On many dairies, soybeans aren’t necessarily a crop grown in the rotation. But at Golden E Dairy in Kewaskum, Wis., they’ve become a strategy for lowering feed costs, increasing components and gaining more control over the operation’s future.
What started with Chris Elbe reading about high-oleic soybeans at his kitchen table has evolved into a farm-wide investment. Today, the Elbe family milks about 2,900 cows, manages roughly 3,200 head and grows some of the 1,400 acres of Pioneer’s Plenish high-oleic soybeans they feed, partnering with neighboring farmers to supply the rest. They’ve built on-farm storage, installed a roasting system and incorporated roasted high-oleic soybeans into the lactating cow ration.
The journey required substantial capital, changes to their cropping program and a willingness to learn as they went. But for Chris, the decision was never about following the latest trend.
“I do a lot of reading,” he says. “I read all the farm magazines and newspapers cover to cover, and that’s where I first learned about it. The more I read about the benefits, the more I felt it was something we needed to do. That’s how you move forward. You just gotta do it.”
His son, Ryan, admits the announcement caught everyone by surprise.
“Dad kind of came to all of us and said we’re planting high-oleic soybeans next year,” Ryan recalls. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t have a clue what Plenish was. But we went all in and it’s worked well.”
Building Around Cost of Production
Chris didn’t grow up on his own dairy farm, but agriculture has been part of his life since he was 9 years old.
He spent much of his childhood and young adulthood working for a neighboring farmer, where he learned how to stretch every dollar. Instead of always receiving a paycheck, Chris was often paid with calves. Over time, those calves became heifers, giving him the foundation to start his own herd.
“When we bought this farm in ’91, we started with 90 cows,” Chris says. “We’ve been really blessed. There’s not too many people that have done as much as we’ve done in that time frame, but it’s also being willing to take risk.”
Chris says those early experiences shaped how he approaches investments today. Watching another farm navigate financial challenges taught him to be intentional with every purchase and look for ways to get more value from the resources already on the farm.
“When you grow up where they have a lot of financial problems, you learn to be more resourceful,” he says. “You learn lessons you probably wouldn’t if money wasn’t as tight.”
Today, rather than expanding for the sake of growth, the Elbes look for investments that help them produce milk more efficiently and keep more value on the farm. Ryan says every major investment is evaluated by one question: Does it lower the dairy’s cost of production?
“A lot of people in the dairy industry focus on milk price,” Ryan says. “I think we should be focused on cost of production and how to lower it. Investments like our grain system and roasting unit have helped reduce our feed costs, making the operation more sustainable and giving us more flexibility during the tough times.”
Lowering Feed Costs
The family’s interest in high-oleic soybeans started with a familiar challenge: rising feed costs and unpredictable ingredient prices. Rather than relying on increasingly expensive purchased fat sources, the Elbes began looking for a way to produce more of that nutrition on their own farm and gain greater control over one of their largest operating expenses.
“Butterfat and feed costs drove our decision to plant these beans,” Chris says. “The palm fats we were purchasing had climbed from about $800 a ton to $1,500 a ton. Rather than relying on imported fat, it made more sense to grow a fat source ourselves.”
The farm’s veterinary nutritionist, Monty Belmer, agreed that the opportunity was hard to pass up. By roasting and feeding high-oleic soybeans grown on the farm, the dairy could replace purchased fat products and portions of expensive bypass protein while utilizing homegrown feed.
“We were able to save the first year somewhere of almost 50 cents per cow,” Belmer says. “It settled into about 25 to 28 cents savings in the diet because we displace some of the ruminal bypass proteins that normally are pretty expensive, and then, as Chris says, we also got a chance to displace a lot of the fat that we were buying that comes from overseas.”
Belmer says sourcing those nutrients from fields surrounding the dairy also reduces transportation costs.
“Now we can grow something here locally on farm and don’t have to bring it very far to the infrastructure, and then feed it back to the cattle,” he says.
The nutritional response has extended beyond feed savings.
“With the benefit of the oleic oil within the cow, we see typically when we start them, we see about two-tenths of butterfat increase,” Belmer says. “Energy-corrected milk tends to go up, and we usually see somewhere about a tenth protein percent.”
During the current feeding season, Belmer says the herd’s butterfat climbed from roughly 4.2% to 4.5%, even during periods of heat stress.
The farm currently feeds roasted Plenish soybeans only to the lactating herd.
“Our normal feed rate of our roasted beans is going to be four pounds a day per head,” Belmer says. “When we jump to Plenish, we’re jumping to six.”
Benefits in the Field
The addition of soybeans has also diversified a rotation that, for years, had been heavily dependent on continuous corn. Chris notes how the shift has been more than just a crop change—it’s altered how the farm approaches soil health, field operations and even equipment use across the year.
“Growing beans has helped with the rotation because we’re corn on corn on corn,” Chris says, noting how the system had gradually intensified over time as corn silage needs expanded.
Introducing soybeans, along with rye cover crops, has given them a broader rotation window and helped reduce the need for aggressive tillage. The added diversity in rooting structure and residue has improved how soil behaves through both wet and dry periods, while also helping protect fields during shoulder seasons when ground would otherwise be left bare.
“We hardly use the chisel plow, we don’t use the field cultivator,” Chris says. “The land is healthier. It’s more mellow, and it takes more water in.”
