figure one out of three would be a good year. We did all right.”

In the beginning, the barn was in the valley near their home. Then in 2008, they began constructing a barn meant to house roughly 140 cows and built with the use of milking robots in mind. It was completed in 2009 and the two DeLaval machines purchased by the Wasserstrasses were set to work, providing feed to entice the cattle to step into place to be milked by the robots.

That year, milk prices were low, Calvin said. But they ticked up again in 2010, a common fluctuation to farmers, and Calvin said it was a positive year for revenue. Then a drought hit in 2012. Two years later, milk prices increased again but so did crop prices, making feed higher in cost despite their efforts to grow most of the herd’s feed on their own land. 

The decision wasn’t a quick, simple process. Both father and son said they could not pinpoint an exact moment they made the choice to sell the barn, part of the land and most of their cows. It wasn’t a deliberation at the dinner table or a blatant suggestion falling out of one of their mouths on an ordinary day. 

It eventually simply became the only choice.

“When you don’t have money to pay the bills and it just keeps adding up, you got to do something,” Calvin said, equating the situation to any desk worker being asked to work for nothing and wondering aloud how long they would remain with the company if it was asked of them. 

“And even worse, what if he said, ‘hey, in order to keep the lights on, you guys got to chip in $10 a day?’” Calvin said. “That’s what’s happening for people right now.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture milk prices report published Sept. 27, the state milk price for August was $16.20 per hundredweight before hauling costs. While it was an increase from the July price of $15.30, it was still drastically lower than the August 2017 price, which was $2 higher.

Calvin said their farm of about 100 cows wasn’t receiving that much toward the end of its operation. They had been getting $14 per hundredweight, sometimes the “low 15s,” he said.

“Dairy farmers are either, if they’ve got money in the bank, they’re going every month and getting money out of the bank to pay their bills,” Calvin said. “Or they’re going down to the bank and borrowing money in the hope that prices are going to go up.”

He said the situation reminds him of the struggles by rural residents in the late 1920s.

Instead of farming, Calvin has now added hours to his part-time job at Leo Agriculture of Monroe, where ag-based machines are created. He noted that he likes being able to “unplug the alarm clock” after decades of waking around 5:30 a.m. 

Calvin said he and his wife made sure Aleron went to Blackhawk Technical College after graduating high school to learn something aside from farming. Aleron had been working part-time as a diesel mechanic while the farm was in operation. He’s now moved to full-time work.

Despite working outside of the dairy, the place he calls home was in his blood from an early age and has never left.

“I was born and raised there and never left,” Aleron said. “It’s not really a job; it’s just habit. It’s not just a job, it’s a way of life.”

Calvin said they sold the barn and 80 acres to an investor from Monroe in June, renting the space back while they waited to sell most of their dairy cattle and finalize their shut down Sept. 7. He added that while most of the cows were sold, some of the dry ones were kept until their sale could provide a larger profit. 

“If we’d sold our cows a year ago, we’d have gotten twice as much,” Calvin said, echoing his son’s thoughts. “I wouldn’t have minded it so much if we’d have come out of it with a little more money. When you sell your cows for half what they would have went for a year ago; it would have been nice to have a little more to show for it.” 

And while Aleron, now 32, appreciates the steady paycheck and the lack of interruption to his sleep schedule because he no longer has to respond to alarms about a malfunction with the milking robots in the middle of the night, he feels a great loss at not being able to continue the family operation. He even noted that some of the cows they were milking likely had genetic connections to the ones that began with his grandfather.

A true forfeit, not just because of the loss of a business, but a way of life he imagined that he and his future wife could pass down to another generation some day. It was a loss of the family’s “pride and joy,” he noted.

But after talking to friends, who he said he considered better farmers than himself, the decision was made. And he noted that even though the decision seemed inevitable, he refuses to let go of farming completely. He said he intends to grow a limited number of crops and raise beef cattle on family land.