Glenda Pereira: 00:00
After notifications, there’s no way you can’t hear that.
Colt Knight: 00:04
Glenda, we talked about this. I have to turn the volume on so I can hear the clicks to know when we’re gonna talk before I can turn the volume off. There’s two different “don’t” things. Come on.
Glenda Pereira: 00:15
Colt’s a recent iPhone user.
Patricia Henderson: 00:19
New technology.
Glenda Pereira: 00:20
Yes. The person who is the most advanced in video technology and audio technology. The notifications for emails are different than the sound. That is true. Never mind. Never mind.
Glenda Pereira: 00:40
They’re different, though. You can turn off your email notifications, but I hope you’re not keeping any of this because it’s not anything.
Colt Knight: 00:52
Germane to the conversation. Yes. You heard us. The quick track. I cannot bend to this.
Glenda Pereira: 00:59
Colt’s gonna remove this. So welcome to the Maine Farmcast.
Colt Knight: 01:04
I don’t feel very welcome.
Glenda Pereira: 01:07
Well, you heard the segment on me teaching Colt about Apple products and stuff. We don’t endorse Apple, by the way. I just wanted to say that I’m joined today by my cohost, Colt Knight. Does that feel welcoming, Colt?
Colt Knight: 01:25
No. It’s pretty, pretty bland.
Glenda Pereira: 01:28
Oh, come on. I’m excited. I’m peppy. I’m not eating in your podcast studio.
Colt Knight: 01:33
Not now.
Glenda Pereira: 01:35
I stepped out and ate before I came. Okay. So I’m getting better at rule-following in the podcast studio. But today, we have a special and first-time guest, Patricia Henderson. Patricia, who are you?
Glenda Pereira: 01:53
Would you let the listeners know what your title is and what you do?
Patricia Henderson: 01:57
Yeah. So I am Patricia Henderson. I’m the farm superintendent at the JF Witter Research and Teaching Center. We are the large animal research facility within the Maine Agriculture Forestry Experiment Station. So we’re our own separate thing outside of the college, but we support the college for teaching and research.
Glenda Pereira: 02:17
Yeah. And I think you’re one of our first. So the Maine Ag and Forest Experiment Station, the acronym is MAFES. Yes. And I think you’re one of our first MAFES folks.
Glenda Pereira: 02:32
We’ve had professors on who have MAFES appointments, but for folks who have maybe not heard of this term, the University of Maine has multiple research stations throughout the state. And the Witter Center, which is right here on the Orono campus. Is that Old Town? Old Town. Old Town is one of them. Then we have other facilities throughout the state.
Glenda Pereira: 02:54
So we have, like, Highmoor Farm down in Monmouth, and then Aroostook County, Aroostook Farm. I don’t know what the experiment station is called.
Colt Knight: 03:04
Highmoor.
Patricia Henderson: 03:05
And Aroostook Farms and Blueberry Hill.
Colt Knight: 03:08
Yeah. Blueberry Hill.
Glenda Pereira: 03:09
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Colt Knight: 03:09
I think there’s five total experiment stations.
Patricia Henderson: 03:11
Mm-hmm.
Glenda Pereira: 03:12
And within those experiment stations, the goal is to, you know, potentially conduct research or applied research that is relevant to the Maine agricultural systems. Yeah. Does that about sum it up? Yeah.
Colt Knight: 03:33
And this is where Glenda starts talking in sign language that none of us know how to interpret.
Glenda Pereira: 03:38
Tell me more.
Patricia Henderson: 03:40
Tell me more about that. So, like, at Witter, we support the college with some teaching and research. So we have a couple faculty members that are doing active research projects at the farm. We currently have some sheep there in quarantine that Juan Romero is gonna be using for a contaminated study later this year, where they will go to a different site to do their study. But right now, the students get some experience doing sheep chores and kind of handling them and learning that and stuff.
Patricia Henderson: 04:14
And he’s got several grad students and undergrads that work for him. And then we have Dr. Causey, who manages the equine program, essentially, at the farm. So we have eight Standardbred horses there, and they get used in a variety of classes. We offer an equine studies minor. So there are several classes that meet at the farm, a lot of horse classes.
Patricia Henderson: 04:39
So there’ll be, I don’t know, I think there’s, like, 137 students in the equine program between all the classes. Some of them overlap, but there’ll be multiple sections and labs and stuff that get to work with the horses and do things. And then on the dairy side, we have a new faculty member, Jessica Motta, who does dairy research. She teaches the dairy tech class.
Patricia Henderson: 05:06
So that’s been a lot of fun. So this will be her third semester with us. So she’s got a couple projects going on. We’ve got about 20 heifers, or will be 20 heifers next week, enrolled in a reproduction project for her, which is really cool. So, yeah, we’re kind of looking forward to how all that’s gonna go.
Glenda Pereira: 05:26
Yeah. And you not only support so, so the Witter dairy is probably what folks are most familiar with here on campus, but the Rogers Farm is also part of It’s separate now. It’s separate now. Okay. Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 05:41
But you still supervise both of those locations.
Patricia Henderson: 05:44
No. So we hired a new superintendent who does the
Glenda Pereira: 05:47
Oh.
Patricia Henderson: 05:47
Rogers Farm. Yeah. So Tom Davis, who’s actually a former dairy farmer, he now manages the crops research over at Rogers. Nice. So he’ll support me a little bit and stuff, and we kind of help each other back and forth with equipment and stuff.
Patricia Henderson: 06:02
But yeah. So he’s full time over there now, which has been pretty cool.
Glenda Pereira: 06:06
Awesome. Well, great. Yeah. Thanks for kind of that snapshot of what the Witter Center entails. And so but you’re not new to the University of Maine because you were first a student here.
Glenda Pereira: 06:20
Do you wanna just talk about
Colt Knight: 06:22
I wanna know more about Patricia.
Glenda Pereira: 06:25
Yeah. She’s gonna tell us.
Colt Knight: 06:27
So where are you from, Patricia?
Patricia Henderson: 06:29
I am from Blaine, Maine, which is a little tiny town way up in Aroostook County. It’s like 20 minutes outside of Presque Isle. So, yeah, I don’t know if you know where Mars Hill Mountain is, but when you’re driving up Route 1 and heading all the way up to the County, my parents’ farm is right down on the east side of the mountain.
Colt Knight: 06:47
And did you grow up in an ag background?
Glenda Pereira: 06:51
Yes.
Colt Knight: 06:51
You kinda had to up in that part of the world, I’m assuming.
Patricia Henderson: 06:54
Yeah. I was pretty much working since I could stand on my feet. So my parents have a beef farm. They also raise pigs and sheep. We did a little bit of everything when I was a kid.
Patricia Henderson: 07:08
I don’t know if it was on purpose or not, but we had, you know, goats and chickens. And at one point, we had geese. I don’t know why we had geese.
Colt Knight: 07:19
Oh, I’ve got you beat there. We were more of a petting zoo than a family farm. We’ve had chinchillas, coatimundis.
Patricia Henderson: 07:29
What is that?
Colt Knight: 07:30
Coatimundi? Yeah. It’s like a South American raccoon.
Glenda Pereira: 07:35
You didn’t listen to our episode, Patricia. Shame on you. I’m just kidding, guys.
Patricia Henderson: 07:39
I do listen to some of them, but I haven’t listened to them all.
Glenda Pereira: 07:41
Because you mentioned that in this one with your colleague from Ohio State. It’s like a koala.
Colt Knight: 07:48
No.
Glenda Pereira: 07:50
Like a raccoon koala is what I imagine?
Colt Knight: 07:51
Like it’s a raccoon, and it’s more of a slender raccoon. It’s got the ringed tail. Same colors. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 08:02
They’re very curious, personable little critters.
Patricia Henderson: 08:04
Did it live in your house? Like a pet?
Colt Knight: 08:06
Yeah. Until he got older, then he got mean, and then he had to go live outside.
Patricia Henderson: 08:10
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 08:11
And then he got real mean, and then he had to go live somewhere else. I still have scars
Patricia Henderson: 08:17
Oh my.
Colt Knight: 08:18
from him. But, yeah, I know
Patricia Henderson: 08:20
all about
Colt Knight: 08:20
the eclectic mix of animals growing up.
Patricia Henderson: 08:25
Yeah. Yeah. And then, of course, like, we did 4-H and stuff. So I showed beef cows and kinda went all over the place, went down to West Virginia to the big jackpot show down there to buy heifers every year. I made friends.
Patricia Henderson: 08:40
I was on the Maine 4-H beef team. We would travel down to Eastern States. I also showed pigs at all the local fairs. Well, I shouldn’t say all the local fairs. There’s, like, two in the County. And then, you know, I would help out with, like, the dairy shows and stuff at Eastern States, and yeah.
Patricia Henderson: 09:02
Oh, I also did FFA. That was my first introduction at Witter, actually, was for the state FFA convention in, like, 2007.
Colt Knight: 09:12
Still the only active FFA is up in Aroostook, I believe.
Patricia Henderson: 09:16
I think they have more now.
Colt Knight: 09:17
Do they? That’s good.
Patricia Henderson: 09:18
They started a couple new chapters. Yep. Because I helped out with their state convention last year.
Colt Knight: 09:24
That’s good.
Glenda Pereira: 09:25
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 09:30
And then you drank up all the chocolate milk. Yes.
Patricia Henderson: 09:34
I’m really sad that Houlton Farms went out of business. Yeah. It’s very disappointing.
Colt Knight: 09:39
I remember one time I was in Aroostook County and Patricia just happened to call me about something unrelated. And I said, oh, I’m up in your neck of the woods. And she’s like, you have got to go get the chocolate milk. Yes. And so I had to go find it.
Colt Knight: 09:54
And she said, oh, you just get it anywhere. Anyway.
Glenda Pereira: 09:56
And the
Colt Knight: 09:57
first place I went didn’t have it.
Patricia Henderson: 10:00
Okay. Well, almost all the stores in Aroostook County.
Colt Knight: 10:04
Ended up going to two or three different places before I found it.
Glenda Pereira: 10:07
Was it good? Did it live up to a trip?
Colt Knight: 10:09
It was good. I don’t know if it’s the best chocolate milk in the entire…
Patricia Henderson: 10:15
We did a blind taste test and everybody agreed it is.
Colt Knight: 10:18
Okay.
Patricia Henderson: 10:18
Was it chalky? No. It’s, like, smooth and creamy. It’s perfect.
Glenda Pereira: 10:26
It was a little chalky.
Colt Knight: 10:32
But anyway, so your first introduction to Witter was through the FFA.
Glenda Pereira: 10:37
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 10:37
So you came down for that. And then how did you end up here at the University of Maine?
Patricia Henderson: 10:43
Well, pretty much since I could walk, I was like, I’m gonna be a large animal vet, and that’s all I ever wanted to do. And so I only applied
Glenda Pereira: 10:52
Welcome to the throngs of people, yeah, on our podcast that had the same exact vision and path to where they are today.
Colt Knight: 11:03
I think we’ve only ever had two folks on here that actually went to vet school.
Glenda Pereira: 11:08
Causey and Hill? Mm-hmm.
Colt Knight: 11:10
Yeah. I guess Jessica.
Glenda Pereira: 11:12
Jessica went to vet school, too. Jessica, yeah. Yeah.
Patricia Henderson: 11:18
Yeah. I didn’t really have any other dreams in high school. I was just like, I am gonna be like Dr. Hotham, and I’m gonna go to vet school. And UMaine was the only one that had a pre-vet program, so I just applied and came to school here.
Colt Knight: 11:31
Mosied right on down here.
Patricia Henderson: 11:33
Yep. And then I took organic chemistry, and I was like, you know, vet school is not for me. And yeah. So then I was like, what am I gonna do with an animal science degree? And I found myself at the trade show in Augusta with a handful of resumes.
Patricia Henderson: 11:50
And I walked up to a bunch of feed companies and was like, here’s my resume. And then a week later, they called me. So I took a job as a dairy consultant after school.
Colt Knight: 11:59
I think when I first got to Maine, you had just started with FCI, or had you been there for a little bit?
Patricia Henderson: 12:07
What year did you
Colt Knight: 12:08
2017. It was January 2000 the trade show was like my first official thing that I’ve that I did as an extension.
Patricia Henderson: 12:16
Yeah. So I started with FCI in, like, May 2017.
Colt Knight: 12:20
Okay.
Glenda Pereira: 12:20
Yeah.
Patricia Henderson: 12:24
What was that like? It was good. It was definitely a learning experience for me because, I don’t know, I guess I thought I knew it all, and clearly, I did not. And so I spent a lot of time down in Vermont training, you know, a bunch of different farms down there, and just I didn’t really like nutrition when I took it in school, and I was like, this is gonna be terrible. And they’re like, oh, it’s all in the feed program on your computer.
Patricia Henderson: 12:49
Don’t worry. I’m like, okay. Great. And so I, yeah. I just kinda went in there thinking I knew it all, and I didn’t.
Patricia Henderson: 12:58
It was a really good learning experience, though. But I got to meet a lot of people, made a lot of connections. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. I really, really enjoyed it.
Patricia Henderson: 13:09
I think during COVID, it got really hard because everybody closed their doors, and they were like, we don’t want any visitors. Nobody’s, you know? Mm-hmm. And so it just got really hard as a sales consultant when you’re trying to sell grain. You’re like, hey.
Patricia Henderson: 13:24
When can I stop by? And they’re like, no. My grandmother’s sick. Don’t come to the farm. You know?
Patricia Henderson: 13:28
And after, like, I don’t know, two months of that, I’m like, what am I even doing? I’m just driving around wasting time. So, yeah. I just it was probably, like, six months where I was just, like, banging my head off the wall, just wasting time. And finally, I was like, you know what?
