On Hillcrest Saylor Dairy Farms, the goal is to plant cover crops on every acre of corn harvested for silage.

Dairyman Shawn Saylor is what one might consider a jack-of-all trades; in fact, “super handyman” is even part of his email address. A quick look around his farm is all one needs to put proof behind that statement. In different areas of the dairy, Saylor has created solutions to fill needs and solve problems.

“I’m the kind of person who looks at how can I make a task easier for someone to do,” explained Saylor, “and if I can’t find it, I’ll build it.”

For instance, when he first put up silage bunkers years ago, he didn’t find a silage facer on the market that met his needs. So, he made one — a rotary-type facer they used for years. When Saylor wanted to improve calf feeding efficiency, he designed and built a milk delivery cart. In the freestall barn, to help with heat abatement and water usage, he designed a control box for the sprinkler system.

Saylor has always been into technology and construction, but he has not been formally trained in these areas. When I asked him how he learned skills such as electrical work, for instance, he said he picked up hints from a friend who was an electrician. For the most part, though, he learns as he goes. He noted the value in learning from other people, and today, he said the internet can also be a great tool and teacher.

A major project

Hillcrest Saylor Dairy Farms is located in the lower mountains near Rockwood, Pa. Saylor is the fourth generation on his family’s dairy, where he currently milks about 680 cows and farms 1,500 acres with his family and team of employees. All calves and heifers are also raised on-site.

Although he did not start his farm from scratch, he has left his fingerprints on many parts of the dairy. One of his biggest projects to date was the construction of an anaerobic digester.

Before building the dairy’s new freestall barns in 2002, Saylor knew he wanted to add a digester to the operation. But other than Pennsylvania’s Mason Dixon Farm, which installed a digester in the late 1970s, there weren’t many farms using digesters back then to visit and learn from. Still, he designed the new barns and the gravity-flow manure system with the ability to incorporate a digester, and then he forged down a path to make it a reality. When some grant money became available in 2005, Saylor was able to start on the project.

“Using my knowledge on how to build things, I got NRCS [Natural Resources Conservation Service] approval and went ahead and built it,” Saylor explained during a Center for Dairy Excellence podcast. As one might expect, Saylor did most of the excavation, electrical, plumbing, and heating work for the digester. The following year, he applied for another grant that helped pay for a second generator.

The digester has been running for more than 15 years now, and Saylor says the system has worked admirably. While grant money helped get the project off the ground, it has more than paid for itself. Servicing the digester can be a big expense, he noted, so being able to do the maintenance and repairs himself makes it more profitable.

Other than regular maintenance on the engines, Saylor said the digester is easy to manage. “It’s no different than any other piece of equipment that runs all the time,” he shared. “If built right, there is very little maintenance.”

About half of the energy produced is used on the farm and in the farmhouses located on their satellite locations. Pennsylvania has a net metering program, so the extra energy produced from the system is sold through Rural Electric. That extra electricity is only sold at a wholesale price, though, so Saylor’s best value comes from using it. He said that someday, renewable natural gas may be in their future since they are located near a natural gas pipeline.

Beyond electricity generation, other benefits of the digester are somewhat dependent on location, Saylor noted. For example, “Odor control can be valuable in some places,” he said. “It helps here, no doubt.”

Taking in food waste is another opportunity, depending on location. He receives a variety of foods for the digester, including waste potatoes from a snack food manufacturer. He has capacity to take more food waste, but there is not a lot of manufacturing in his part of the state, and companies are limited on how far they can truck, he explained. Food needs to be metered in, Saylor noted, but this addition helps generate more electricity and heat.

With only cow manure, the digester is stable and takes care of itself; however, food waste can throw it off. For instance, Saylor explained that a foodstuff with too much sugar or energy can give the digester a “gut ache.”

Last year, something high in grease was added to the Hillcrest Saylor Dairy Farms’ digester, and it significantly impacted the system by throwing off the pH. Saylor said within a week, the digester stopped making gas, and it took a few weeks to return to production. It was a worst-case scenario, but fortunately, that has only happened once in the last decade and a half. Saylor reiterated that normally, the digester is self-sufficient.

On the back side

Once manure travels through the digester, it still has plenty of value. On their farm, they switched to manure solids for bedding. “It has eliminated most of the sawdust we use, and the cows love it,” Saylor said.

