On a clear, cold winter evening, the sun begins to set at Lost Lake Farm near Jewell, Iowa, and Kevin Dietzel calls his 15 dairy cows to come home.
“Come on!” he hollers in a singsong voice, “Come on!”
Brown Swiss cows and black Normandy cows trot across the frozen field and, in groups of four, are ushered into the small milking parlor.
Unstable milk prices that rarely get very high have forced most dairies to grow their herds to sufficient sizes to make money on volume. In general, farmers rarely keep the one or two cows in a red barn so often depicted in children’s books. But Dietzel, with 15 milking cows, is among the small dairy farmers in the U.S. trying to turn a profit without having to churn out substantially more milk.
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