Patricia Henderson: 13:46
I’m gonna go and just apply to a farm. So I called my neighbors. I was like, hey. Can I come breed cows or something? And they were like, absolutely.
Patricia Henderson: 13:56
So I went and worked at Thomas Farms for, I don’t know, maybe a year or so. And that was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that. I loved working with Peter. I learned a lot there.
Patricia Henderson: 14:09
They milked, like, 500 cows, maybe 600.
Colt Knight: 14:14
And they’re like my neighbors.
Glenda Pereira: 14:15
Yeah. Yep.
Colt Knight: 14:18
My wife grooms their dogs.
Patricia Henderson: 14:20
Oh, really? Their dogs are a little crazy.
Colt Knight: 14:24
Mm-hmm. And then then we snatched you away.
Patricia Henderson: 14:30
Yeah. Then Josh called me and was like, hey. I want you to apply for the livestock job. And I said, okay.
Colt Knight: 14:36
So you started as the livestock herdsman at the University of Maine at Witter Center. Yep. And then you transitioned into your position now.
Patricia Henderson: 14:47
As a superintendent. Yep. And
Colt Knight: 14:49
so that’s why Glenda and I wanted to have you on the podcast is because there’s been a lot of changes at Witter Center. And we figured that folks would like to know, you know, what’s happened out there and kinda so when you came to the University of Maine, the dairy program was kinda like on the decline. And then through the pandemic and everything, it was very stagnant and nothing was much going on out there with the dairy program. But here recently, you guys have just done a ton of work out there, and there’s a lot of exciting things. So we wanted to get your perspective on, you know, where the farm was and how it’s transitioning into the modern age.
Patricia Henderson: 15:31
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Significant changes. So when I first started, we were milking in the tie stall, and it was just after COVID.
Patricia Henderson: 15:42
So we were barely having classes at the farm again. You know, one person gets sick and suddenly we can’t meet. It was a whole thing.
Colt Knight: 15:48
We didn’t even know if we were going to be able to milk cows
Colt Knight: 15:51
when the COVID guidelines came out. We were freaking out a little bit because we rely so heavily on student labor to get the farm work done. We didn’t know if they were even gonna allow us to have students out there.
Patricia Henderson: 16:04
Yeah. For sure. It was definitely a struggle bus because we had to, like, kind of submit, you know, all the size of your buildings and stuff, and everybody had to wear masks, and only two kids per milking shift. And that was a whole thing. It was a little scary, really.
Patricia Henderson: 16:18
But, but yeah, we managed through. It was not pretty. We got all the cows bred back finally after, you know, when there’s breeding issues and there’s a lapse in management, just, you know, it takes a long time to build the herd back up. And we had to cull a lot of animals because of, you know, some staph aureus going around. So that was a real bummer.
Patricia Henderson: 16:47
But we got a new dean of the college, and she was like, we’re gonna invest in agriculture, and the dairy industry is important to Maine. And so we started making a plan because the dairy barn was in desperate need of repair. The roof was falling in. It was moldy. It was bad.
Patricia Henderson: 17:05
So, yeah, several options for what are we gonna do, how are we gonna do it, timeline. First, we were gonna just build a parlor. We were gonna put all the cows in the livestock barn. We were gonna renovate this, renovate that. Finally, after all the quotes came in and stuff, it was like, it just makes sense to build a new facility.
Patricia Henderson: 17:25
And with robots being in the future, very popular, pretty much everywhere outside of Maine, it just made sense. There’s already two robot farms in the state. Well, only one actually at the time we decided to put in a robot.
Colt Knight: 17:40
Two have come online
Patricia Henderson: 17:41
Yes.
Colt Knight: 17:42
prior to ours coming online. Yeah. So we’re the third.
Patricia Henderson: 17:45
Yes. Yeah. We were gonna be the second, but now we’re the third. Took us a long time to get here. But yeah.
Patricia Henderson: 17:52
So about $3,200,000 for the whole project altogether. So we’re still in phase two of the project, which is the teardown of the old barns. So at the university, in order to build new barns, you have to tear down old barns. So that was kind of the whole point getting started is that the dairy tie stall barn needed to go.
Glenda Pereira: 18:13
So it was no longer safe. So right, when you’re mentioning that. Yeah. Because if you think about this, so this is not this is a teaching facility, and there is research that happens there.
Glenda Pereira: 18:26
But, mm-hmm, like you mentioned, there are students at this facility.
Patricia Henderson: 18:30
Yes. Every day, all the time. Seven days a week.
Glenda Pereira: 18:34
And so the safety aspect is really crucial when you have so many students day in and day out in this space. So the old tie stall was no longer safe to be operable is what you’re alluding to. Yeah. Yeah. That’s that’s a good
Patricia Henderson: 18:52
way to put it.
Colt Knight: 18:54
If you’ve been at Witter in the last 10, 15 years, you would have seen some ugly fences and some ratty machine sheds and barns around there. And all those older barns are being torn down now. Mm-hmm. Well, they’re flattened, yeah, at the moment, but we’re still cleaning up a little bit.
Colt Knight: 19:13
But they’re gone. There’s a brand new robot milking barn.
Glenda Pereira: 19:17
The
Colt Knight: 19:19
fences are being renovated right now. So the fences are all starting to perk up a little bit, to look a little nicer.
Glenda Pereira: 19:26
Yeah, it’s gonna have
Patricia Henderson: 19:26
a whole facelift. It looks good.
Colt Knight: 19:28
And your previous superintendent did a lot of work to haul out a lot of the old scrap metal and trash. Yep. So the farm is starting to perk up these days. When you go out there, you’re like, wow, this looks nice.
Patricia Henderson: 19:43
Yeah. Yeah. It’s definitely a good feeling because five years ago was not such a good feeling.
Colt Knight: 19:49
And that’s not unique to Maine. I mean, every land grant university’s farm all has the same issues. Usually, most farms, there’s like 30 tons of government surplus laying around just in
Glenda Pereira: 20:02
case. Yeah.
Patricia Henderson: 20:06
Yeah. We got rid of our last government surplus loader probably two years ago.
Colt Knight: 20:12
Those things don’t come around like they used to.
Patricia Henderson: 20:14
No. No. Nope. But that thing died right where it was sitting. It was time.
Patricia Henderson: 20:22
But, yeah, there was also some equipment grants written sometime in the meantime of us planning for this new robot facility. So we did get several new pieces of equipment, which has been a game changer for getting daily operations done, feeding cows and stuff. We got a new skid steer. We got a new feed tractor. We got a new farm truck that was necessary.
Patricia Henderson: 20:47
So yeah.
Colt Knight: 20:49
Things are things are looking up at Witter.
Glenda Pereira: 20:52
Yeah. And so some of the vision for this was so you mentioned how you went through iterations of it, but you said that you were we were gonna be the second, but then the third. And so projects at a university just take longer. Yeah. You know?
Glenda Pereira: 21:11
And that’s why the other dairy farm that became the second one that had robots in the state had a different timeline because projects, you know, there’s more layers to the onion at a university than there are.
Colt Knight: 21:29
Construction is always three times the cost of what it would cost you on a farm.
Patricia Henderson: 21:33
Yeah. Right.
Colt Knight: 21:33
And the levels of bureaucracy and things that we have to get signed off on. Nothing moves quickly.
Glenda Pereira: 21:39
And there’s considerations too. So you mentioned this, but the barn needed to be designed with modifications in mind after the fact. Right? So if we do want to do research in there, it’s already in a flow that can accommodate that even if it’s not happening right now. Right.
Glenda Pereira: 22:00
And when you put concrete down, you don’t just, you know, go back in, dig some parts out and, you know, modify. Space is definitely a limitation. And so will you talk to us just briefly about what your experience was just helping to design and build a university farm and really a dairy barn?
Colt Knight: 22:23
And before you do that, I gotta tell the story because it’s funny. We had to move the location of where we wanted to put the barn. Yeah. Because when they went to put the foundation in, they started digging up the ground and they find out, oh, when the university demolished asbestos-filled buildings in the past, they landfilled them at the teaching farm. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 22:46
And we couldn’t build a new barn on top of a landfill. So we had to move the barn to the parking lot.
Patricia Henderson: 22:56
Yeah. That was a funny story in itself. So, originally, right next to the manure pit was, like, the ideal location. It just made sense. I was so excited.
Patricia Henderson: 23:05
We can finally, like, scrape straight out the barn to the manure pit. So they start doing some, you know, all the Dig Safe permits and testing the soils. And then they’re like, oh, yeah. This was the site of the old methane digesters. And we buried a bunch of asbestos here.
Patricia Henderson: 23:21
So unsuitable soils. So back to the drawing map we went. And anyway. So we had to put it in the parking lot out front of the horse barn. But, again, space was limited because we couldn’t go too far out into the road. We still had to have access on both sides.
Patricia Henderson: 23:39
So the barn was, I couldn’t literally couldn’t get an extra square inch out of it. But that’s okay. We’re managing. We had to put a lot of thought into, like, the future of the farm when building this because it wasn’t just gonna be, we wanna milk cows in a robot barn. It was, how can we teach and do research in this barn moving forward?
