OXFORD, Ohio — It takes a family to keep a dairy farm going - and some ingenuity. Butler County has lost more than 50 dairy farms in the past 30 years, said Steve Bartels, an Ohio State University extension agent.

Yet Tom and Sandy Study’s family dairy continues to prosper.

“The Studys make good use of the resources they have,” Bartels said. “Typical of many small dairies, both Tom and Sandy have at times worked off the farm relying on family members to do the milking and livestock chores. They love cows and dairying. You have to love it to continue to do it.”

Tom Study has dairied all of his life. He and Sandy moved to their present farm in 1987.

They do almost everything themselves. The farm is tidy and picturesque.

“For the most part everything we have here is used equipment,” Tom said. “The (grain) bins, the silos, everything with the exception of some new metal on the roof, has been brought in from other facilities that went out of business.

“We tore them down, brought them here and reestablished them,” he said. “That includes the milk parlor (it’s at least 50 years old), and most of the machinery.”

The Studys raise all their own feed except concentrate. They have 100-acres of corn, 60-acres of beans and the rest in hay.

“We’ve got 105 acres here and I rent about 200 acres,” Tom said.

Tom does most of his own veterinary work, even dehorning the cattle himself. Still, prices for medication have risen, he said.

Annual gross receipts for milk are about $90,000. Currently they have 87 cows and milk 60 but they started with about 35 head.

“We raise all of our replacement heifers,” Tom said. “We kept saving our heifers until we got the numbers up. This is almost a closed herd now. We haven’t brought anything in for the last 15 years except a bull. Now I’m going to raise my own. I also do the artificial insemination."

A good land steward, Tom has put in waterways and built a manure lagoon.

“Plus we do strip farming to keep the land from eroding,” he said. “The contour of the land starts to slope off toward Indian Creek.”

In the early years, the land was poor and Story put sludge down. It paid off.

“This year all I had to use was 35-gallons of 28 nitrogen on the corn. I didn’t need potash or any other fertilizer. I have the soil tested every other year. The rented ground needs fertilizer.”

However, he negotiates a lower cash rent because he rotates the crops and plants hay, which he feeds.

“The farm owners I deal with want to rest the ground,” he said. “They bought the farms and they were run down - people grained them to death. It’s not a big profit, it’s marginal ground but it’s a good thing for me.”

Yet as Sandy said, “It’s just all family; it takes a family to keep it going.”

Tom worked off the farm for 35 years doing second shift jobs and bus driving. All three children, Tonya, Tony and Tom Jr. helped as did the many foster children that shared the Study’s home.

“I ran the farm when he was on the road; he was a bus driver for 16 years,” Sandy said. “I’d get up in the morning and milk and then go to work. My daughter, Tonya, when she’d get home from school, would do the afternoon milking."

Added Tonya, “We did whatever it took to keep things going. They were keeping a roof over my head as well. We were all raised to keep together.”

Juan Moncada came to live with the family at age 9. He graduated and moved away but has since come back to work full-time.

A grandson, Tom III, 13, is home-schooled and helps every afternoon. “I feed; I help do anything that needs to be done,” he said. “I help grandpa in the field. I disk; I spread manure. I love farming. I like being with my grandpa and helping.”

Grandpa plans to keep going as long as his health holds out. Yet he sees dairying getting tougher.

“My feelings are that everybody’s going to have to keep on overproducing to make up for the cash flow. I foresee feed costs up. I see the draw on corn and beans for fuel use is going to drive the cost of feed up. I think when they get the plants going it’s going to be higher costs for food unless it produces more by-products that we can use.”

Study’s Dairy Farm will be on the Butler County Farm/City Tour Oct. 14-15.

This farm news was published in the June 21, 2006 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee.