Wyoming Ranch Family Builds A 6,200-Cow Mega-Dairy On Eastern Plains

CARPENTER — Mad cow disease in the early 2000s prompted what seemed like a madcap idea to Jerry Burnett, a farmer and a rancher raising wheat and running a typical cow-calf operation near the tiny town of Carpenter with his two sons, Jeff and Jay.

It’s a story Burnett loves to tell any time he gets a chance. His most recent opportunity was during a tour of Burnett Enterprises for Cheyenne’s Centennial Antique Tractor & Engine Club.

“They (Jeff and Jay) came in here and said they wanted to build a mega dairy,” Burnett told the group. “And those mega dairies have, like, 3,000 cows.”

Burnett could hardly believe what he’d heard them say. 

“You can’t do anything with 3,000 cows in a day,” he told the boys, shaking his head. “Let alone milk them.”

But Burnett gave his sons’ idea a chance, agreeing that he would at least go on a tour of some large dairies with them.

One small thing led to another, each one bigger than the last. Today, the dairy milks around two-thirds of Wyoming’s 9,000-some dairy cattle. 

That’s 6,200 cows per day — 800 every hour — and 66,400 gallons of milk per day. 

The milk is trucked to Leprino Foods in Colorado, which makes mozzarella cheese for Pizza Hut. Which means any time you eat a slice of pizza, there’s a good chance some of the milk that made that cheese came from Burnett Enterprises in Wyoming.

Surprising Success

Burnett initially thought the idea of milking cows was the craziest he’d heard in a while. 

After all, dairies across America are more often struggling to survive and outright vanishing than they are opening up a new business. 

Take Star Valley in Western Wyoming as an example. That area used to be so flush with dairies up and down the valley that Afton resident Jody Shumway just grew up knowing, without any question, that he was going to be a dairy farmer. 

“If you were going to be anything in life you had to milk a cow,” Shumway told Cowboy State Daily in an interview last year. “That was just the way you were raised. Everybody was a dairy farmer, and that was just a cool thing to do.”

But the dairy sector began a precipitous fall in the 1970s. There were 648,000 dairies then, but, by 2022, just 24,470 remained — most with herds of more than 2,500 cows.

Shumway Farms is now the last dairy left standing in Star Valley. 

The only way it survived was through sheer stubbornness and out-of-the-box thinking. Shumway shifted into a direct-to-consumer model, thanks to Wyoming’s Food Freedom Act, which saved a family dairy that has its roots in the 1880s.

Survival is still a struggle for Shumway Farms, though his Wyoming skyr, a yogurt-like product, and his homemade ice creams are gaining popularity throughout the region.

Business Sense

Out-of-the-box thinking was one of the reasons Burnett told both of his sons that if they wanted any help getting a start in life from him, then they were both going to college.

“I don’t know that going to college really makes you that much smarter,” Burnett said. “But your brain gets to work a little bit differently.”

The time away would give his sons a chance to think differently about the ranch, rather than just perpetuating habits that Burnett felt had become something of an economic vise. 

“I didn’t know what I wanted,” Burnett said. “I just knew that it felt like I was in a rut. I knew we had to make some kind of change. And when I looked around at the people in the community, it looked like the better-educated people were doing a better job. So I just thought it’s so important for the kids to get an education.”

One of the things Jeff and Jay learned from their college classes was how to analyze operations to see if the economics are where they need to be. 

“My dad, Jeff, and my uncle, Jay, knew when they came home from college that the farm wasn’t large enough to support two more families,” grandson Reese Burnett told Cowboy State Daily. “And so if they both wanted to come home and farm, they knew they had to get bigger.”

Beets Before Bovines

First, the boys decided to give sugar beet farming a try.

“By the second year we were the largest sugar beet grower for Holly Sugar in Torrington,” Burnett recalled. “So that went really well and that gave us a big kick with the sugar beets, so we had a little bit of money.”

For the next new enterprise, Burnett’s sons decided to try building a feedlot to custom-feed cattle. 

“That was just a good way to get their foot rolling and farming,” Reese said. “Because it didn’t take a lot of capital infrastructure, and so it didn’t take a lot of upfront expense.”

That created a little instant sweat equity, too, and was going really well until 2003, when mad cow disease hit the U.S. market, crashing beef sales.