Patricia Henderson: 23:59
Because likely we’re not gonna get another big investment like this in the farm for a long time. So we built an extra feed alley, essentially, or I don’t know if it’s a feed alley. But, basically, it’s about 14 feet wider than your traditional three-row barn on purpose so that we could have one-way gates on either end, and we could do a lactation trial. So, basically, cows that are on trial for a certain diet would only have access to one side of the headlocks, and then control cows or cows on different diets could only go on the other side through a one like a gate that would, you know, from their collar or their ear tag. But we wanted to make sure that we were never limiting water space or the robot.
Patricia Henderson: 24:49
So we kinda had to design it in a funky way so that the cows always had free-flow access to the robot and always had availability to water, and we were never, like, trapping cows in alleys too long or holding them in certain places or making it too inconvenient to walk around that boss cow in the end of the barn. So there’s a lot of thought and design into where the robot would go, how the feed alley was gonna be, how wide we wanted those gates to be and stuff. So whenever we do go on a lactation trial, we’ll see how that design worked out. I hope that it’s gonna be good in the future, but we put a lot of thought and time and effort into that. Mm-hmm.
Glenda Pereira: 25:27
Yeah. Yeah. Which is why, like I mentioned, it took a little bit longer because it wasn’t just, you know, we wanna maximize cow comfort and milk cows. There’s a lot of other things that this farm gets used for. And so kind of talk to us about you were an undergrad here and now you’re in this role where you kind of saw this barn come to life.
Glenda Pereira: 25:59
What do you or what have you heard students say about how this barn is now really relevant? Even maybe the dairy industry in Maine as well, mentioning how they feel like this is really a relevant space. It’s, you know, tie stalls are great. And for research purposes, they are optimal because you need individual feed intakes, but they can be restrictive in other aspects as well. So this, like you mentioned, was really the right decision.
Glenda Pereira: 26:29
And then it’s gonna be the the the barn that stays here for a while.
Patricia Henderson: 26:35
Right.
Glenda Pereira: 26:35
It was a big investment.
Patricia Henderson: 26:36
Yeah. I think another big thing was that this is gonna kind of mimic a small dairy farm in Maine. Right? Like, there’s a lot of small tie stall barns in Maine. And so kind of one of the goals was to be able to show that we could have labor savings, you know, because, like, the tie stall barn was incredibly labor intensive, which, by the way, this was my first Christmas not milking cows in a tie stall barn.
Patricia Henderson: 27:04
I was so excited about that. But yeah. So just, like, being able to put the cows in there and let the cows be cows and then be able to teach the students how to manage the cows in their own setting. Because before, we kind of controlled their setting. Right?
Patricia Henderson: 27:23
Like, we walked them in and out. They were always on halters and stuff. So this really gives us a different teaching style and opportunity to show the students what a real farm is like if they were to step into a robot farm in Vermont or something. Like, oh, I’m, you know, I had a kid that was like, I really wanna get a herdsperson job in New York. Well, now this is gonna give her an opportunity to be around cows that maybe actually have a flight zone, and they’re not, like, trying to put a halter on them and drag them out and stuff.
Patricia Henderson: 27:54
Like, some of our cows, of course, are halter broke. You know, that’s just the reality of a teaching farm. But it’s just so much more applicable to what’s going on in the industry now. Yeah. It’s very cool.
Patricia Henderson: 28:05
It’s exciting for me to show that to students.
Glenda Pereira: 28:09
Yeah. And so what is your vision, or what do you foresee, the direction of Witter in the coming years, and what kind of is exciting or coming down the pike? And I know, you know, this is the first it’s only been one year where the students the the the dairy cow program, UMAD COWS program, has undergone, you know, being in the new robot barn. But there’s a lot of exciting things that are coming our way, and there’s just more adapting. And like you said, adapting the training and the educational program currently to integrate more data and more sort of automated system and technology into the training and educational setting.
Glenda Pereira: 29:06
Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Patricia Henderson: 29:07
So that’s that was kinda the biggest, like, feedback that we got when we were going to the robot barn. Now what are the students gonna do? Because the students always did the milking. And honestly, we’re still kind of trying to figure that out every semester. We’re like, okay.
Patricia Henderson: 29:20
We like this, but we didn’t like this. And so, of course, training students is much like training cows. Like, they just they don’t know until they get practice out there. You know? Like, they’re unfamiliar.
Patricia Henderson: 29:33
They’re nervous. Everything’s new. And so the class gets a lot more time in the classroom, and they’re gonna get a lot more data analysis and understanding that side of it a little bit more versus, like, being in the barn and milking the cows. Because before, they learned some good work ethic. They know how to, you know, break the beds and do all of that.
