rep5@wyomingnews.com

CARPENTER - Stand in the parking lot of Burnett Enterprises outside Carpenter, and your view of southeastern Laramie County is almost exclusively of fields, houses and farm buildings.

That's no surprise; the county's rural economy is firmly grounded in agriculture.

Burnett Enterprises fits seamlessly in that picture, with its barns, fields and cows.

Primarily, it's a dairy.

But when you take a closer look, Burnett Enterprises is really a key diversification of the local ag economy.

Twists, turns along the way

"Not many people wake up one day and say, 'I want to milk cows,'" Jeff Burnett says, seated behind a big wooden desk in his office on a recent warm afternoon.

Jeff, 33, didn't, and neither did his brother, Jay, 31, who are fifth-generation farmers, although not on the land they are currently working.

The road to Burnett Enterprises wasn't exactly straight. The turns in their journey are labeled "dry-land wheat," "cow-calf operation," "feedlot" and "irrigation." Later turns are marked "drought" and "mad-cow disease."

The signpost where Jeff and his wife, Kim, and Jay and his wife, Lisa - all partners in the enterprise - now stand comes after a sharp bend and could be marked simply "dairy."

If Burnett Enterprises isn't the largest dairy in the state, it's somewhere near the top of the list. The milking herd consists of about 2,350 cows. They'd like to build that to 2,500.

It's also among the newest in the state.

Jeff sits behind a wooden desk in his office in the Burnett Enterprises building on a recent warm afternoon.

A few flies, the bane and nearly inevitable consequence of livestock operations, buzz around inside. Outside, a grader is working on a stretch of dirt.

Of the two brothers, Jeff is the talker. A good-natured, sturdy man with blunt fingers, Jeff tries to keep his Pepsi habit to two a day.

Upstairs, Kim is watching their 3-year-old daughter while she and an employee work on computers.

Jeff has a personal digital assistant in his pocket and a computer and multi-line phone on his desk.

These are the tools of a 21st-century business, even if the core of the business reaches back centuries.

"For a while, when I was in college, I was interviewing with banks," he says. "I had job offers."

A family friend laughed when he told her that. "'You're not a banker,' she told me. 'You're a farmer.'"

She was right; that's the industry he chose. Even though Burnett Enterprises carries the name and impression of a very large operation, people tend to lose sight of the fact that it's a family business, he says.

"They see a poor old dumb farmer. They want to know why you have to go to college to be a farmer," Jeff says. Jeff and Kim both graduated from Colorado State University; Jay graduated from Oklahoma State University.

Well, it comes in handy when facing what all businesses face: risk.

"You know, we all need luck," he says. "The ones that didn't survive are the ones that can't manage the risk."

The Burnetts traded in the risks they faced as dry-land wheat farmers and small feedlot operators - drought, mad-cow disease - for those of dairy operators.

"We had a partner who was retired from dairy," Jeff says. "I called him up and asked him if he wanted to get into the dairy business again."

The choice of a dairy was a critical one; Jeff says a dairy is one thing you can borrow money to start.

The immediate answer was no. But the next night, Jeff got a call back. If the Burnetts would provide the workforce, the partner said, the answer would be yes.

Shortly after that, the Burnetts leased a dairy operation, and 18 months later, they moved to their current site in Laramie County, bought out the rest of their partners and now Jeff, Kim, Jay and Lisa are the partners of Burnett Enterprises.

The dairy, which opened on Sept. 15, 2005, just marked its first anniversary.

Ag cluster development

The Burnetts decided to locate their expanded dairy just outside of Carpenter, on family land.

As they were putting together the operation, Jeff contacted Cheyenne LEADS, the economic development corporation for Cheyenne and Laramie County.

"Jeff said he was considering Laramie County for the dairy, and he wanted to know what, if any, programs were available to help them make an investment here," LEADS vice president Tim Thorson says.

When they looked at the likely impact of a large-scale dairy, Thorson said, they considered the network of dirt roads near Carpenter that would see a great deal of truck traffic.

That led to a grant, written by LEADS and sponsored by the Laramie County Commission, to improve 14 miles of county roads.

"The rationale was they needed to have access to the dairy and reduce the impact on surrounding owners," Thorson says.

The gravel that was laid cut both the dust kicked up by the truck traffic and the cost to county government for maintaining the roads, Thorson said.

The dairy has brought other benefits to the area as well.

"In industrial development, we talk about developing clusters," Thorson says. Clusters share inputs and outputs with other existing businesses. But the phenomenon is not limited to industry.

The dairy, Thorson said, is an example of an agricultural business that's making use of use of a cluster. The dairy is consuming the output of local farms, providing a market for the local products.

"A dairy converts - as an approximation - about $4 million in feed into about $8 million in milk," Thorson says. "That's the model of added value."

The money the Burnetts make from selling milk and steers pays the cost of running the dairy, which includes wages for about 40 people.

Jeff estimates he spends more than $400,000 a year buying corn silage from area farmers to feed his cows.

"An average dairy dollar turns over seven times in the community," Jeff says.

The dairy is just one of the Burnetts' enterprises. The partners also grow hay and sugar beets.

"The fact they have diversification is the key to their success," Wyoming Business Council director of agribusiness Cindy Garretson-Weibel said; if prices in one area are down, the partners can generally rely on another area.

The fact that dairy prices have been good has helped fuel a resurgence in Wyoming's dairy industry.

Forty years ago, the state counted 23,000 milk cows. Twenty years ago, the number had dropped to about 10,000.

By 2000, numbers had dropped below 6,000. Garretson-Weibel said the reason was low milk prices and high feed and fuel costs.

While that was happening, she says, production per cow was on the rise. In the past four decades, it has just about doubled.

Now the trend is reversing, in part because Wyoming has become a much more attractive place for dairies that are leaving places where urban development is squeezing out agribusinesses.

"Dairies are leaving California in droves," she said.

Provided they can find enough feed, there's room for expansion in Wyoming, in southeast corner of the state, Fremont County and the Big Horn Basin, she said.

Brown cows, chocolate milk

Jeff Burnett says more than 600 people, including school groups, have toured his dairy since it opened.

It's time-consuming, and he has thought of turning some of them away, but he doesn't.

"We feel like it's something we can give back to the community," Jeff says. He drives his pickup down the center aisle of one of the cow barns, doing a visual check of his milk producers. The cows, used to the intrusions, pay the truck no mind. Every tour gets the handouts the Western Dairy Council supplies - stickers, brochures and erasers shaped like cheese. And they get an up-close view of how the dairy operates, including the sewage treatment.

"See that?" he says, braking to a halt and pointing. "That cow is chewing her cud. If they are chewing their cud, they are happy cows."

That's important, because happy cows are good producers. Jeff says cow comfort is the top priority, and the business has detailed procedures to make sure they stay healthy.

"Mainstream America is getting away from production agriculture," he says.

That mainstream flows as close as Cheyenne.

A number of kids - and some of their parents - think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows and strawberry milk comes from red cows.

Even though Jeff assures them his Holsteins give only white milk, he thinks they are not entirely convinced.

"We had a group through here from an elementary school, and there was one lady who told me she never thought anything about where milk came from, and she kept apologizing to me about that," he says.

While a shopper may look for organic milk or milk that doesn't have BST, a bovine growth hormone, in it, they don't think anything of buying produce from Mexico, which doesn't have the same stringent controls that are imposed on U.S. producers.

"What scares me is if society gets used to being fed by third-world countries," he says. That poses both quality control and security problems.

"One of the ways we worked over Germany was to cut off their food supply. People were living in mansions and had money, but there was no food to buy," he says.

On this day, though, that seems very far away.

In the dairy's milking parlor, attached to the offices, milking is taking place with a practiced and efficient choreography.

The cows file into their milking stalls. Guarding against cross-contamination, workers clean udders with an iodine solution, and prepare the cows for milking. The milking process takes 10 to 12 minutes. Each cow carries a radio tag that records milk production. Before the cows are released, workers walk back down the line, wiping and conditioning the udders. Then the gates release and the cows file out, making way for the next group.

The milk moves through a system of pipes that flash-cools it and stores it in tanks to be picked up.

The Burnetts' milk is sold through a co-op; the bulk of it goes to a cheese factory near Fort Morgan, Colo.

Happily ever after?

Agriculture is something that Jeff Burnett says he can see himself doing 40 years from now.

"For me, I never worry about my kids and family going hungry," he says. "I know about every job that needs to be done around here. I don't do them all, but I know them."

The dairy business is a little different from farming.

"When you start taking on a business that has 40 employees, you take on the responsibility of feeding their families," he says.

Then there's everyone else who relies on the operation - farmers who supply feed, the trucking firms, just to name two - and it's a responsibility that he doesn't take on lightly.

"Of course, if it's keeping you up at night, you aren't working hard enough during the day," he says.

The Burnetts have staked a claim in a shrinking legacy.

The American Farmland Trust estimates that two acres of farmland are lost every minute in the United States. Between 1992 and 1997, an area the size of the state of Maryland was converted from agricultural to other uses.

In Laramie County, the story is the same. Rural subdivisions are bringing homes into farm and range land every year.

That may bring some conflicts for the Burnetts.

Jeff Burnett acknowledges that could happen, but so far, he hasn't had many. Neighbors often bring over family members on Easter and Christmas to see the operation.

"Most of the neighbors have been awesome. We've gotten good support," he says. "We're raising our family right here with you."