A recent report published by the UW-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Studies reports that both large and small dairy farmers are equally happy in their lifestyles. For those of you who farm – do you agree?
What type of dairy farmer would you expect to be more satisfied with life? One who owns a large confinement farm, milks hundreds of cows, raises hundreds of acres of row crops, hires many employees and invests heavily in field equipment, feed storage and waste management? Or one who milks fewer than 100 cows and feeds them in large part on carefully managed pasture, moving them as often as twice a day, relying mostly on family labor and investing considerably less in equipment and facilities?
It turns out that both answers are right. Farmers who follow either of these divergent paths in modern dairy farming are equally satisfied with the quality of their lives. And they are more satisfied than those who operate smaller confinement farms or less intensive grazing operations, according to a survey of 1,300 Wisconsin dairy farmers by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
Farmers who use different farming systems do differ somewhat in how they evaluate their own satisfaction, but not in the ways some might expect, according to the survey.
Managed graziers place more importance on hard-to-measure dimensions of life, such as opportunities for new challenges and creativity. Large confinement operators also valued such intangibles, but they gave similar weight to measurable achievements such as income, yields and property.
“For both groups, satisfaction is about more than material things. It’s not just about money. That may surprise some people (who) assume that (operators of large farms) are just motivated by material kinds of things. That did not show up in our survey.”
The researchers learned this by providing a list of various activities and experiences — such as earning money, being creative, having outside interests, providing jobs and being a steward of the land — and asking respondents to numerically rate how important they found each to be.