Check out the Aggie Dairy Farm

GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) — It’s not the job Corey Burgess saw himself in when he went to Dudley High School in Greensboro.

“When I tell people that I’m a farmer, especially a dairy farmer, the eyebrows seem to go up,” Corey said.

“I went to Dudley High School,” he said. “I’m a little different than most of my fellows that I graduated with.”

It’s not an easy life. The hours start early and run long, and it’s not like you can take long vacations.

“You have sheep and goats and some beef cows. You can put up a fence. Put a couple of water tanks out there. You go to the beach for the week, you’d be just fine,” Corey said. “That’s not the case here.”

The case here is innovation in the industry.

The A&T Dairy Farm is one of only three on the East Coast to have what’s called the VMS 300.  The letters stand for “voluntary milking system.” It’s set up to milk the cows whenever they are ready and walk into the stall.

Dr. Lauren Mayo is in charge of the farm, and I asked her if the cows truly walk into the setup voluntarily to be milked.

“They really do,” Lauren said. “We had our old parlor which had four stalls, and they would come in at 4 in the morning. So if the gate … was closed accidentally by the wind … the neighbors would hear it down the street because the girls were not happy … Cows love consistency.”

They call the 460+ acre farm NC A&T State University’s largest classroom which teaches real-life skills.

“Everything that we do here is hands-on,” Corey said. So when students come to a lab here at A&T, they’re going to actually take that syringe and needle, and they’re going to give that injection and that vaccine to that cow.”

They can do things with far more sophistication than they could when the farm opened in 1897 with, as the Aggie staff likes to say, “Two cows and a spoon.”

Among the things they do now are, “Look at their reproductive performance and get ready to make sure they are maintaining a lactation … Those are things back then that we didn’t really have a grasp on. We’re able to monitor a lot of things with our new milking system … on an individual cow basis and a teat basis,” Lauren said.

It’s a great teaching lab for Aggie students. Many of them are inspired to continue their animal-centric studies.

“Most of our students … come in thinking that they’re going to vet school, and we do have a fair amount of students that are successful in going to vet school,” Lauren said. “We … have a lot of students that either go into the pharmaceutical industry or sales of nutrition goods or become nutritionists themselves or become geneticists.”

NC A&T State University continues to expand the facility and can only imagine what it might be doing in 20 years or so.

“It’s going to be magical,” Lauren said.

See the Aggie Dairy Farm in action in this edition of The Buckley Report.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to FOX8 WGHP.