386 | From 100 Cows…to Milking 100 Cows Every 8.2 Minutes with Rodney Elliott

In this episode of the High-Performance Mindset Series powered by Nedap, Peggy Coffeen interviews Rodney Elliot, an Irish-born dairy farmer who alongside his wife Dorothy and family, has spent 20 years building Drumgoon Dairy in South Dakota into a multi-site operation and helping launch the 5,000-cow County Line Dairy partnership, where a 100-stall rotary milks 100 cows about every eight minutes. Elliot explains how scaling became more manageable through specialized roles, simplified protocols, and shared systems across sites, including centralized data access via DairyComp and activity monitoring through Alta CowWatch powered by Nedap. Rodney details a high-performance reproduction program with one dedicated technician per farm, minimal hormonal intervention, and targets like 32–34% pregnancy rate, plus strategic heifer pipelines through Kansas Dairy Development. Elliot discusses labor challenges, using technology and sort gates to reduce pen walking, the importance of partners and buy-sell agreements, difficult build decisions like walking away from a biodigester plan, and focusing leadership energy on controllables such as repro, cow comfort, feed quality, and people. This episode is part of the High-Performance Mindset Series powered by Nedap. Nedap is future-proofing dairy farming with smart technologies in activity monitoring, cow locating, milk metering, sort gates, and AI-powered camera systems. Nedap is improving life on the farm by putting the right cow in the right place at the right time, every time. 00:00 From Ireland to South Dakota 01:55 Meet Rodney Elliott 05:31 Scaling with Partners 07:37 Inside County Line 12:24 Building for Scale 14:04 Profitable Cow Goals 18:19 Defining Great Repro 20:35 Collars and CowWatch 22:07 One Tech Accountability 26:29 Morning Briefings 29:26 Labor and Monitoring 31:34 Trusting Simple Systems 32:37 Why Nedap 36:11 Collar Data Continuity 37:04 Trusting Tech and IT 38:49 Future Risks and Labor 48:41 Legacy and Transition 52:11 Building and Partnerships 53:25 Tough Calls Keep Simple 01:00:05 Advice and Wrap Up