Visitors to the High Oleic Dairy Farm Field Day, Aug. 14, had an opportunity to learn more about where the roasted beans may fit into dairy cattle’s diet, grow and weed control considerations, roasting, processing and quality control and what led the Jake and Brooke Carrow and Miller families to start feeding it to their cows.

Jake and Brooke Carrow purchased Enchanted Dairy from Brooke’s parents, Ron and Jeannie Miller and her uncle Marv Miller on Jan 1, 2021. Having transitioned into taking over the farm for a while, Jake said he started reading about the highlights of feeding high oleic soybeans to dairy cows in 2020. Wanting to integrate the beans into the operation, he and Brooke weren’t quite sure at first what that would look like.

“You know, it takes time and trials and everything like that. There was not a lot of good research on it in our area yet, so it took probably three years for me to finally dive in and actually say, ‘We’re going to plant some of these things,’” he said.

The Carrows planted 200 acres of high oleic soybeans on their farm in Marshall in 2024 to see how well the beans would grow.

Prior to introducing the high oleic soybeans, the energy content of the milk in kilocalories per kilogram of milk fat (ECM) was 103.5 for Enchanted Dairy in December 2024.

“January, we started the year out with a bang. We put the beans in right away, first part of January, and we saw about a four pound energy corrected month increase. We went up to 107.49. I’m not guaranteeing that in every single situation. Obviously, the beans are going to be different everywhere,” Chelsea Myer with Form a Feed said.

Costwise, the Enchanted Dairy saw significant feed cost savings the first year, around 50 cents per head per day.

Read more takeaways from the Enchanted Dairy High-Oleic Soybean Field Day here.