HEADWATER HOLSTEINS:
Making It Work By Melissa Hart
everyone says we should do. Others get bigger and we are getting smaller,” Lorelle explained. “Yeah, we do everything wrong,” Eric joked.
We Like Good Cows Nestled in the hills of northern New York, the Shermans are surrounded by several farms and necessary infrastructure for dairy producers. On Nov. 1, 1999, on a rented farm in Delaware County, two twentysomething Holstein enthusiasts embarked on a farming endeavor that has turned into a family operation, producing 80 homebred Excellent cows with five at EX-94. Eric and Lorelle Sherman are familiar members of the New York Holstein Fraternity, and today Headwater Holsteins is situated in the rolling hills of Lewis County surrounded by like-minded producers and an infrastructure to support their passion. Seventeen years ago they moved three hours north and away from family. “We are in the snow and all alone,” Eric said, chuckling. One of the biggest reasons they moved to Lewis County was the number of farms that are 100 cows or fewer - the infrastructure supports dairy farming. They belong to the Lowville Producers Dairy Co-op, which is just a few miles from the farm. Tending approximately 260 acres, they made several improvements to the old tie-stall barn. “We had to improve all of it. It was a lot of jackhammering,” Eric recalled. “We put in a new gutter cleaner, bulk tank and stalls, we did a lot of work to this barn.” While they like the improvements they’ve made, it still takes time to feed the cows. “We just run around the barn all day. We just get done with one lap, we start another.” The barn was built with more than 70 stalls, but now they are down to 63. “We keep losing stalls because every time we jackhammer, we lose two stalls to make the stalls bigger, so we are doing the opposite of what 14 - NYN January-February 2022
In making breeding decisions, he says they are just farmers who like good cows. “You breed one good one, then you want to breed 10 more good ones,” he explained. “Eric likes pedigrees, he likes the learning, the history of the Holstein breed. It’s not a hobby for Eric, it’s a passion in life.” Lorelle added, “He wants to have a nice high-scoring herd of cows, he wants to be in the Holstein Fraternity; he loves talking about nice cows, he loves looking at nice cows, he likes to visit other farms and look at their cows and he helps young people with getting started with their own herd.” Mentoring young people comes by way of 4-H and county involvement. “When we go to our county show we always take an army of kids with us - and they don’t belong to us,” Eric noted with a laugh.
The Shermans had to jackhammer a lot of cement to custom fit the stalls for their cows when they moved to their farm in Lewis County.
