Meet Orville and Mary Jane Miller

Miller Dairy milks 180 cows and raises a similar number of young calves and heifers. Most of their farm is focused on growing feed for the dairy. The farm has six to eight employees, and also operates a forage chopping business, manure hauling business and an ag equipment and auto repair shop.

Both Orville and Mary Jane were raised with similar backgrounds; on family dairy farms located a mile away from one another. They attended the same school and eventually belonged to the same youth church group, which is where their courtship began.

“We both knew we wanted to raise our family on a dairy farm, and so we came back to the farm and formed a partnership with Mary Jane’s parents, Fred and Mary, in 1983,” Orville said. In 1988 they purchased the rest of the cows from Mary Jane’s parents and moved to the farm. The Millers have four children and their youngest, Brian, and his wife, Amanda, recently came back to the farm.

Mary Jane rises with her alarm at 2 a.m. and heads out to the barn to push up feed and milk cows, a job that she has done for the past 30 years. Orville prefers the evening hours, which allows him to attend various board meetings or prepare for his next sermon. His responsibilities at Miller Dairy include managing the farm’s employees and feeding the cows.

While the cows’ diet includes staple feed ingredients like corn, hay, vitamins and minerals, Miller Dairy cows are also fed chocolate! Yes, chocolate — scraps from a nearby chocolate factory are mixed and put into the feed the cows eat every day. Miller Dairy also feeds about 10 pounds of taco shells to their cows; that, along with five pounds of chocolate candy, replaces approximately a third of the grain in the ration.

“The candy comes through the mixer in whole pieces and the cows always nose through the feed, trying to find the candy,” says Orville, whose dairy recently adopted the tag line, “Where happy cows live.”