Exclusive Sponsor: Main Street Financial Services Brad Van De Berg and his son, Jason, are shown with their cattle feedlot set-up on their rural Hills farm. Julie Buntjer / The Globe
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Van De Berg farm upgrades with two new barns in 2016 By Julie Buntjer | jbuntjer@dglobe.com HILLS — When Brad Van De Berg purchased an acreage set up for dairying just north of Hills in 2009, it was with plans to clear out the existing outbuildings and begin anew with facilities to feed cattle.
He built two new barns in the summer of 2016 — a 900-head capacity slat barn and a 95-head capacity shipping/receiving and bed pack barn with sick pens. He also added concrete to the existing cattle yards to create feed storage.
“(The farm) is set up so I can handle it,” Van De Berg said. “Financially we started from scratch. All I own here is the acreage, and I wanted to have enough livestock to make a living on the farm.”
From 2009 to 2016, he had a capacity for 350 head in outside lots. Due to continuous issues with manure runoff that ended up on the neighbor’s land, Van De Berg decided to take action and put a roof over his cattle pens.
Today, all of the manure from the operation ends up in a concrete storage pit that gets pumped out twice a year — a little in the spring and emptied in the fall. There is also a 24- by 48-foot manure bay for the pen pack manure.
Van De Berg, who grew up seven miles north of Beaver Creek, farms with his dad, though not in a financial partnership. They share crop equipment and help each other with the workload. In addition to raising cattle, Van De Berg CONTINUED ON PAGE 83
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