A wet late-April weekend briefly curtailed planting on the Crave Brothers Farm’s 1,800 acres, but plenty of other activities kept the business north of Waterloo, Wis., buzzing: • Contractors hammered away at a new special-needs maternity barn, the last step in the family’s latest round of expansion that is doubling dairy output. • Nearly 2,000 cows and heifers inside and out of freestall barns munched on total mixed rations made with homegrown forages delivered from bunker silos. • About 850 cows with a rolling herd average of more than 28,000 pounds rotated through the central milking parlor. • Most of the milk flowed across the road to the just-expanded 20,000-square-foot cheese plant, where a few dozen employees, including three licensed cheesemakers, crafted Crave Brothers Farmstead Classic Cheeses. These prize-win-ning specialty products are making a name for themselves, including one sold under the brand Les Frères (The Brothers). • Two hulking 800,000-gallon anaerobic digesters silently turned manure into methane for con-version to biogas. The output powered a huge engine generating enough electricity to run all farm and factory operations. Excess juice sold through We Energies powers about 550 homes. • Spreaders stood by to carry away the liquid ma-nure remaining after methane removal, which reduced odors and neutralized active ingredi-ents for improved plant uptake. • A front-end loader filled a semitrailer with remaining dried solids to be sold as disease-free cow bedding and garden potting soil. • Infrastructure work along entry roads prepared the sprawling site for Wisconsin Farm Technology Days, hosted by the Crave family in July. Technology Spotlight The Crave farm in southern Dodge County is a lead spon-sor of Wisconsin Farm Technology Days, July 21–23, along with the University of Wisconsin-Extension. United Cooperative is a charter sponsor of the event, expected to attract more than 60,000 visitors and 700 vendors. "We've been for-tunate to have many educational oppor-tunities, and this is a chance to give back," says Charles Crave. To learn more about the show, visit www. dodgefarmtech.com. Digesting Renewable Technologies Freestall barns, total mixed rations and bunker silos were leading-edge technologies in Wisconsin when the Crave brothers adopted them years ago. As those practices became standard, the far-sighted family kept moving forward. The “Food, Fuel, Future” theme of 2009 Wis-consin Farm Technology Days reflects the latest Crave adoptions: specialty cheesemaking, auto-mated manure digestion and power generation. On-farm methane digesters may be the future, but they aren’t new. “We thought about a digester 20 years ago when we built our first freestall barn,” says Charles Crave, “but we had to wait until we built up cow numbers.” Two hulking 800,000-gallon anaerobic digesters anchor freestall barns at Crave Brothers Farm, turning manure into methane for conversion to biogas. Your CHS Connection 23