Our History

Gary and Cris Peterson have been dairying together at Four Cubs Farm since 1973. Gary farmed by himself for eight years before that.

Four Cubs Farm has been in Gary’s family since 1877, when it was homesteaded by his great-grandmother. A barn and house were built in 1895 by his great-grandfather, B.J. Peterson, with lumber cut from the surrounding land. Over the years, the barn and the house have been added to and changed.

Like many dairies across Wisconsin, Four Cubs Farm has changed and grown over the years. In 1998 Petersons decided to expand their operation from 45 cows housed in a 100-year old tie-stall barn to 200 cows housed in a 6-row free stall barn. They built a double-10 parabone parlor in the old barn, hired their first-ever employees and jumped in.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota, Ben came home to work on the farm full-time. A year later, in 2000, they expanded to 400 cows milking. In 2005 they expanded from 400 to 525 with the addition of a 56 cow dry cow barn.

The next major expansion, in 2007, included a new manure lagoon, a solid separation system, flush flumes and a sand settling tank. Another 210 stall free-stall barn was added to bring the milking herd up to 620.

A 50’x80’ shop was then added to accommodate repair on larger equipment.

In 2009 to start recycling the sand bedding, a sand separator and hydro-cyclone were installed to streamline animal bedding operations.

In 2011 another 220 stall free-stall barn was added bringing the free-stall barn to 704 feet long. This included two sand storage bays. The decision was also made to install a new double-16 parlor in another section of the original barn. This parlor had the ability to collect daily milk weights as well as several other kinds of data for managing the herd. The barns were modified to keep cows under shelter when walking to and from the parlor.

The facility in Atlas, Wisconsin where the heifers are raised was purchased in 2012 after several years of renting.

In October 2014, Nathan Brandt joined the team as Dairy Herd Manager to lead our cow-side team of employees to improve production, milk quality and cow health daily.

On November 1, 2017 the original barn which housed the milking parlor tragically burned to the ground. For the first time since the late 1800’s a cow wasn’t milked on our farm. Thanks to neighbors, friends and strangers from afar, the 860 cows were sent to different farms to be cared for while we recovered from the fire.

Over the course of the next five months we designed a retrofit to our facility that allowed us to install 16 robotic milking units. The first four robots were up and running by the end of March 2018. Each robot milks 60-65 cows. By October 1, 2018 we were back to full capacity. In this renovation we also added a new dry cow barn / transition facility which houses approximately 200 cows.

Today we milk nearly 1,000 Holstein cows, averaging 3.1 milkings per day.