JACKSON TWP — At a time when fewer and fewer people make a living as dairy farmers, Drovers Inn Farm is bucking the trend.

Owner John Bame and business manager Brad Wise this week will celebrate the farm’s one-year anniversary in its newly built facility on Textor Hill Road.

The Drovers Inn Farm was the site Tuesday night of the Butler County Dairy Twilight Meeting, an annual event hosted by Penn State Extension and the Butler County Holstein Club.

Farmers from the region, and other interested community members took a tour of the farm, learned about the equipment and talked to other farmers about technology and trends in the industry.

The farm was built on vacant farmland in 2015 and the cows were moved over from their previous facility in the township.

Bame said he has been a dairy farmer for more than 40 years. He and Wise, who are cousins, trace a thread of family farm ownership back to 1835.

“Everyone said ‘He’s nuts to want to milk cows,’ but it’s not very often you get to start a farm from scratch,” he said.

The facility includes some of the newest designs and technology to produce milk as efficiently as possible.

“In all of agriculture, to survive in a very, very tough economic situation, you’ve got to get way bigger and more efficient. And it’s expensive to be efficient,” Wise said.

One way farmers have improved production is by learning more about nutrition and what should go into the animals’ feed.

“Everyone does a better job of feeding cows today because we better test our rations to ensure they are healthy,” Bame said.

The cows spend most of their time in a barn with an open stall design. There are 100 stalls for the 84 milk-producing cows and they are able to move freely between stalls, water troughs and an open aisle area.

The barn is insulated and has many fans, which creates tunnellike ventilation. The cows have sand bedding, which is considered the best because bacteria will not grow in it.

The milking equipment was installed by Ohio-based Progressive Dairy Systems. Suction-based milking devices are used to milk 20 cows at a time, twice daily.

The milk is then cooled and held in a tank until it can be taken to a cheese-processing plant in New Wilmington, Beaver County, Bame said.

All of the farm’s milk is sold through Dairy Farmers of America, an industry co-op group.

There are numerous reasons why dairy farms in the county have gone out of business, Bame and Wise said.

Nationwide, there is a surplus of milk and advances in science and technology have allowed for a smaller number of large and efficient farms to produce most of the milk.

Locally, some family farms have been sold because new generations weren’t interested in being farmers or because development made the land more valuable to sell than to farm, Wise said.

John Tyson, an agricultural engineer from Penn State University, gave a short presentation about dairy farming and the facility, which he helped design.

The key to having cows produce the maximum amount of milk is having cows that are comfortable and healthy, Tyson said.

“There are four things cows need in my book, in this order: air, water, feed and rest,” he said.

Tyson agreed that recent advances have changed dairy farming a lot.

“I think what you are seeing is a huge leap in technology,” he said.

During the 1920s a typical dairy cow would produce about 4,000 pounds of milk per year. Today, a cow produces more than 21,000 pounds per year and that figure will continue to increase, he said.

Several other farmers Tuesday said they were impressed with the new facility.

Amy O’Donnell said she attends the Dairy Twilight meeting every year to keep up with what other farmers in the county are doing.

O’Donnell said her family’s farm, Kramer Farms of Fenelton, used to have dairy cows, but switched to beef.

“For dairy farms it is hard to be profitable, so it’s super awesome to see one that is able to be successful,” she said.

Tim Sturgeon, a dairy farmer in Lawrence County, said he is a friend of the owners of Drovers Farm.

“It’s a dairyman’s dream,” he said about the new facility. “It has anything you would ever want, and more.”