Governor Ricketts Tours Thiele Dairy Near Clearwater

The dairy cows and calves at Thiele Dairy near Clearwater had a special guest last Wednesday. 

Governor Pete Ricketts, along with the director of the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, Steve Wellman, toured the Thiele Dairy as part of Dairy Month during June. 

"June is Dairy Month, and we're making the rounds on our Ag Adventure, here," Ricketts said . 

Thiele Dairy is a fourth­generation family-owned dairy operation outside of Clearwater. Bill Thiele explained that his grandparents and parents both farmed there. Bill and Tom Thiele started on the operation in 1977 with hogs. 

"We went through the '80s with inflation and all of those things, and that wasn't going well," Bill explained. "Although we always milked cows here, forever, we were in hogs mainly." 

When Ron Thiele graduated from high school in 1979, the family converted a horse barn into a dairy stanchion barn and kept adding cows along the way. Eventually, the family quit hogs and combined dairy herds. 

With the operation finally moving to its current facilities in March of 2016, Bill said it's been a gradual expansion. 

Currently, Thiele Dairy is milking about 1,800 cows on the farm three times a day, as well as raising almost all of its own feed. The dairy also works with other dairymen and farmers to help graze heifers and raise the calves. 

The tour included the freestall barn, calf barn and the milking parlor. 

"It's a modern design, comfortable for the cows. It has sand for the cows to lay down, misters with the fans to generate wind and cool everything down," said NDA Director Wellman about the freestall barn. “And then in the winter time, they close all that up, and it’s heated by the livestock themselves, so it’s a great system. And it’s really great to not only see that, but to see the passion behind it, the families here all operating at Thiele Dairy.”

Ricketts commented, “It was actually pretty comfortable even though it’s a rather warm day. It was pretty comfortable inside [the freestall
barn], especially when you’re standing close to those misters, and it actually smelled pretty good, too.”

Bill Thiele explained that one of the mantras on the farm everyday is to do what they can to keep the animals clean, dry and comfortable
because they are producing food. “Farmers, the original conservationists,” said Ricketts.

He explained that the idea of the Ag Adventure Tour is “to promote dairy, to get the word out that Nebraska is a great place if you want to be a dairyman, a great place to be a dairy processor, because we want to attract more of both because that’s that value-added agriculture that grows our economy and creates more jobs.”

He went on to say that one of the things Nebraska can do to keep the dairy industry alive in the state is to try and attract more processors. “If we’re uncompetitive in regards to how far, for example, the milk is going, it costs more, and that actually drives away larger operations so people make up for that differential. The more that we can site processors closer to our dairies, that will help us keep those smaller, family owned dairies,” Ricketts said.

The vision for Ricketts’s administration is to grow Nebraska. “Our number one industry is agriculture — the heart and soul of what we do here in our state,” he said. “To grow Nebraska, we have to grow agriculture.”

This is why the Ag Adventure tour started - to promote the industry as value-added agriculture.

As part of the tour, Governor Ricketts and his team visited Jisa Farmstead Cheese by Brainard to promote processing within the dairy industry, Larson’s Dairy near Creston to focus on the technology aspect of the industry, Hiland Dairy in Norfolk to see the ice cream operation, and finished the day at Thiele Dairy to see how a traditional dairy farm operates.

“Not every state gets out there like that and hustles for their ag people, and so it’s a great thing for us,” said Thiele.