Outside the quiet, historic town of Muncy, Pennsylvania, nestled in the beautiful Susquehanna Valley in Lycoming County, is the Scarlet Summer Holsteins farm. A family-run organization owned by Jarrod Burleigh and his wife, Marsha, founded on Marsha’s parents’ farm, it is where the couple and their two children, Alexander, age 18; and Madison, age 15, reside.
Jarrod works away from the farm as a dairy nutritionist between milkings, while his father-in-law and brother-in-law do the field work and maintenance.
Jarrod and Marsha met in college. Having both grown up on dairy farms, they knew they wanted to take care of and develop cows of their own someday.
“We had to make the decision where we were going to plant our roots,” Burleigh explains. “My parents were on a farm in an area that had little agriculture left in the area. Anytime Dad had equipment break down, he had to wait for hours for a service call. My wife's family farm was in an area with plenty of farming infrastructure.” The rest, they say, is history.
Jarrod’s father had always bred excellent cows, and so Jarrod and Marsha were able to keep some of his 4-H projects and cows that Jarrod had purchased on his own to start building their own herd at Marsha’s family farm.
“I also located a lot of ‘diamonds in the rough’ at local Amish farms in my travels as a nutritionist. We were able to buy a lot of EX cows that were in disguise,” Burleigh says. “This allowed us to build our Breed Ag Average (BAA) and to increase the quality of our herd without a massive cash outlay.”
Currently, the Scarlet Summer Holsteins operation is milking approximately 90 cows. These include 55 EX Holsteins and 5 EX Brown Swiss. Eleven cows are EX-94, and three of those are Red & White.
“We're very limited on labor, which doesn't allow us to show as much as we would like,” Burleigh says. “For that reason, we have focused on developing deep pedigrees and a high BAA as our marketing and promotions strategy.” The current BAA is 113.
When asked what goals Burleigh and the family have for Scarlet Summer Holsteins, he is quick to point out that he doesn’t really have goals.
“Goals are for wimps,” Burleigh says. “I have dreams. Dreams are harder to attain and they keep you from getting complacent. I've learned it's a lot harder to stay at the top of a mountain than it is to climb the mountain, so I've just decided to keep finding higher mountains.”
One higher mountain that Scarlet Summer Holsteins has set its sights on is maximizing the genetics on key individuals within the herd. They are doing this by using in vitro fertilization (IVF).
“We're very fortunate to own the only two Red and White Holsteins that have produced over 60,000 pounds of milk in a year,” Burleigh says. “Both of those cows (EK-STJ Brilliant-Red and Scarlet-Summer Martini-Red) are EX-94. Demand for their embryos has exceeded our wildest expectations, and it would not be possible to meet the demand in the marketplace without IVF.
"When I was in college, if someone told me that within 10 to 15 years, I would be able to flush my pregnant cows and make nothing but heifer calves, I wouldn't have believed it, yet here we are.”
Being able to breed cows back to continue their development and add to their lifetime production without eliminating the ability to make pregnancies from them has been a total game-changer for Scarlet Summer Holsteins.
When identifying a cow to focus on in the IVF program, Burleigh follows the “rule of three.” Each donor must have three different qualities to be able to market their embryos. Those three things might be different for each cow, but there have to be three.
“They can be high scoring, from a famous cow family, have a great show record, be extreme on components, be polled, be Red and White or any combination of these,” Burleigh says. “We've noticed that the more of these boxes a cow checks, the higher the demand for her embryos and the easier it is to move them.”
Scarlet Summer Holsteins takes advantage of on-farm ovum pick-ups in order to access hormone-free IVF, while keeping donors at home. The farm has recently started working with Vytelle labs and has been doing IVF work on donors that are unstimulated. The use of IVF allows the dairy to accelerate their elite genetics.
Looking ahead, Scarlet Summer Holsteins plans to stay on the course they currently find themselves and plan to continue to breed as many great cows as possible. Considering Jarrod and Marsha were awarded the Pennsylvania Holstein Association’s Distinguished Young Breeder Award in 2019, as well as the 2010 Holstein USA Star of the Breed Cow with Scarlet-Summer RB Gwendelyn EX-95 2E, they are on the right track. They have also received numerous Premier Breeder and Premier Exhibitor banners at local shows and have had the high herd in Lycoming County on a number of occasions, as well as having earned All-Pennsylvania and Junior All-Pennsylvania awards and milk quality awards from Dairy Farmers of America.
“One thing we would like to do,” Burleigh says, “is set ourselves up for the ability to export embryos, which will require a certified facility on the farm at some point in the near future.”
