Model 400 Barn Cleaner Success Story
Brad Keicher, Wyoming County Correctional Facility Farm Manager, with Art Timmel of Timmel's Equipment. Attica Prison is in the background.
"Patz is the top of the line barn cleaner. Something that's working for me...I'll buy it again."
Brad Keicher, Farm Manager,
Wyoming County Correctional Facility
Wyoming County Correctional Facility
Brad had been the farm manager at Wyoming Correctional for 14 years. This is one of ten state run prison farms, nine are dairies and one in Washington County is beef. Wyoming Correctional farm has 255 acres.
They milk 120 cows in tie stalls. They pasteurize their own milk and make their own butter. The milk is packaged in 5-gallon poly bags and sent to 11 other state prisons in western New York, including Attica. This provides about 50% of the fluid milk needs. Their 300-gallon butter churn produces 5,000 lbs. of butter per month. It is packaged in 20 lb. pails and sent to the other prisons. It accounts for almost of the butter needs at the other prisons.
Twenty-seven prisoners work on the farm. They are 1-2 years away from release. Some originally were in Attica and transferred to Wyoming County Correctional Facility 5 years before release. Turnover is very high since the better they work the earlier they get out. Most prisoners have never even seen a dairy cow before. As a result milk production of over 22,000 lbs. has to be maintained at the same time that new people are constantly being trained.
Wyoming Correctional Facility is on official DHIA test & maintains a herd avg. of about 22,000 lbs.
This means that machinery is worked much harder than at a family farm. Consequently machinery has to be made well. Brad Keicher said,
"Patz is the top of the line barn cleaner. It worked here for twelve years so it had to be a good barn cleaner and I needn't look any further. Something that's working for me ... I'll buy again. I heard that Art Timmel, our Patz dealer, did good work. He proved it. Beautiful job."
Patz has proven it can work in one of the most challenging conditions in the northeast.
Source: Tom Mahoney, The Country Folks