A Dream Fulfilled

As houses are built closer to dairies, producers are finding innovative ways to be good neighbors

Luke Krickenbarger always planned to be a farmer. A surprising turn of events didn’t take that dream away. Stop by the West Alexandria, Ohio, farm where 24-year-old Luke Krickenbarger works with his mother, Lisa, and father, Doug, and you will find a well-kept farm with clean cows and a beautiful two-acre pond. You’ll see a tidy milkhouse attached to the double-eight herringbone parlor and a stack of quality awards the Krickenbargers are too busy to hang on the walls. What you won’t notice, at least not right away, is that Luke is blind.

A month after graduating from The Ohio State University with a bachelor’s degree in animal science, Luke, then 21, noticed his sight was failing him in one eye. Over the next two months his vision continued to deteriorate and began affecting his other eye. After more than a dozen trips to a series of eye doctors and a misdiagnosis of multiple sclerosis, Luke learned he had Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON). This maternally inherited disorder affects the central vision and strikes young men almost exclusively. Luke can see some shadows and contrast but not enough to watch TV, use a computer or read. He can tell if you are holding your hand out beside his head, but cannot see well enough to tell how many fingers you are holding up.

Luke lost his central vision but he hasn’t lost sight of his desire to be
a dairy farmer. Even though he can only see what most people see
out of the corner of their eye, he still spends his mornings feeding the cows and his afternoons in the milking parlor. He can drive a tractor around the 350-acre farm because he knows where everything is and can see enough contrast between the grass and the dirt to keep the tractor on the driveway. He also knows where everything is and his family is careful not to move the things he needs.

Luke handles the feeding in the morning and can load the mixer wagon by waiting for the flashing amber light and the audible alarm signaling when the wagon is full. He also can read the numbers on the scale if he is an inch or two away.

“Some people are surprised I’m still driving a tractor, but I don’t run into trees,” Luke says. “I can do that just fine, but if I drop something on the ground, I can’t find it. I just have to feel around. It seems like the small tasks, like cutting a piece of string, are what I really have problems with, but the larger things I can do just fine.”

One of those “larger things” Luke still handles is the afternoon milking of the 85 Holsteins and Brown Swiss. When his father travels as part of his role as a DFA Mideast Area Council and Corporate Board member, Luke often milks alone. On a normal day he’ll milk with one of his parents, which always makes the job go faster.

Luke says it’s not as difficult as it might seem.

“When you milk, you don’t really look at what you’re doing,” he says. When you wipe, you don’t really see the back two teats anyway. You do it by feel. So do I. It is almost automatic so it doesn’t really feel like it really changed that much.”

In the face of Luke’s challenges, Doug focuses on the blessings.
“The timing of his loss of vision, if there is such a thing, was good,” Doug says. “He already knew what he needed to do, so it’s a little easier for him. He got his dairy science degree and 30 days later he started going blind. But you can’t take that knowledge away from him. He knows how to breed cows.

“He knows how to formulate rations in his head. We both work together with a feed consultant. And the cows do okay,” Doug adds. “We’re not going to break any records, but we’ll stay in business.”
While they may not break records, the farm’s quality would be the envy of many farms. They average 1,000 on PI (preliminary incubation) and SPC (standard plate count), which Luke attributes to keeping the pipeline clean and equipment well-maintained. The somatic cell count is usually 150,000, although, “when it is really dry it can be closer to 100,000 so it is easier to keep the counts down,” Luke says.

“We use no antibiotics or drugs in our lactating herd and this was in place even before this happened to him,” says Doug. “If we do have a cow that has been dry-treated, we isolate her and wrap duct tape around her leg. We also use the duct tape to designate that a cow had a bad quarter and he can feel that.” They use the DHIA test results to selectively cull the cows that contribute most to the herd’s somatic cell count.

“If we find mastitis in the filter, the next milking someone else will do all the stripping to find that cow,” Luke says. “Usually I do all the feeding in the morning and someone else is milking so there’s plenty of opportunity for someone else to see it. I milk at night. Sometimes I can just feel if the udder is hot or hard.”

Luke says quality is important to the farm and quality starts with the basics. “We keep the sand filled up in the freestall barn and keep the lot scraped. And we don’t stress the cows working for the absolutely highest production because stressed cows can push the cell count higher.”

They also pre- and post-dip with a 1 percent iodine solution. They purchase the iodine from Eagle Dairy Direct, a service offered by DFA, because it saves them $100 a barrel.

“As far as the quality goes, it’s just one of those things I’ve always strived for. What we do on our operation are those routine things of watching…and I’ll compliment the Mideast Area and Glenn (Wallace) and his ideas. Getting four tests a month has become a great management tool because you get ahead of the curve so much quicker,” Luke adds. “You get that information and can see if there is something wrong. You don’t have 30 days of the problem getting worse.”

“The Mideast Area has come up with a good plan and all you have to do is participate in it and it will make you money,” Luke says. “Last year when milk prices were lousy, for a small farm like ours, it was the difference between going to the grocery store that week or not.”
Doug pulls the quality results from the myDFA Web page every day. He shares that information with Luke and they jointly make decisions related to the herd.

“I would take one of him, with his challenges, over three hired guys,” Doug says. “He’s just that much better, that much smarter, that much faster.

“He knows what he’s doing.”