Schoenberger Hof : Dairy farming in the modern day

A view of the Schoenberger-Hof dairy farm, Heilberscheid, southern Westerwald, Germany

The new high-capacity milking parlour

Maize in the foreground and winter wheat in the background

The biogas unit used to ferment slurry and wastes and maize silage

Cows feeding inside the new dairy barn

Andreas Schoenberger, Albert Zinndorf and Gerhard Schoenberger outside the new dairy barn

Inside an older dairy barn, now an area for heifers

A disc seeder capable of sowing crop or pasture seed at 6 hectares per hour

The Schoenberger family have run a dairy farm at Heilberscheid in the southern Westerwald region since 1966. Farming 260 hectares, they are currently milking 200 Holstein-Friesian cows. Having started in 1968 with 40 cows the family has improved their facilities about every 9 years building more sheds and providing better conditions for the cows. New buildings constructed in 2009 include a cow barn with 250 cow capacity and a state of the art milking parlour capable of milking 120 cows per hour.

Half of the farming land is used for cropping with rape, maize, wheat, oats and barley in the rotation. Silage and hay are cut from the remaining land area. Machinery on this farm is up with the big end of town: 2 tractors in excess of 200 hp, high capacity sowing and harvesting implements and now non-inversion tillage equipment. Andreas Schoenberger indicated that previously cultivation had been carried out fairly often and at depth with a mouldboard plough but now most paddocks are cultivated with power harrows. The topsoil across the farm is about 350 mm deep and well drained but layers below this include many smooth rocks.

The dairy cows are housed all year round, and currently production averages 9500 L per cow over a 310 day lactation. Cows are fed soybean meal, corn silage, grass silage, wheat and barley. Spent brewers' grains and rapeseed pellets also form part of the diet. Forty hectares of maize are grown each year as well as 30 ha of oilseed rape, 70 ha of wheat and 10 hectares of winter barley. Fertiliser rates are high to ensure reasonable yields in crops and pastures.

The farm has a high capacity anaerobic digestor which uses substrates such as dried manure, slurry and maize silage to produce methane which is then converted to electricity and fed into the power grid. The new cow barn is covered on the southern side with an enormous photovoltaic array which is capable of returning in excess of 9000 Euros to the farm per month in the sunny months.

The Shoenberger Hof dairy is an efficient and impressive animal production unit designed to operate efficiently and with minimal environmental impact.