Small is the New Big

Dave and Kat pause to enjoy the new freestall and robot barn on their Washtenaw County farm with their two year-old daughter Annie.

(Photo courtesy of Framed, by Rachel Kohler)

By Bev Berens

They bought the farm, switched to a grazing dairy, built a house, had a baby, built a new free stall barn set up for robots, and installed robots in a matter of four years. To say that Dave and Kat Mageean are mentally and physically tired for now, is an understatement.

“The mental part is harder than the physical part,” Dave said. “You’ve got to keep busy or you will blow your mind out.”

With the acquisition of Lambarth Farms, LLC of Ann Arbor in January of 2017, the pair had a lot of ground to cover once they took over the farm from Kat’s 10 Michigan Dairy Cattle News parents as fourth generation farmers.

Covering a lot of ground is not new to the couple who met while working in New Zealand---she as a dairy veterinarian, he as a contractor for a dairy AI company. Dave is a native of Ireland with a degree in engineering but a love for cows. Kat is an MSU graduate and practicing dairy veterinarian since 2007.

The robot Installation is the most recent puzzle piece set into place. The herd and their owners settled into the new quarters in August and are enjoying the barn they designed especially for cow comfort. “We have traveled a lot and have ideas from many different farms,” Kat said.

They worked to incorporate some things that worked well on other farms with ideas of their own. “Sometimes marrying ideas together didn’t work like we thought they would, and we did some design on the fly,” Dave added. The barn will house up to 100 cows; milking animals are on one side of the curtained building and steam up cows on the other side. The ceiling is designed for cross ventilation. Milking cows have around the clock access to the robots using a free flow system.

“We are cow motivated people; we try to do everything we can to make the cows comfortable and healthy, so that they can produce the amount of milk that we want them to do,” Kat said.

Dave adds, “It’s not just the amount of Winter 2020