Expanding Soybean Acres
As confidence in the feeding program has grown, the Elbes have steadily reshaped their crop rotation to support a longer-term goal: feeding high-oleic soybeans year-round.
The farm started out more conservatively, planting about 400 acres in the first season. Today, that has expanded to roughly 1,400 acres between farm-raised soybeans and those sourced from neighboring growers.
For Chris, that expansion required a shift in how he thought about feed security on the farm.
“For a while, we didn’t have the land to grow beans,” he says. “I always felt I needed enough corn because I’ve got to chop all the corn for silage.”
Over time, he began to view corn and soybeans differently in terms of flexibility and availability. Corn, he notes, can be sourced from a wide market if needed, while high-oleic soybeans require more intentional planning to secure consistent supply.
This realization opened the door to expanding soybean acres and relying more on purchased corn when necessary to balance inventories.
“Our overall goal is to have year-round high-oleic soybeans,” he says. “To speed up the process, we’ve changed up our crop plan, planted more high-oleic soybeans ourselves, and we’ll substitute our acres with purchased grain corn.”
Even with the push toward year-round feeding, the ration still shifts throughout the year based on availability and harvest timing. During parts of the year when high-oleic supplies are tighter, the dairy feeds a blend that includes conventional soybeans. As more new-crop high-oleic soybeans become available, they transition back into the full program.
The approach allows the dairy to keep the ration consistent in structure while still working within the realities of crop storage, harvest timing and neighbor-grown supply.
The goal, Ryan says, is building enough flexibility into the system to keep high-oleic soybeans in the ration as consistently as possible without disrupting overall feed security on the farm.
Familiar Agronomy, Different Destination
Although the end use differs considerably from commodity soybeans, Bob Berverich, Pioneer field agronomist, says growers won’t find many differences in production practices.
“High-oleic soybeans have some differences in the finished product, but the plant is the same,” Berkevich says. “If you plant current commodity soybeans one year, you don’t have to make a lot of huge changes to your production practices, your equipment or things like that because the plant is basically the same.”
Ryan agrees.
“We kind of kept our same practices,” he says. “There was a little bit of a management change from a weed side of things, but in all, it’s been similar.”
Berkovich encourages growers to remain aggressive with weed control, particularly as Enlist Plenish varieties become more widely available.
“Our weeds continue to get harder and harder to control, especially waterhemp,” he says. “Even with the Enlist Plenish soybeans, we still need to use a pretty stout weed management program to keep those weeds under control.”
Roasting Requires Management
Growing the crop may resemble conventional soybeans. Processing them does not.
The Elbes built their roasting system inside an existing grain facility that originally wasn’t designed to accommodate soybeans. The setup includes dedicated storage bins, a Roast-A-Matic roaster, steeper, cooler and roller mill.
“We had to build our setup to fit our operation,” Ryan says. “There was a lack of space because when we built our corn facility we didn’t plan on putting a soybean roaster here. But we made it work.”
The system produces enough roasted beans to feed the herd while allowing flexibility to switch between conventional soybeans and high-oleic depending on the season.
Running the equipment, however, demands daily attention.
“It is not a plug-and-play system,” Ryan says. “It’s not something where you just fill up the hopper bin, hit start, walk away and go do something else. It takes some babysitting when we run the roaster.”
The family has added automatic shutoffs to reduce equipment failures and routinely checks ingredient inventories, anticipating needs further in advance rather than reacting to shortages after they happen.
“If the bean pile is getting kind of small and it’s Thursday, I’m on Ryan,” Chris says, “I don’t want to have anything go wrong, especially when we’re heading into the weekend. We try to stay ahead of it so we’re never in a position where we’re scrambling for feed or fixing something in the middle of a feeding run.”
Ryan also recommends building more capacity than initially seems necessary.
“If something breaks down, it could take two or more days to fix. So, if you only roast as much as you need every day, you’re going to run into some hardship when something breaks,” he says. “Build a little bit more than what you need.”
Particle size, roasting temperature and steeping time all influence the final product. One continuing challenge is keeping foreign material out of the roasting system.
“A lot of the hardship is actually based upon harvest quality,” Ryan says. “There’s a lot of pods, stems, Lord forbid stones...there’s a large fire risk.”
The dairy is exploring installing additional cleaning equipment before beans enter storage or the roaster.
A Faster Return Than Expected
The roasting system represented one of the larger capital investments the family had made for feed processing, and Ryan initially expected the return on investment to take several years.
“I like some of these investments to be a five-year ROI,” he says. “When I started seeing the numbers of what this would cost, I really wasn’t sure it was going to be there.”
But once the system was operating, the economics exceeded those expectations.
“When we started penciling out the numbers, that investment was essentially paid off within 12 to 18 months,” Ryan says. “It was a big upfront expense, but once we factored in the milk production, component gains and the reduction in purchased fat, the payback came much faster than we expected.”
For the Elbes, high-oleic soybeans have been another example of investing in infrastructure that strengthens the dairy through changing milk prices and feed markets.
“We don’t want to milk more cows,” Chris says. “We’re maxed out at cows. You don’t need to milk more cows either.”
Instead, he believes steady improvements across the operation add up over time. From the feed bunk to the field, each change has helped the farm become more efficient, giving the family another tool to manage costs and stay competitive.
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