Patricia Henderson: 29:58
But now they’re gonna get to see it from a little bit different perspective. We still have some student employees that do some of the labor stuff, you know, breaking the beds, liming the beds, that kind of thing. But we’ve just changed our teaching approach. And so every semester, I feel like we get a little bit better at it, and we’re learning how to make it a better experience for the students.
Glenda Pereira: 30:20
Yeah. But it’s definitely attraction for the students in our program here to just come learn how to manage within a robotic milking system. Yeah. Yep. Well, Colt, anything else you wanted to ask or get to know about Patricia?
Colt Knight: 30:36
I feel like I know Patricia so well right now. We’ve gone over the chocolate milk. We’ve gone over the livestock.
Glenda Pereira: 30:43
Well, it was a big that was a big talking point for Colt. You know,
Colt Knight: 30:47
it’s I take my chocolate milk serious. I know Patricia takes her chocolate
Patricia Henderson: 30:51
milk serious. Yes.
Colt Knight: 30:53
Glenda is the actual dairy specialist and she’s the only one here that acts like she doesn’t care about chocolate milk.
Glenda Pereira: 30:58
I love chocolate milk.
Colt Knight: 31:00
What’s your favorite chocolate milk?
Glenda Pereira: 31:02
There’s this company. It’s not even fancy. There’s this company on the it’s on the I-29 corridor in Minnesota and South Dakota. It’s called, I wanna say it’s Cass or Klas. I can’t remember now.
Glenda Pereira: 31:22
I can’t, but I can see the label. And it was just the perfect milk. It wasn’t chalky, and it was smooth like Patricia was mentioning the Houlton Farms chocolate milk was. And it was basically like drinking chocolate, and it’s just so delicious. So I really like that one.
Glenda Pereira: 31:40
But funny enough, I didn’t grow up drinking chocolate milk because Portuguese people don’t drink chocolate milk. What? So flavored milk is very much, I hate to say it, an American thing.
Colt Knight: 31:52
Like when I was a kid in elementary school, that was the only thing they offered you to drink was milk. Yeah. And you got two choices. It came in like little four-ounce cartons. Yep.
Colt Knight: 32:03
It might have been six-ounce. I don’t remember. They’re little, little bitty cardboard cartons. You got the 2% white milk or you got the the the fat-free chocolate milk. And you want to talk about chalky?
Patricia Henderson: 32:18
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 32:19
I mean, just the cardboard taste alone is gonna
Glenda Pereira: 32:21
kill you
Colt Knight: 32:22
on that. And then I remember about fifth or sixth grade, they brought us all together in class for an assembly, and they made this big announcement. We were no longer gonna serve milk in a carton. We were gonna get bags.
Patricia Henderson: 32:40
What?
Colt Knight: 32:41
They were like little six-inch square plastic bags of milk.
Glenda Pereira: 32:47
That’s also very much a Midwest thing. And milk comes in bags.
Colt Knight: 32:51
You got a straw
Glenda Pereira: 32:52
with, like,
Colt Knight: 32:52
like a Capri Sun. They had to have this assembly to teach us how to use them. Right? Because you can imagine, like, elementary school kids, if you squeeze the milk and stab it, but you don’t put your thumb over the end of the straw, it just squeezes the milk out. Or if you stab it too hard, you go through both sides of the bag, and then you gotta go get another straw.
Colt Knight: 33:08
Anyway, it was supposed to be, like, better for the environment and less wasteful, and milk was supposed to taste better and this and that. And I gotta be honest, it probably did taste better than the cartons. But I can remember the first time they ran out of the bag milk and I went back to the cartons. Every kid went straight for the cartons and we never looked back. We did not like the bag milk at all.
Colt Knight: 33:35
So it only lasted probably less than a school year, the bag milk.
Patricia Henderson: 33:40
Yeah. It just sounds wrong.
Glenda Pereira: 33:43
Bag milk is very much a thing, though.
Patricia Henderson: 33:45
That’s so weird.
Glenda Pereira: 33:46
Only ever had
Colt Knight: 33:47
milk in school.
Glenda Pereira: 33:47
Started offering whole milk, 2% milk, or this fat-free chocolate milk. But when you were a kid, it was always really weird. It’s like, why does chocolate milk have less calories than the white milk?
Patricia Henderson: 34:01
Yeah. Yeah. I never really thought about that. Speaking of milk, have you tried the marshmallow chocolate milk that Oakhurst does?
Colt Knight: 34:09
Haven’t tried that one yet. I’m gonna have to because I really like the Oakhurst chocolate
Glenda Pereira: 34:13
milk.