Originally the recycled solids were placed on top of the mattresses, but it was difficult to keep in the stalls. When the mattresses needed to be replaced, Saylor removed them and added a bedding retainer to the back of the stalls. A deep bed would be ideal, Saylor noted, but the current set-up works quite well.

The solids go through a separator, which dries them down to about 70% moisture. A bedding dryer, another creation of Saylor’s, takes the moisture content down about another 10%. There are some fluctuations in the bedding quality in wet weather, but overall, Saylor believes it is the next best thing to sand.

There used to be a plentiful supply of solids, and some of the excess solids not used for bedding would be sold to neighbors who eagerly used the product on their gardens. These days, the use of brown midrib (BMR) corn has led to finer solids, and the volume of bedding is reduced, Saylor explained. That means most of the solids are now used in the stalls. Any extra solids are spread to fields farther from the farm. This nutrient source has been especially valuable in fields that were strip mined decades ago.

Dairyman Shawn Saylor, seated on the John Deere B tractor, farms near Rockwood, Pa., with his wife, Michelle, and children, Gage and Harlowquin.

Making the most of it

“We try to use our manure as much as possible,” Saylor said. For fields farther away, trucking gets expensive, so more commercial fertilizer is used in those locations.

Utilizing draglines for manure application has been a positive change for the dairy. About 40% of the farm’s manure is applied to hundreds of acres this way, and it is more efficient and less costly. There is also the reduced risk of soil compaction, which Saylor considers a big benefit.

“Truck traffic is really hard on the fields, so with draglines, we are getting the compaction problem out of the picture when spreading manure,” Saylor shared.

They will apply some manure when the cover crops start to grow to recover more of the nitrogen and between rows when planting corn. Manure will also be applied to forage fields between cuttings. In fall, manure is applied to cornfields after harvest.

Traveling through the digester first reduces the manure’s pathogen load and number of weed seeds. The digester also changes the ammonia in the nitrogen, Saylor said, which you can see when it is applied to the field. “It’s different,” he shared. “It’s easier for the plants to use.” The farm’s fields are nutrient deficient, so it is not an issue for him to also apply the liquid that comes from the digester.

They have been doing cover crops and no-till practices for the last decade. With hard, clay ground and not a lot of topsoil, it can be difficult to get crops planted if there isn’t much moisture. The first couple of years he seeded cover crops, he realized some yield loss, but even with their poor soils, Saylor said they saw some benefits by the third year. Over time, there have been more improvements. It helps with the hardness of the soil; before that, he had trouble no-tilling into dry soils. With cover crops, the farm is seeing better results and doesn’t need as much moisture to soften the soil.

As for cover crops, he plants a lot of cereal rye. Some triticale has been planted on closer fields because it works well for applying manure and offers a wider window for harvest. Cereal rye has a shorter harvest window, but it is an inexpensive feed source for heifers or cows, Saylor noted. He harvests 200 acres of cereal rye for silage, taken from the first cutting in the spring. The rest of the acreage is planted green.

Saylor has used precision planting the last six years. It allows him to monitor what he’s planting. He also uses autosteer, which saves stress and makes fieldwork easier to do and keeps the rows straight. Up in the mountains, the growing season is shorter, and technology – both on the machinery side and with crop genetics – makes planting earlier a little easier. With some trial and error, Saylor has found cover cropping and no-till strategies that work at their location.

Looking forward

Saylor is more focused on decisions that make financial sense, but there is an environmental benefit to what he’s doing as well. “I think people need to look at these practices a little more, because they can probably save money by doing some simple things that can work,” he said. An evaluation showed that the farm is well on its way to being “net zero” because of the digester and other practices.

Expansion is not part of the plan because available acreage in the area is limited. Instead, Saylor is focused on enhancing the current operation. In terms of the digester, he would like to do more with the liquid that is separated from the solids, which is currently applied to fields as another nutrient source.

“I truly believe there needs to be a simple way to process the wastewater after digestion and make clean water from it,” he said. “It would reduce hauling costs and reduce well water needs.” He is keeping an eye on new technology as it becomes available to see what could be the best fit for his farm.

In addition, he is also looking for opportunities to automate. “Labor is always going to be an issue,” he said. “It is hard to find people to work the hours we need for what we can pay.” One goal is to focus on efficiencies and work with technology to make tasks easier for the employees they have and ease some of that burden.

With his do-it-yourself attitude, it would be a safe bet to say that Saylor will be implementing more technology in the future. And more likely than not, at least some of those pieces will be homemade.