A Dairy Farm with No Barn?
By Molly Shaw & John Dudak, Photos by John Dudak

Who would have thought you could run a dairy farm without a barn? The concept seems strange even to those who are acquainted with Rob and Pam Moore and their farm business. “My neighbors think I’m crazy,” Rob said.

The Moores run a seasonal grazing dairy. Their cows have an all-grass diet and only make milk when the grass is plentiful.

The farm is perched in the hills of Nichols with 200 acres of pasture and woodlots that sustain 80 organic dairy cattle. Rob is the eighth generation of Moores to farm this land, but his current farming practices have more in common with his great-grandfather’s than his dad’s.

When Rob was growing up, they grew corn to feed the cows, who were housed in a barn and milked twice a day all year long. This required large tractors with numerous attachments to plough and seed the fields and harvest the corn. And, of course, it meant hauling manure out of the barn.

But Rob says, “Grass is what wants to grow on this farm. Growing corn is an uphill battle on the steep, easily erodible slopes that make up the farm." And Rob would rather spend his time moving fences in the pastures to guide his cows to fresh grassy paddocks than working on a tractor. So the Moores decided to pattern their farm as much as possible after nature.

When the grass is the most plentiful in spring the calves are born and are suckled and raised by the cows. The cows are milked in a small milking parlor during the grass growing season and are dry (make no milk) in the winter when they eat hay, which gets harvested with rented equipment. They are outdoors all year, taking shelter in woodlots and in the lee of hills when it is cold.

And they are healthy cows—healthier, in fact, than those that Rob raised in an enclosed barn. Not all cows, however, would thrive in these conditions. Rob selected cows with genetics from half a dozen breeds. The resulting herd is a multi-colored, hardy bunch that harvest their own food and spread their own manure as they amble through the fields grazing. A dairyman’s dream.

Milk production is around half that of the average Tioga County dairy, but it is produced with much less labor, energy and chemicals. “I make the same amount of money with half the hard labor,” Rob reflects, “and every day I have time to sit down and see the sunset.”