Also featured in the Putnam County Dairy Festival this year is the Georgia Dairy Youth Foundation (gadyf.com), based in nearby Madison.
GDYF is a nonprofit group that raises funding for youth dairy activities in the state for Future Farmers of America (FFA), 4-H, and college-level dairy farmers.
“We pretty much go from little, bitty kids all the way up to the end of college, so ‘youth’ covers a lot of people,” GDYF President Carol Williams said. “Pretty much any dairy activity, we provide funding for, but we do not do scholarships. With scholarships, you can only help one or two, so we do things like help sponsor the University of Georgia Commercial Dairy Heifer Show each year at the UGA livestock facility in Athens. We also help sponsor the Commercial Dairy Heifer Show at the state livestock shows in Perry in February."
GDYF also sponsors dairy judging trips, as well as local, state and national 4-H Dairy Quiz Bowls, which are game-show-like events that involve teams of four buzzing in with answers to dairy-related questions. This year’s North American finals competition will be held Nov. 3-4, at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
A lot has changed in dairy farming over the decades since the Dairy Festival began, perhaps most significantly the replacement of hundreds of small farming operations by farms that now boast a thousand heads of cattle or more. Putnam County at its peak in the 1950s had well over 200 dedicated dairy farms, and though less than 10 remain countywide today, overall milk production numbers are higher.
“There has been a lot of progress in dairy cattle nutrition. The nutritional plane is much higher; the genetic plane is higher," Williams said.
The cows are genetically wired to produce more milk and although there are fewer farms, there is a much higher number of cows and they produce more milk because of the nutrition, the genetics, the mechanization, just the entire advanced process we use now.
“There are so many, many advancements that have been made as far as handling cattle and cow comfort and dealing with the heat stress on cows and so forth. So, any opportunity we have to educate the public about the milk industry is a plus," Williams said. "Many, many advancements have been made as far as handling cattle and cow comfort and dealing with the heat stress on cows and so forth.
"When I give tours of our dairy, one of the things I always point out is the fact that a cow that is stressed or unhappy, or hungry will not produce as much milk as a cow that’s comfortable and full of feed. So, all of our cows are well taken care of. My husband has always said, ‘It’s like a manufacturing plant, the better raw materials you use, the better product you end up with.’”