“After that, nobody wanted to feed cattle anymore,” Reese said. “They lost all their custom-feeding customers.”

They needed a new direction and fast. That led them to take a second look at a dairy that was just down the road from their feedlot.

“They’re on the Colorado side, but they’re only about 15 miles south of us,” Reese said. “And they were a feed lot and a dairy on the same location, so dad went and talked to them.”

That conversation happened on a Thursday. 

By the following Monday — just barely a weekend later — a deal had been reached and the Burnetts were in the dairy business, milking between 400 to 600 cows.

Growing The Operation

The Burnett family has a saying they repeat often, and that saying is, “Average goes broke.”

Burnetts’ sons knew they needed to grow this herd to reach a stable economic base. The first leap was to 3,000 cows, but that number wasn’t optimal.

“When we were milking 3,000 cows, we were doing that with 50 employees,” Reese said. “And we have an accountant who does accounting for dairies all across the United States.”

Using that data, he could show the Burnetts how much they were spending for each pound of milk versus what their peers were spending. 

That helped them see that the optimal number of cows for them to milk was closer to 6,000. 

“So we went from 3,000 cows to 6,000 cows and about 54 employees,” Reese said. 

That kind of size is less and less unusual, Reese added.

“I don’t want to downplay the numbers at all,” he said. “Six thousand cows is a lot, but as you study the trends of dairies in the United States, herd size, number of cattle, is just increasing quickly, because everyone else is figuring out exactly what we figured out. If you can milk twice as many cows with the same number of employees, you make more money for every 100 pounds of milk you sell.”

Innovative Approach

Now that the dairy farm is the size that it needs to be, the Burnetts are continuing to work on maximizing the operation with innovative approaches, some of which have patents pending.

One of their projects involves a vertical growing operation, where they grow either corn or wheat. That’s housed under a giant quonset that looks a bit like a huge, puffy pillow under the sky.

It’s a bit of a work in progress, but as part of that growing operation, the brothers have figured out how to naturally speed the germination of seeds that they’re going to grow indoors, so they can more cost effectively grow their own milk cow quality feed.

That’s difficult to do on dryland acres, but it’s also difficult to achieve in Wyoming on a year-round basis. Winter feels like it’s always coming, and the summer growing season is always short and fleeting.

By moving to sprouted grains that are grown indoors, though, they could have a year-round source of high-quality feed, which would help defray some of their expenses, while also conserving a lot of water.

“It doesn’t take very much water to sprout a seed,” Reese said. “All the water that runs off, when we’re making milk cow feed, water is one of our ingredients, so we pump it down there and use it in their rations.”

The process is taking an old idea — sprouted grains — and applying some new technology to make the idea work on a larger scale.

“When you think about any grain, whether it’s wheat or corn or milo or anything, a seed is storing energy in the form of starch,” Reese said. “When that plant sprouts, it starts to turn that starch into sugars which are less durable but are more readily available for digestion.”

Self-Sustaining System

One of the other innovative things the Burnetts have done on the dairy farm is figure out a system where they can reuse the bedding while recycling the manure and creating two marketable products from it.

The synergy there starts with sand bedding, which can be washed into a drain system that carries the sand away to a facility where it can be cleaned and disinfected for eventual reuse.

The manure, meanwhile, goes through a digester where the microbes normally found in a cow’s stomach work on the manure to break it down.

“That creates methane, and methane and natural gas are the same molecule,” Reese said. “And so we can refine that and sell that methane as natural gas, which you can burn in your home just like any other natural gas.”

What remains of the manure can either be applied to the dairy farm’s pastures, or it can be sold as fertilizer, too, if desired.

“Really there’s three revenue streams that come off that,” Reese said. “The manure is fertilizer, the gas is energy, and then there are carbon credits.”

The ranch can qualify for carbon credits because of all the work it’s been doing across the operation to reduce methane emissions. 

One of the new areas that the dairy is now pushing into is what Burnett calls dairy beef, created by crossing Holsteins with Angus cattle. 

Holsteins are typically larger than Angus cattle, so the cross creates beef cattle that will put on more weight and be worth more at market. The first wave of dairy beef will be hitting the market this fall for Burnett Enterprises. 

Time will tell if that approach is the right economics for this pioneering dairy in Wyoming, which is chasing new ways for American dairies to grow and thrive into the future. 

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.