Patricia Henderson: 34:13
It’s so good. It’s seasonal. So I don’t know if they I don’t know how much longer they’re gonna have it, but it’s so good.
Colt Knight: 34:19
And who does the mud season milk? That’s not Oakhurst, is it? I think
Patricia Henderson: 34:23
that’s, like, True Moo or something. No. I think it’s Oakhurst.
Colt Knight: 34:27
Is it Oakhurst?
Glenda Pereira: 34:28
Mud season, maybe? Yeah.
Colt Knight: 34:29
I like that one too.
Glenda Pereira: 34:31
Yeah. I think so.
Patricia Henderson: 34:31
Yeah. That one’s good.
Colt Knight: 34:32
And I like the one with coffee in it. That one’s good.
Glenda Pereira: 34:35
I didn’t like coffee. Milk is actually the state beverage of the state of Rhode Island. What? Fun fact. I also don’t like coffee milk because it’s straight-up sugar.
Glenda Pereira: 34:46
Yeah. If anyone’s ever
Colt Knight: 34:47
tasted coffee. True for Maine too, the Allen’s coffee brandy and milk?
Patricia Henderson: 34:51
I don’t know. I’m just I’m not a huge fan.
Glenda Pereira: 34:54
You’re just the true Mainer.
Colt Knight: 34:55
Yeah. I’ve never had Allen’s coffee brandy.
Glenda Pereira: 34:57
So she might know. Allen’s. I don’t even know what that is.
Colt Knight: 35:01
It’s a coffee liqueur.
Patricia Henderson: 35:02
Yeah. It’s a coffee liqueur. Allen’s.
Colt Knight: 35:04
Yeah. That’s a big Maine thing.
Patricia Henderson: 35:06
Yeah. It’s pretty popular. I guess if you, like, go to a restaurant or something, they definitely serve that, like, governors and stuff. Tippy Cow?
Glenda Pereira: 35:14
What? See, that’s the only dairy liquor I know. Tippy Cow? Yeah. It’s this
Colt Knight: 35:23
When I was a kid, there was a thing called cow tipping, but I don’t remember.
Glenda Pereira: 35:26
That’s a lie, Colt. You know it. You can’t tip cows. Have you ever tried to move a 1,600-pound animal?
Colt Knight: 35:38
Exercise. It’s like snipe hunting. It’s not that you catch snipe. It is that you can convince someone to go out in a muddy field and try to tip over a cow.
Patricia Henderson: 35:47
Yes.
Colt Knight: 35:48
It’s not a real
Glenda Pereira: 35:51
Secrets out.
Colt Knight: 35:51
thing, people. You don’t go out and tip cows over. When they fall over, you laugh at them. I mean, that wouldn’t even be funny. Yeah. The funny part is you convince the city people to go out there and step in cow poop and get muddy.
Colt Knight: 36:03
And as soon as they touch the cow and it wakes up and it lets out a big beller, they freak out and just take off running.
Glenda Pereira: 36:10
That was such a weird thing for me too. Like, because people would talk about cow tipping all the time, and I’m like, what are you guys talking about? Cow tipping? You can’t do that. And there was this association with, yeah, you can go out and tip cows.
Glenda Pereira: 36:26
American people, I tell you. The stories they create.
Colt Knight: 36:31
It’s like the western tall tale thing. You know, there are certain things that we will never admit aren’t real, like jackalopes. Whenever I have got a mounted jackalope in my office.
Glenda Pereira: 36:45
Is that a jackrabbit?
Colt Knight: 36:47
It’s a jackalope. It’s different.
Glenda Pereira: 36:49
Oh, okay. Never mind.
Colt Knight: 36:51
So a jackalope looks like a jackrabbit, but it has antlers. And so whenever anyone asks me what that is and I tell them it’s a jackalope and they say it’s not real, I say, no. No. No. They’re real.
Colt Knight: 37:03
It’s just most people have never seen a buck jackalope. They always just see the does.
Glenda Pereira: 37:09
And with that, folks, if Colt ever asks you to go cow tipping, say no because you can’t do it. Anyways, thank you so much, Patricia, for being on the Maine Farmcast. It was great to get to know you and to hear about all the exciting things happening out at Witter. And if folks have questions and comments, we’ll put your information in the show notes. And if they wanna come out into Witter, we’ll put that information there too so that they can come out and see all the awesome stuff that’s happening.
Glenda Pereira: 37:43
Thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Patricia Henderson: 37:45
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Colt Knight: 37:47
Well, we would like to remind the listeners, if you have questions, comments, concerns, stories about cow tipping, or would like to tell us your favorite chocolate milk, you can send us an email at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.