A36-Lancaster Farming, Saturday,
February 16, 1991
Effort By
(Continued from Page A 1)
Run down
“The place was pretty well run down,” said
Stees. ‘ ‘The lawn was covered with, you name it,
refrigerators, trash, all sorts of garbage. I built a
pond, cleaned up around the place, knocked out
the fence rows, and buried all the trash.”
For the next five years, Stees worked steadily
on improving the property, including replacing
the floor in the house (using silo wood), planting
pine trees as buffer zones and windbreaks, and
repairing the bam.
“When I first came into the bam, I was really
amazed,” he said. “I knew I had to do some
thing, because the bam was under four feet of
manure and you couldn’t tell where the stanch-
ions were.”
The concrete stalls were in near shambles,
which Stees quickly worked to clean and rebuild.
Every year, according to Stees, he was involved
in a new, large project that aimed to take care of
the problems and rebuild the farm.
Work on soil
But it was the work on the land that first took
the conservation farmer’s attention.
“The first thing we did was put in the grass
land waterways and contour strips,’ he said.
From the day be began with the district in 1967,
he has been working to repair the land under their
auspices.
Stees said that some of the worst soil had a pH
of 4.2. The best soil had a pH of 5.0. In the first
year of planting crops, the farmer said he
harvested 42 bushels of com per acre. In the
drought year of 1988, Stees said the harvest was
better than the first year—and now, Stees regu
larly harvests about 140-150 bushels of com per
acre.
Stees keeps a “running track record” of
improving the soil conditions and the property.
Major improvement
“I don’t think there’s been a year when I
didn’t put some type of major, major improve
ment in the property,” he said. “From grassland
waterways to a diversion to a building. This year
I will be putting in a buffer zone of pine trees.”
In addition, he recently installed a manure
holding tank, which converts manure into a slur
ry. He uses spreading calibrations to apply the
right amount of manure to the soil. The farmer
also conducts regular soil and manure tests to
ensure the soil is receiving the correct nutrients.
In the beginning, it was difficult to farm,
because Stees had no money and took a long time
in obtaining the equipment and building the herd.
For the first five years, he worked as a herdsman
at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton
Center, taking what free time he had to repair the
farm. In 1969, he married, and shortly after
moved permanently into the farm.
Stees started out with some inexpensive
calves, which he wasn’t happy about, since they
couldn’t produce and he couldn’t breed them.
After he sold them, he bought 10 registered
cows. One of the cows provided the foundation
of the herd, birthing seven heifers in a 12-year
span.
Milks 50
Stees milks 50 head of registered Holsteins
with 30 replacement heifers and calves. He’s
raising 15 heifers this year. He grows most of his
own feed, but he purchases 25-30 tons of hay per
year.
The dairy operation is a comfort stall with a
milking pipeline. A member of the Pennsylvania
Dairy Herd Improvement Association (DHIA)
since 1977, Stees thinks that the “bottom line”
rules in his management decisions.
“I’m not a person that pushes high produc
tion,” he said. “I’m more concerned about feed
costs and the bottom line. That’s my baby. A lot
of people demand the production and high milk
and they want records and everything else. I’d
rather have the cows work for me, not me work
for the cows.”
Recently, his son Clinton worked on erosion
control as part of a 4th grade science project. The
project won first place in the school and second
in the county and pinpointed a Parkesburg deve-.
lopment that was causing erosion problems. The
developer was subsequently fined for causing
erosion problems at the development site.
(Turn to Pag» A 37)
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