Today’s June Dairy Month farm stop is with the the Korth Farm outside of New London, owned and operated by Dalton Korth. The farm started in 1973 with 80 acres and 15 cows and Dalton explains he had an interesting route towards becoming a farmer.

“I started farming way back in high school with FFA,” Dalton reflected. “I started with pigs. I went in the Army and worked on cars. I went to the Fox Valley Tech for auto body and worked on cars for 11 years and a neighbor stopped by one night and asked if I wasn’t interested in buying a farm. That was in 1973.”

That farm is the farm Dalton currently owns. Dalton married a former TCHdailyNews farm woman of the year in Lucina Korth, who was raised in the city and hadn’t had much experience on the farm until one night she was thrown into action.

“She used to help me with the calf chores and in 1985 I helped a neighbor catch his beef cow and I got kicked in the leg. I didn’t do anything for five months and that night she had to learn how to milk cows right there.”

When Dalton first took over the farm, he says they were forced to grow their operation in order to receive a loan from the bank, which asked Dalton to double the herd of cows. He says they’ve kept growing ever since.

“Right now, we milk about 250 cows,” Dalton said of the farm’s current operation. “We’ve got a cooperation called Golden Hillview Farm. That’s with my son Michael and his wife and the other three sons are with us.”

Dalton says that their dairy operation is only a sliver of what they do on the farm.

“We farm about 800 acres. We own about 500 of that and rent about 300 acres. We do about 350 acres of corn, 300 of hay and about 100 acres of soybeans.”