Robbie Watson carries on tradition despite new challenges
By Kristen Tribe | Published Sunday, June 28, 2009
As a young girl, Robbie Watson of Decatur trailed after her dad around the family's dairy. She preferred the company of cows to the confines of the house and spent her days just one step behind her dad, learning the finer points of the dairy business.
On a day like most others, her cousins, who were all boys, taunted her saying that she couldn't go because she was a girl.
Robbie ran to her daddy in despair.
"Don't ever believe that," Bert Pipes told his little girl. "You can do anything you want to do."
Robbie said that's the reason she's in the dairy industry now. She and her husband, Mike, own On the Go Farms, the dairy that once belonged to her parents, the late Bert and Noma Pipes.
"All it takes now is for someone to tell me I can't do something," she said. "If it's what you want to do and love, then that's what you should do."
Robbie's parents operated what was then called the Bert Pipes Dairy on U.S. 380 west of Decatur from 1943 until 1985, when Robbie and Mike took over the operation.
She graduated from Texas A&M University and was working within the dairy industry but had maintained a dream of having her own dairy, as did Mike.
"I told him, 'I can't imagine dairying any place but at dad's place,'" Robbie recalled. And the move home proved to be rewarding.
"It was the best of both worlds. It was our name on the line and our credit on the line, but I could spend two minutes down here (at the house) and get advice and experience from (my dad)," she said.
She admitted that she should have taken more of his advice in those early days. With a penchant for technology, she was quick to embrace the "next big thing," despite her father's suggestions that she might be moving too fast. Now with thousands of gallons of milk behind her, she said she approaches new technology differently today.
"Instead of jumping in with both feet, we put our toes in and test the waters," she said. "You have to look and see if it's cost prohibitive and see how it will affect the bottom line."
These days the bottom line is a moving target, and Robbie compared the fluctuation in milk prices to riding a roller coaster. In the past, the market was more dependable with highs in the fall and lows in the summer, but the unpredictable prices make it hard to maintain any type of budget.
At one time, the Watsons milked as many as 150 head, but just two years ago, they sold down to 25 or 30 head. They currently milk about 100 head, and Robbie said they have been fortunate in that they raise their own baby calves and can sell them as necessary.
The herd is about half Holstein and half Jersey, and she said all the Jerseys were born and raised on the dairy.
And each one is special.
"They're not just a number. They're a name," she said. "There's a history; you know their quirks. It's no big deal but just that you know your cows."
For example, she said one cow is always the first in the barn. Robbie said she may meander around and be at the back of the herd, but once the barn door is open, she will have pushed and finagled her way to the front.
Another cow refuses to go into the first stall of the milking barn. Robbie said if the cow is at the door when it opens, the cow will step back and let another pass into the first stall before she enters.
"(Knowing your cows) is the difference between being a breeder and a milk factory," Robbie said. "I spend more time with the cows in a week than I do my daughter."
Robbie and Mike's daughter, Katrina, is now 16. She once had a small chair in the barn where she would sit and eat her snack, while visiting with her mom, and although she's enjoying a successful career in the show ring, Robbie said she does not want Katrina to follow in her footsteps.
"She's seen that it's feast or famine. There are a lot easier ways to make a living. I want a better life for her than that," she said.
Robbie's parents wished the same thing for her, and as she sat in her living room, the same one once occupied by her parents, she admitted that dairying is who she is, part of her heritage.
She recalled how her grandmother came to her parents' dairy every weekend to check the Jersey heifers and give Robbie's father advice on their upkeep. The last year of her life, at age 86, she continued to visit the farm, making her way through the pasture with a walker.
Her great-great-grandmother watched as a Union soldier stole her last milk cow and only source of food for her family. She chased after him with a broom and was killed.
"It's a family heritage that I just can't let go," she said. "I can't picture myself not doing this. It's more than what you do. It's what you are inside and outside."
