Wright County, Mo., isn’t the Swiss Alps, but there’s still milk in those hills.

On clear fall mornings, folks in the Shaddy, Mo., community can hear a tinkling chorus of cow bells: The Roth herd has left the milking barn and is on its way back to grass.

The Wright County, Mo., hills are not the Swiss Alps, but Emanuel and Ernest Roth have carved out a productive grassland dairy operation here. The Roths brought some of their dairy skills and traditions with them when they migrated to southern Missouri from Switzerland less than 3 years ago. Among those traditions are the cast brass bells that dangle from the necks of several Roth cows.

The bells are decorative; not cow-locating devices. With their intensively managed grazing program, Emanuel Roth and his uncle, Ernest, know where their cows are every minute of the day—and night.

“We came here primarily to get away from the burdensome regulations in Switzerland,” Emanuel explained. “In Switzerland, there are too many people on too little land.

“In the winter of 1999-2000, I came to Missouri and started looking around for a place,” he continued. “I enlisted the help of some real estate agents and found this place. The land had been neglected for several years, but it looked as if it had potential for what we wanted to do.”

“This place,” a 193-acre farm just south of Grovespring, had been a dairy operation for years, but had not been managed as such for a half-dozen years. Fescue pastures were choked with weeds and sprouts. Emanuel came back to Missouri in the fall of 2000 and began putting the farm in better shape, stringing miles of portable electric fencing to make grazing paddocks and renovating the pastures.

“The soil fertility and pH were very low,” he recalled. “There was a lot of work to do here. My uncle came the next spring and we began putting cows on the place.”

The 80-cow herd the Roths put together has a majority of Brown Swiss (not surprisingly), with a few Holsteins, Jerseys and Ayrshires in the mix. They chose good milkers— the Roth rolling herd average stands at just over 17,200 pounds. With lower-volume Jerseys and Ayrshires in the milking mix, that means their top cows peak at 100 pounds of milk per day or more.

And they do it substantially on grass. The Roth pasture recipe includes wheat for fall and late winter grazing; pearl millet for hot weather; and permanent cool-season swards of orchardgrass, brome and ryegrass, liberally interseeded with red and ladino clovers. Roth cows graze from early April through most of November and rotate to new grass every 12 hours. Pastures are cross-fenced into paddocks of 2 to 3 acres.

“The first year we were here, we overseeded the existing fescue with clover and tried to milk cows on that,” said Roth. “It didn’t work, so we started renovating fescue pastures as quickly as we could.”

Although cows milk well on wheat and pearl millet, Emanuel uses these crops as a transition in converting fescue to other permanent cool-season grasses.

“When we plan to renovate a fescue pasture, we begin in the winter by feeding hay in that area,” he said. “Then, in spring, I chisel plow and disk the ground and plant pearl millet. The following fall, I rip out the pearl millet and seed wheat, and come in again the next spring with pearl millet. Then, I chisel plow, disk and seed the permanent grass mixture with the fertilizer truck as we fertilize the pasture. It’s a pretty effective way to replace fescue with better quality grass.

“We don’t manage any hay meadows as such,” he added. “In seasons when the grass out-grows the cows, we bypass some paddocks and bale them. We wet-bale hay at 60 to 70 percent moisture and wrap bales in plastic right away. There’s a Harvestore on the farm, but we don’t use it. It would cost too much to get it into condition, and our wet-wrapped hay fits our operation better.”

Emanuel and Ernest Roth are proving they know how to convert Missouri forages to milk. In peak pasture seasons, upwards of half the milk that goes into the tank is made with grass.

“On good forages, you can expect a cow to eat 3 percent of her bodyweight per day, on a dry matter basis,” said Ted Probert, University of Missouri extension dairy specialist. “And she should produce a pound or more of milk for each pound of forage she eats. With lush vegetative forage, a cow should get more than ample protein, but may not get an equivalent amount of energy.”

The Roths understand this situation.

“You have to get nutrients in to get milk out,” said Emanuel. “We feed each cow 20 pounds per day [10 pounds per milking] of MFA Heartland 16 with Flakes, and with Taltec. That’s a pelleted Heartland ration with steam-flaked corn and Taltec for extra fat. We also feed some whole cottonseed in the dry ration.

“With Taltec in the feed, cows stay in better body condition,” he added.

For the near future, the Roths will continue upgrading pastures to the orchardgrass-brome-clover mixture.

“We probably won’t expand much beyond 80 cows,” guessed Emanuel. “If we grew much beyond that, we wouldn’t do as good a job of managing or we’d need to hire more help. Our bottom line wouldn’t look any better.

“But we may change the makeup of the herd some,” he continued. “We’ll probably phase out the Holsteins; they don’t take the heat as well. We’ll stay with a majority of Brown Swiss, and keep some Jerseys and Ayrshires. We are also doing some crossbreeding, depending on how cows adapt to our system.

“One surprise in coming to Missouri is the summer heat; it’s much hotter here than in Switzerland in July and August,” he concluded. “It’s colder in Missouri, too, although we don’t get as much snow here as in Switzerland.”